What Is Permaculture?

A whole systems way of designing resilient natural ecosystems using design principles featuring patterns found in nature.

As the founder Bill Mollison has said “…….the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there will be enough for everyone.”

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is a term created by Australian Bill Mollison to describe a land use system that is modeled after natural eco-systems.

Mollison defines Permaculture as the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems that have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, shelter, energy and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

Permaculture philosophy teaches us to work with rather than against nature.A way of looking at systems in all their functions rather than asking only one yield of them, and allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.

Permaculture can be used in urban, suburban, and rural environments and offers a proactive approach to addressing the ever present environmental crisis. Permaculture design is a “whole systems” approach to land use planning based on the patterns of symbiotic relationships between land, water, air, soil, animals, and people inherent in natural eco-systems.

To learn more about permaculture, follow some of the Permaculture links and resources that specifically highlight local networks and those working for equality and racial justice.

Hawaii Food Basket

Through a mix of supplemental food programs, traditional food pantries and congregate meal sites, we aim to provide people with access to the type of food assistance they need. In addition to food, these community food access programs provide social contact and promote community cohesiveness — critical components in building individual and Hawai`i Island resiliency.

Hawaii Island Food Alliance

The Hawai‘i Island Food Alliance works to create a resilient, economically just, ecologically sound, and culturally rich food system for Hawai‘i Island. Learn more. In response to the spread of COVID-19, HIFA is sharing farm and food business and food access resources and opportunities.

Food Security Hawaii

Food Security Hawai’i believes the solution to island-wide food security is in our hands; grown one garden, one ʻohana at a time. Let’s work together to create a thousand backyard gardens.

The Kohala Center - Planet Hawaii

With a diverse range of microclimates, deep soils, and year-round growing conditions, we can grow and produce more food here in Hawai‘i. The Kohala Center, through its school garden, seed saving, farmer training, and rural business development programs, is working to increase demand for fresh, local food and support the next generation of farmers, ranchers, and food producers.

Indigenous Permaculture

Indigenous Permaculture is a grassroots organization. We envision that diverse communities we work with will become self-sustainable by reclaiming and promoting their own traditional practices and values. We are a non-profit organization rooted in an indigenous cosmovision that seeks to promote community development through traditional approaches in education, art, integral health, and traditional agriculture. We are committed to supporting the development of the diverse communities we work with, both in the United States and Central America. OUR MISSION Is to support and empower communities to become their own protagonists in developing self-sustainable ways of living. We share traditional farming practices and apply environmentally and culturally-appropriate technology, with the ultimate goal of community food security, and do this work in an affordable way that builds capacity within the community. We provide holistic support to design and implement community food security projects, inspired by indigenous peoples' understanding of how to live in place.

Black Permaculture Network

BPN is a network of Afro-indigenous people who have come together through the practices of permaculture, agroecology, natural living and care of the earth. We recognize and honor the ancestral and historical knowledge that each of these land care practices embrace and strive to broaden inter-cultural dialogue around natural earth care; the love of people, plants and animals.

Permaculture Action Network

Permaculture Action Network is a continent-wide organization that mobilizes thousands of people to take action on regenerative projects. We partner with performing artists, cultural events, and a diversity of grassroots groups working toward collective liberation to create days of action and educational spaces in which people regenerate ecosystems and catalyze the movement for a just transition.

 Black Urban Growers Association

Black Urban Growers maintains a network and community support in order to foster Black leadership in food and farm advocacy. Their programs include the Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference, a national conference started in 2010 that brings together Black farmers, advocates, chefs, and communities to share their best practices and leadership efforts.

 Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network is working on the ground in Detroit, Michigan, to ensure that the local urban agriculture movement is racially and socially inclusive. It was founded in 2006 to mobilize the Black community to address food insecurity challenges, and the network believes that the most effective movements grow organically within the communities they are designed to benefit. They operate organic urban farm sites, various local food policy initiatives, and a cooperative food-buying program for community residents.

 Dreaming Out Loud

Washington D.C. nonprofit Dreaming Out Loud works to create healthier, more equitable food systems in low-income communities. Dreaming Out Loud supports economic opportunity-building with their two-acre farm, several community gardens and farmers markets, and a food business accelerator. During the COVID-19 pandemic,  they partnered with Little Sesame restaurant to provide free meals for people of all ages every weekday afternoon.

 Family Agriculture Resource Management Services (F.A.R.M.S.)

Recognizing the systemic challenges and discrimination Black farmers face in the United States, attorney Jillian Hishaw founded Family Agriculture Resource Management Services. F.A.R.M.S. provides legal assistance to farmers with limited resources and helps them retain control and ownership of their land. F.A.R.M.S also helps them access support in other ways, such as grant writing and fundraising. Hishaw also helps tackle food insecurity by linking farmers up with food banks to sell surplus produce at a discounted price.

 Jamila Norman of Patchwork City Farms

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Jamila Norman is a world-renowned urban farmer and food activist. In 2010, Norman founded Patchwork City Farms, a certified naturally grown organic urban farm where Norman farms—and provides the local community with safe and nutritious foods. Norman is also co-founder of EAT Where You Are, an initiative that aims to spread awareness of the importance of including fresh foods in diets, and is the manager and one of the founding members of the South West Atlanta Growers Cooperative, which helps Black farmers create equitable, sustainable, responsible food systems.

 Karen Washington, founder of Rise and Root Farm

Karen Washington, a farmer and community activist, wants to build a different agricultural narrative, inclusive of all races, genders, and sexualities. She created Rise and Root Farm to be a place of healing for diverse and marginalized communities—particularly important today, as black farmers work to call attention to not only their own contributions to the modern food system but also the impact of the slave trade on the development of global food chains. “Agriculture must be inclusive in its diversity,” Washington tells Food Tank.

 La Via Campesina

La Via Campesina is an international coalition of organizations that defend food sovereignty as a way to promote social justice and worker dignity. They built a movement that amplifies the voices of smallholder peasant farmers and aims to decentralize the power of corporate-driven agriculture, which they argue is destructive to the environment and social relations.

 Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm

Soul Fire Farm grows food as an act of solidarity with those oppressed by food apartheid while maintaining respect for their ancestors, history, and the environment. Soul Fire Farm conducts training programs to raise the next generation of activist-farmers and support food sovereignty for future communities. The organization’s Co-Director Leah Penniman recently completed a book, “Farming While Black,” a guide for African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity.

 National Black Food and Justice Alliance

A coalition of Black-led organizations, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance builds Black self-determination around food and land sovereignty. They accomplish this through community organizing and increasing visibility of Black narratives, visions, and achievements. In 2018, co-founder Dara Cooper was honored with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award “for dedicating her life to racial equity and justice in the food system and increasing capacity and visibility of Black-led narratives and work.”

 Planting Justice

In Oakland, California, Planting Justice builds economic justice and food sovereignty among communities impacted by mass incarceration. Planting Justice teaches gardening skills to people while in prison and offers them paid positions after release. Planting Justice has planted over 500 gardens in the Bay Area, offered reentry employment opportunities to over 40 people, and helped people reconnect with the land.

 Reclaim the Block

A Minneapolis-based organization, Reclaim the Block works to reallocate city money away from police and instead toward community-led health and safety initiatives. They have assembled an extensive digital toolkit to help communities in all cities and states advocate for divestiture from police. You can support them via donations or by signing their petition encouraging the Minneapolis City Council to redirect police department funding toward resources for Black and Indigenous communities.

 Soil Generation

Based in Philadelphia, Soil Generation is a Black- and Brown-led coalition with a vision for “a people’s agroecology”—a combination of environmental and food justice with a focus on community self-representation, anti-racism training, education, and advocacy. Soil Generation has successfully worked with the city council to amend a bill that would have put urban gardens at risk and continues to actively campaign for rights to vacant lots.

 Tanya Fields of the Black Feminist Project

As founder and executive director of The Black Feminist Project, Tanya Fields is a food justice activist and educator. Fields started the Libertad Urban Farm, an organic urban garden in the Bronx, as an effort to address the lack of nutritious food and food education accessible to low-income people, specifically underserved women of color. Additionally, Fields works closely with The Hunts Point Farm Share, connecting city residents to high-quality local produce through community-supported agriculture.

 Toni Tipton-Martin

Toni Tipton-Martin, based in Baltimore, Maryland, works on a series of endeavors to promote food justice. She has written two James Beard Award-winning books that trace Black cuisine, Jubilee and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbook. Martin served as the president of Southern Foodways Alliance board of directors and was the first Black food editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Additionally, Martin founded the SANDE Youth Project, a nonprofit organization that works with children to combat obesity while supporting Black food culture.

 Urban Growers Collective

The Urban Growers Collective operates eight urban farms on 11 acres of land in Chicago’s South Side and works with more than 33 partner organizations to create economic opportunity and boost healthy food access. Each farm uses organic methods and integrates education, leadership training, and food production. The organization was co-founded by Laurell Sims and Erika Allen, a visual artist and food advocate who works to use creativity for social change.

 WANDA: Women Advancing Nutrition Dietetics and Agriculture

Given the rise of diet-related conditions like obesity and diabetes among Black women both in Africa and the Diaspora, WANDA aims to build a platform for “a new generation of food sheroes.” The WANDA movement, launched in both Africa and America, set a goal to give a million women and girls access to education and health advocacy opportunities by 2030, to improve agriculture and nutrition worldwide. 

ETHICS & PRINCIPLES OF PERMACULTURE

Ethics:

• Care for the Earth • Care for People • Share the Surplus

Take responsibility for our own existence and that of the children.

Principles:

1. Observe. Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements throughout all the seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and climates.

2. Connect. Create functional relationships and time-saving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a system, not the number of elements.

3. Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a system to perform as many functions as possible. Increasing beneficial connections between diverse components creates a stable whole.

4. Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.

5. Make the least change for the greatest effect. Find the “leverage points” in the system and intervene there, where a the least work accomplishes the most change.

6. Turn problems into solutions. Constraints can inspire creative design. We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.

7. Use the edge effect. The edge—the intersection of two environments—is the most diverse place in a system, and is where energies and materials accumulate. Optimize the amount of edge.

8. Encourage diversity. Complex, diverse, highly connected systems are more resilient, productive, robust, and sustainable than simple ones.

9. Accelerate succession. Mature ecosystems are more diverse and productive than young ones, so use design to jump-start succession.

10. Use biological resources. Renewable resources (usually plants and animals) reproduce and build up over time, store energy, assist yield, and interact with other elements.

11. Recycle energy. Supply local and on-site needs with energy from the system, and reuse this energy as many times as possible.

12. Use appropriate technology. Apply sustainable practices for cooking, lighting, transport, heating, sewage treatment, water, and other utilities.

13. Get a yield. Get some immediate returns from your efforts: “You can’t work on an empty stomach.”

14. Yields are unlimited. The biggest limit to the yield of a system is the designer’s imagination.

15. Mistakes are tools for learning. Plan to evaluate your trials; making mistakes is a sign you’re trying to do things better.

List compiled by Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden.

My Journey into Permaculture

My love affair with this practical, beautiful, gardening system began in Portland, Oregon over fifteen years ago. I took a class and witnessed first hand what was possible with permaculture techniques in a small city lot. A tremendous amount of food was grown and multifunctional systems using grey water, comfrey tea, worms, chickens were utilized. I immediately started observing, designing and planting my own backyard permaculture garden. Some parts of my plan thrived, while others didn’t. Eager for more knowledge, I began researching different places to get certified in permaculture. Hawaii being my first choice and future home destination. Ultimately, I chose Thailand for its safety, cost, delicious food and my longing to return to such a lovely country. I earned my Permaculture certification, gaining incredible knowledge from my time living in a thriving Permaculture community with others from all over the world at Panya Project Intentional Community, north of Chiang Mai. Next to Pun Pun Center for Self Relieance and Yousabia Sustainable Thai Cooking School. I took advantage of the time I had after the two week course and ate every different regional food I could find. I also volunteered at Elephant Nature Park with rescue elephants, and visited the temples of Angkor Wat along my travels through Thailand, Loas, and Cambodia. Only seven months later I packed up everything I owned, and with only a suitcase and backpack journeyed across the Pacific to Hawaii Island.

Only seven months later I packed up everything I owned, and with only a suitcase and backpack journeyed across the Pacific to Hawaii Island.

It is here I remain, over a decade later, surrounded by giant tree ferns and gorgeous red ohia blossoms in the native tropical rainforest. The land is sprinkled with the many fruit and spice trees, vines, herbs, and medicinal plants I’ve planted over the years. Avocado, mulberry, and passionfruit planted near the chicken coop, providing safety from hawks, shelter, and berries for food. Companionship, entertainment, eggs and manure for fertilizer are exchanged in this symbiotic relationship. Ponds filled with koi and talapia, replenished by frequent rain, provide habitat and a consistent water source for many garden creatures, while also providing nutrient rich water and mulch to be used nearby in the garden system. The classic herb spiral with plants for tincture and salve decorated the yard. A small polyculture kitchen garden, bursting with lettuce, peas, culinary herbs, carrots, kale and more. Although I have learned so many valuable lessons through the challenges and triumphs of applying permaculture in the tropical rain forest, I feel like my journey is just beginning. Continually growing and evolving.

Current Projects include:

Ka Mala Maluhia Project - Sustainable school learning gardens at Volcano School of Arts and Sciences, Hawaii Island, with vision and momentum from SGITW Something Good In This World, caring teachers and parents. Supported with a generous grant from Kokua Foundation.

Sweet Treats Cookshops on Zoom - Students cook with me from the comfort of their own kitchens. We create delicious healthier desserts and snacks using seasonally abundant produce and natural sugars like honey and maple syrup. Knowing how to prepare all of the wonderful vegetables and fruits grown nearby, is a valuable skill.