Product Description

Permaculture is a creative approach to abundant and fulfilling lifestyles. It is for everyone wishing to live sustainably and tread more lightly on the Earth. Permaculture is an ecologically sound approach to providing for our needs, including our food, shelter and financial and social structures. It is based on co-operating with nature and caring for the Earth and its people. Permaculture in a Nutshell is a concise and accessible introduction to the principles and practise of permaculture in temperate climates. It covers how permaculture works in the city, the country and on the farm and explores ways in which people can work together to recreate real communities. This inspiring book clearly describes how we can live fruitfully and sustainably and is essential reading for anyone wishing to reduce their environmental impact. It has sold over 15,000 copies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12004 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 84 pages

Review
This excellent little book serves as a very good introduction to the subject, covering all the basic elements of the subject, as well as illustrating it with examples more relevant to this climate than many of the Australian books. It is an excellent little book to give to people who know nothing about permaculture. It is beautifully illustrated and is the only permaculture book that you can fit in your back pocket (if you have large back pockets). --Rob Hopkins, www.transition.org

About the Author
Patrick Whitefield, NDA, Dip. Perm. Des., is a permaculture teacher, designer, consultant and writer. He grew up on a smallholding in rural Somerset and qualified in agriculture at Shuttleworth College, Bedfordshire. He then acquired farming experience in Britain, the Middle East and Africa. He has expertise in many diverse areas. These include organic gardening, practical nature conservation and country crafts such as thatching and tipi making. He was also involved in green politics for a number of years as a prominent member of the Ecology Party. Patrick has found that his mixed experiences have led him to the logical conclusion of permaculture and are directly relevant to his present work. He is a permaculture teacher and writer who inspires respect, affection and a good measure of action wherever he imparts his considerable knowledge. Patrick is also author of the acclaimed book, How To Make A Forest Garden as well as other useful booklets such as Practical Mulching, Woodland in Permaculture and Tipi Living. As well as being distributed in the USA, Permaculture in a Nutshell has also been translated into German, Czech, French and Russian.

Excerpted from Permaculture in a Nutshell by Patrick Whitefield. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
WHAT IS PERMACULTURE?

There is a great awareness these days that we are reaching the physical limits of the Earth. We cannot go on creating pollution at the present rate, or filling our ever-growing appetite for energy and materials for ever. We are so profligate with oil and other fossil fuels that we have developed a way of producing food which consumes around ten calories of energy for every calorie contained in the food.
Changing to organic methods of food production could reduce this high input by a significant amount, as both chemical fertilisers and poisons are energy intensive. But conventional organic farming still relies heavily on machinery and the transport infrastructure, so the whole process of putting food on our plates would still consume more energy than it produced. Simple peasant agriculture can reverse the situation and yield ten calories for every one expended. The energy here is almost entirely in the form of the farmers’ own labour and that of their beasts, and herein lies the fear: that our only choice is between a high-energy lifestyle and one of sheer drudgery.
But there is a third choice, called permaculture.
Permaculture includes many ideas and skills that are not unique to it; some are traditional farming practices, others involve modern science and technology. What does make it unique is that it is modelled very closely on ecosystems, which are natural communities of wild plants and animals, such as forests, meadows and marshes.

Imagine a natural forest. It has a high canopy of trees, lower layers of small trees, large shrubs, small shrubs, herb and ground layers, plus plants which are mainly below ground and climbers which occupy all levels. The production of plant material is mind-boggling compared, say, to a wheat field which is only a single layer about half a metre high.
If only the forest was made up entirely of food plants, how abundant it would be! How greatly it would out-yield the wheat field!
To achieve this great production of biomass, the forest needs no inputs but Sun, rain, and the rock from which it makes its own soil. By comparison, the wheat field is a sorry state. It needs regular ploughing, cultivating, seeding, manuring, weeding and pest control. All of these take energy, human or fossil fuel. If we could create an ecosystem like the forest, but an edible one, we could do without all that oil.
That is the basic idea of permaculture: creating edible ecosystems.
How Does It Work?

What makes the forest so productive and so self-reliant is its diversity. It is not so much the number of species that is important, but the number of useful connections between them. We have all been brought up with phrases like ‘the law of the jungle’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’ ringing in our ears, and to think of competition as the natural way that wild species interact. In fact, co-operation is just as important, especially when you look at the links between different species.

Different plants specialise in extracting different minerals from the soil and, when their leaves fall or the whole plant dies, these minerals become available to neighbouring plants. This does not happen directly, but through the work of fungi and bacteria which convert dead organic material into a form which can be absorbed by roots. Meanwhile the green plants provide the fungi and bacteria with their energy needs. Insects feed off flowers and in return pollinate the flowering plants. Many plants, such as the aromatic herbs, give off chemicals which are good for the health of their neighbours. The web of useful connections grows richer and richer as you look at it.
Some of the edible ecosystems of permaculture may actually look like a forest, for example a forest garden, in which fruit trees and bushes, herbs and vegetables are all grown together, one on top of the other. But in others the copy is not so direct, for example attaching a productive conservatory to the south side of a house. The conservatory helps to heat the house during the day and the house keeps the conservatory warm during the night, so tender food plants can be grown in winter. The building does not look like an ecosystem, but the design is based on the principle of making useful connections. This is what makes ecosystems work and it is also what makes permaculture systems work.
This can only be achieved by means of careful design. Useful connections can only be made between things if they are put in the right place relative to each other. So permaculture is first and foremost a design system. The aim is to use the power of the human brain, applied to design, to replace human brawn or fossil fuel energy and the pollution that goes with it.
Permaculture design is very much about ‘wholes’. If someone tells you their farm or garden is basically conventional but there is a bit of permaculture on part of it, they are mistaken. That is not permaculture. Permaculture is a process of looking at the whole, seeing what the connections are between the different parts, and assessing how those connections can be changed so that the place can work more harmoniously. This may include introducing some new elements or methods, especially on an undeveloped site. But these changes are incidental to the process of looking at the landscape as a whole.
Although permaculture started out as permanent agriculture, the principles on which it is based can be applied to anything we do, and now it is thought of as permanent culture.

Customer Reviews

a delicous nut
what a great little book, when i first got it i was dissapointed by its small size, but as with many nuts - there is a whole lot of protein and other good things in a small package!!

the book is a great introduction to permaculture, perfect for the beginner who wants to know about farms, gardens, and city living and not just to specialise in one area. It has great examples and is very well written and has a great biblio at the end to give lots of info sources.

to sum up, its a great mulch from which to grow ideas!

interesting
A great basic introduction to the subject. The book is very short, but was enough to inspire me to want to learn more about permaculture and how I can apply it to my own life.

Extreme gardening with a global mission
Permaculture is a small but active section of the Green movement which focusses on transforming the way we produce food by designing schemes whose key feature is the integration of woodland with food crops through "relationship placement" and the close study of microclimates so as to maximise yields and minimise labour inputs. There are places in the world (mostly the Anglo-Saxon parts of it) where permaculture has formed the basis of successful experiments in communal living and production - Crystal Springs near Brisbane and a number of farms in the UK, and one of these was the subject of a BBC Natural World programme in 2009. The author of this pamphlet, Patrick Whitefield, is keen to point out that permaculture is wider in concept and impact than simple organic food production - it requires large inputs of intelligent design, and more importantly, a transformation of people's attitudes to the planet.

So permaculture has global ambitions, in line with the rest of the Green movement. There is a global crisis (climate change, reliance on fossil fuels, industrial agricultural production). The crisis must be tackled by people thinking globally and acting locally, reducing consumption, curbing population growth, creating a smaller-scale sustainable society.

This is where "the rest of us" part company with this booklet. By all means use it as an aid to enjoyable intensive gardening with a frisson of self-sufficiency, but use Patrick Whitefield's The Earth Care Manual (Permanent Publications, 2004)if you're serious about it.

The rest of us are also a bit uneasy about going back (apparently) to a world of subsistence agriculture, where swords have all been beaten into ploughshares and the oil companies have gone out of business. Like all utopian visions, the question has to be asked "how do we get there?" Marx had a similar vision for industrial society but Lenin had to construct some unpleasant ways of getting there (whatever happened to all those kulaks?). How do you persuade people in a democracy to volunteer for the Green programme? And where's the science that says it's all technically possible?

Enjoy the gardening!