Permaculture, a Vision of the Post-Oil World.
Originally published in French as the Preface to the French language edition of David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability. (Translated by Eugene Moreau and edited by David Holmgren)
More than an agricultural technology, permaculture is a vision of the societies of tomorrow, ours, which will be confronted with the evolution of energy and climate systems. Permaculture is not only another way to garden: it is another way of thinking about and acting on the world, a global philosophical and concrete change, at the same time as a drawing together of strategies of resilience in the face of radical transformations, if not collapses, which are presenting themselves.
The wealth and economic growth of the industrial world rest on unprecedented extraction of enormous quantities of fossil fuels, which have taken some hundreds of millions of years to develop in the depths of the Earth. We have used some of this precious energy source to increase even more the consumption of resources in unsustainable proportions. The consequences of this overexploitation are being revealed as access to cheap fossil fuels is in decline. David Holmgren underlines the fact that the squandering of so much capital would lead any enterprise into bankruptcy (collapse).
Permaculture offers a break with this waste of energywhich is based on an erroneous understanding of wealth. One of its fundamental principles affirms the need to capture and store energy out of concern for the long term. In particular, it is focused on how to maximise the capture of energy from photosynthesis. The laws of thermodynamics have not escaped permaculture. In the second principle, speaking of capturing and storing energy, David Holmgren comes back to the law of entropy: in the universe, energy is dispersed from centres of concentration and tends to dilution. High quality energy is degraded into lesser quality energy thus losing its usefulness. This tendency to dissipation and dispersion affects all systems, living or dead. Living systems are organised in such a way that they maximise their capacities for transforming and storing energy: only the most efficient emerge unscathed in the course of evolution.
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