What Is Permaculture?

Permaculture is the extension of the art of biomimicry - a sustainable living and design science rooted in observation of nature; permaculture is to sustainability what math is to physics.  Nature has long solved many of the environmental and social problems we're facing today, but we just have not been paying much attention.  

While many people think of permaculture as gardening, that’s a lot like thinking of math as being about building bridges. Permaculture is much larger than gardening. Permaculture is a sustainable design science rooted in observation of natural patterns. For example, the same branching pattern of a tree is present in every river, as well as in our own bodies — the pattern maximizes edge, increases diversity, and serves at least a dozen other functions. The very concepts of diversity increasing stability of natural living systems and edge increasing diversity are core permaculture teachings.

By observing the way nature works and then applying the same patterns and principles we learn to design truly sustainable, extremely resilient systems on any level – that can be a garden, a business or a whole city.

How Is Permaculture Changing Our World?

Check out this amazing video about how permaculturist Geoff Lawton turned a property in the desert of Jordan Valley into a food-producing forest in just a couple years.  Seriously, go watch the video - it's incredible.

Here are just some of the many things a permaculture course teaches:

• Permaculture principles for smart design
• Pattern observation and site analysis
• Natural building construction
• Renewable energy and appropriate technology
• Rainwater harvesting and conservation
• Passive and active solar design
• Graywater considerations and system design
• Waste recycling and treatment
• Soil regeneration and land restoration
• Food forests, trees and garden design
• Cooperative economics and financial permaculture
• Scale – designing sustainable, thriving cities
• and much, much more.

Why We Are Raising Money

We want to make this work as accessible as possible while costs of filming, editing, web site development and promotion all add up.  For every hour of footage we film, we need to have a professional editor spend several hours editing and converting.  Then we also need to integrate a website platform to make the content truly coherent and allow us to create a very high quality online educational experience.

We estimate the costs of filming, editing, website programming and online promotion to be roughly $10,000.  We are hoping to greatly exceed that minimum with this campaign and the additional funds over that amount will enable us to not only develop the online course but also produce several interviews with our instructors plus additional e-books and a much more extensive online promotion. 

The world needs this knowledge made as accessible as possible.  Help us meet that need by supporting this game-changing campaign.

What You Get For Your Support

You are helping to make history.  Never before has a full permaculture design course been made available online completely free.  We're committed to making this knowledge available to absolutely everyone.

Check out the awesome perks we've listed on the right.  They include gift certificates to our trainings, delivery of physical course DVDs (we're talking about roughly seventy hours of film!), as well as access to our full in-person trainings.  

Even better, through our non-profit partner, we're going to plant at least one tree for every sponsor we get and quite literally make the earth a little bit greener.