Permaculture Project

We currently have a permaculture rainwater harvesting project underway that we are very proud to talk about. It features a closed loop system with a greywayter and rainwater system for a vegetable garden, orchard, greenhouse, and 1 acre of edible fruit plantings (i.e. berries, etc.). The project will be using sheet mulch to build up the soil and then using passive water harvesting to allow water to build up and percolate down to the gardens. The residence will be powered from a photovoltaic system that will also supply power to the greywater and rainwater harvesting systems.

The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies.

Permaculture design principles extend from the position that "The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children" (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the Earth's ecosystems.

Note: Bobby Markowitz studied directly under Bill Mollison in the 1990s.

Thursday, November 06, 2008 7:15:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)      Comments [0]