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EARTH USER'S GUIDE TO PERMACULTURE
by Rosemary Morrow & Rob Allsop
Rosemary Morrow lives in Eastern Australia and has taught permaculture design in India, Africa, Thailand and Cambodia. As a result of her considerable skill and experience she has written a first-rate, practical and informative guide to sustainable living. Permaculture was first developed by Bill Mollison and Dvid Holmgren and has since spread exponentially around the world. This book is a very practical guide to help you get started in your locality. While it has an Australian perspective, I have found the vast majority of it entirely applicable or easily adaptable to a Northern hemisphere temperate context. I bought The Earth User's Guide to Permaculture because I wanted to learn about Permaculture but was intimidated by the price and sheer weight of the key textbook, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, by Mollison. I was also unable to participate in a hands-on design course at the time due to work and family committments. What I found was inspiring. I have since completed the design certificate and am now teaching a university course in environmental ethics. There are several strengths to the Earth User's Guide. First, there are plenty of excellent illustrations by Rob Allsop, so you can see as well as read about the process and principles of permaculture design. The twenty well-chosen colour photographs compliment these. Secondly, the book focusses on two different real-life examples, a small suburban house and an eighty acre farm. Seeing permaculture in action in real places is very helpful. Third, the book avoids duplicating material that can be found elsewhere and instead focusses on the practical. There are project ideas here that could take a morning or a lifetime to complete. As Rosemary Morrow writes in the preface, 'start now and let your life be enriched'. (Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia)
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GAIA'S GARDEN: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
by Toby Hemenway & John Todd
Hemenway, a permaculture expert and associate editor of The Permaculture Activist, explains how gardens can function as ecosystems, describes the basic parts of an ecological garden (soil, water, plants, and animals), and shows how to create backyard ecosystems through guilds. Guilds, the author tells us, are groups of plants that function as an ecosystem to provide products for humans, create cover and food for wildlife, nourish the soil, conserve water, and repel pests. A simple example of a guild is the "three sisters" (corn, beans, and squash); corn stalks provide a trellis for beans, the beans supply nitrogen to the soil, and the squash leaves inhibit weeds and conserve water. While Hemenway's ideas are intriguing, creating guilds specific to an area involves extensive research, which involves either observing plant communities in the wild or using books or university contacts. In addition, the author doesn't sufficiently explain how to incorporate the many sun-loving vegetables and flowers into guilds, which are often shade-oriented. Recommended only for botanical and academic libraries.
(Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove P.L., IL) |
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HOW TO MAKE A FOREST GARDEN
by Patrick Whitefield, Robert A. de J. Hart, Tricia Cassel-Gerard (Illustrator)
In many climates around the world, forest is the natural state of vegetation. It grows without anyone's say-so. It takes no human effort at all for nature to be sustainable, diverse, productive, multi-dimensional, and beautiful. However, most people's gardens, even food gardens, are really none of these, despite large amounts of effort on the part of the gardeners. So what would it be like to garden in tune with nature, to grow a forest garden, with many of the features of a natural forest, and little of the labour usually involved in gardening? Robert Hart pioneered this approach to growing food sustainably, based on his long experience of agro-forestry around the world. He applied his wisdom to his backyard and wrote about it in the classics, 'Forest Gardening' and 'Beyond the Forest Garden'. However, much of what Hart wrote was general and philosophical - explaining the 'why' perhaps more than the 'how'. Patrick Whitefield has produced this intensely practical guide to the 'how' of forest gardening, starting from first principles and including all manner of precise details. Whitefield is an experienced permaculture practicioner and teacher, and he rightly places the forest garden in context as a very useful component of a larger system of sustainable living. On the strength of this book I am in the process of transforming my standard suburban plot into a beautiful forest garden, with apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, loganberries, figs, redcurrants, perennial herbs and salads. It has proved to be an invaluable and much thumbed manual, and an inspirational work. It is directly applicable to temperate climates, and will be of use to those living elsewhere too. (Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia)
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PERMACULTURE IN A NUTSHELL
by Patrick Whitefield, Jonathon Porritt (Preface), Terry Greenwell (Illustrator)
This is an informative, short and cheap general introduction to permaculture, the design of sustainable living. It has been re-issued due to popular demand. Experienced British permaculture designer and teacher Patrick Whitefield explains how permaculture can enrich our lives in the city, on the farm and in the community.
In brief, permaculture focuses on the conscious design of efficient ecological systems.
'Work = any need not met by the system. Pollution = any output not met by the system' (p. 14)
So it is immediately apparent that by careful design both work and pollution can be minimised. Nature, of course, does this without having to think about it, which is why permaculture systems attempt to emulate natural processes.
Though this book is less than a hundred pages long, it has enough detail to get you started on some serious practical projects. The information on 'making a mulch bed' transformed my stony, undiggable back yard into a highly productive vegetable garden in just one growing season, with very little effort (and thankfully no digging!). The book also includes plenty of contact details for taking permaculture further, which, after reading Permaculture in a Nutshell, you will be unable to resist! (Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia)
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PERMACULTURE: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability
by David Holmgren
The author, David Holmgren, is the co-creator, with Bill Mollison of the term "permaculture", and the co-author of the original permaculture book, "Permaculture One." Now, some 25 years after that seminal book, Holmgren has written a timely and comprehensive synthesis that brings permaculture principles together in an exiting new way.
The book highlights our place at a unique moment in history: at the peak of the global oil production curve; at the beginning of the end of cheap fossil energy. This is, for me, the book's most compelling motif: it positions permaculture as a strategy for a future of inevitable "energy descent". Although Holmgren hints that this energy descent may take any number of horrific pathways, he appears to have chosen the term "descent" as a hopeful alternative to collapse, crash, or dieoff.
Holmgren insightfully points out that is not just our reserves of fossil fuel that we've been burning through. Since the Reagan/Thatcher years, he claims, global capitalism has been on a frenzy of job cutting and "just-in-time" inventory reduction. This amounts to a destruction of the embedded intelligence and a severe draw-down of the capital stocks of our institutions: a severe loss of embedded energy. Furthermore, he worries that due to privatization and short-term bottom-line thinking, maintenance on our built-environment and physical infrastructure has been neglected: another huge loss of embedded energy.
On a hopeful note, Holmgren compares this situation to a forest fire: as the conflagration of global capitalism burns through its huge pulse of embedded energy, the time will be ripe for pioneers to take root and produce a flush of new growth. It is a moment of high potential for systemic change, and Holmgren's book hopes to provide "Principles and Pathways" to seed and guide that change.
The subtitle of this book includes the phrase "Beyond Sustainability". It is a well-established insight of permaculture that sustainability is not enough: in a world that is already degraded, we need to achieve an excess yield beyond sustainability that we can feed back into the great work of restoration. Holmgren's contribution to this area is to point out is that it is hard to even give meaning to the term "sustainability" while we are in the midst of a dramatic energy descent with constantly declining energy availability. We must, of course, aim for a soft landing and a smooth transition to a sustainable future but our immediate problem is to safely negotiate the descent itself.
All this is in addition, of course, to Holmgren's wise and fresh take on the more traditional subject matter of permaculture design. This book is a must-read, equal in stature to Mollison's "Permaculture: a Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future". (David Flanagan, Bellingham, WA)
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SUSTAINABLE LIVING AT "MELLIODORA" HEPBURN PERMACULTURE GARDENS: A Case Study in Cool Climate Permaculture 1985-1995
by David Holmgren
When I first heard about Permaculture I thought it was for large acreages in the sub tropics. My first visit to David Holmgren's and Su Dennett's place in 1989 entirely changed my thinking. Here was a passive solar house and a food production system on one hectare, in a cool climate, in a town. It worked: the house was warm in winter, cool in summer and the land provided all the vegetables and most of the fruit for the family!
Throughout the 10 year history of the project, David has kept detailed records and photos, which have been collated into a very unusual book. It has A3 size landscape pages, so at a single opening it covers your desk! Each spread has a theme- such as house design, orchard, or animals with maps, plans photos and text.
The book was written inside the property it is describing - it's a kind of autobiography. It was written over a five year period, and with property now "established", the text has been revised with the benefits of hindsight. It is ideal for anyone seriously interested in sustainable living - both at a practical level and with a good dose of Holmgren holistic thinking.
The meticulous detail allows the reader to trace the development of the property from the purchase of a steep weed-infested site, through the early stages of blackberry slashing, dam construction and tree planting to the "finished" product of family home, office, workshop, greenhouse, and integrated living systems with perennial plants and a range of animals fulfilling many functions.
Hepburn is in central Victoria, 470 metres above sea level, in the Great Dividing Range, north of Melbourne. It is an arboretum for cool climate Permaculture and the book has an extensive species list (over 170 listings).
Twenty years on from the first draft of "Permaculture One", this book shows that Permaculture works.... (Ian Lillington, Permaculture International Journal)
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