ll Mollison of Tasmania, Australia in the early 1970s to mean Permanent Agriculture or Permanent Culture. David Holmgren was a collaborator in this venture. Dr. Mollison was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (otherwise known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1981, for this contribution in the search for alternatives.
It was initially conceived as a framework for a more permanent basis for agriculture rather than just the raising of annual crops. The idea was a beneficial assembly of multi-crop elements of perennial trees, shrubs, annuals (food crops), herbs, vegetables, useful weeds, fungi, tuber crops with integration of animals, aimed towards household and community self-reliance for food sufficiency.
However, Permaculture has now come to mean much more than food sufficiency at household level, for, self-sufficiency in food becomes meaningless unless people have access to land, information and financial resources. Today Permaculture has come to mean a whole life system encompassing various strategies for people to acquire all those resources, including access to land needed to evolve self-financing and self- managed systems to provide for all their material and non-material needs, without depleting, polluting and destroying the natural resources of the biosphere.
Central to Permaculture is the relationship humans should have towards natural resources and their wise, ethical and judicious utilization so that posterity is not saddled with the consequences of our irresponsible conduct. Today Permaculture has made a start all over the world, in some aspect or other, on some issue or other. Except in three countries of the world (Uruguay, Afghanistan and one African country) there are Permaculture groups, organizations, and individuals undertaking efforts, howsoever small to repair the Earth and become more responsible for their actions and enabling others to do likewise.
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Added by Michael Grove at 14:59 on February 19, 2022