Introduction

Permaculture is a design system based on ethics and principles which can be used to establish, design, manage and improve all efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future.

This site explores the 'essence of permaculture' in a simple and clear way, expanding on the work of co-originator of the permaculture concept, David Holmgren.



Permaculture, Business, Resilience and Transition

After a conversation with David Holmgren, Rob Hopkins (author of The Transition Handbook), put together some thoughts about how the principles of permaculture might apply to business.

"In many ways business is already ahead of the rest of us in terms of some of the thinking approaches that are required for energy descent. They are used to thinking ‘lean’ and getting the most out of things. The shift will be from merely prioritising output to thinking more widely. These principles offer a good lens through which to look at how to build resilience for business."

Below is an extract of two of the priciples from Rob's blog. The rest will be featured in the coming weeks.

This principle states that any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive, e.g. productive trees in public places, edible roof gardens, or urban edible landscaping.

This is something that businesses do intuitively, when thinking about maximising cash flow, about doing something that someone needs in order to be able to sell it. This is instinctive to businesses. However, many of us with no business experience have forgotten this. Also, much of business, especially at a corporate level, have taken this to extremes that are exploitative, distorting and damaging, seeing profit maximisation at the sole focus. Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance.

If Catch and Store Energy is about maximising capital, Obtain a Yield is about income, and the observation that our businesses, our projects, need to generate a profit.






A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.

This principle recommends moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities. Businesses need to be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation. We need to be able to apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated. There is the danger of economic ‘bubbles’, even in the world of renewable energy, if people throw all their money into it but it isn’t consolidated.

This principle is about looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general. It is key to build these negative feedbacks in in order to stay ahead of the game. We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.

You can see Rob Hopkins full article here.