a school of sustainable agriculture modeled on observations of how natural ecosystems work. It is founded on three principles: care of ecosystems, care of people, and closing cycles so that waste is returned to the land as nutrients.
Permaculture is a design discipline for developing human communities integrated with natural environments in a sustainable way. It is founded on 3 ethical principles resumed as:
- Earth care
- People care
- Fair share.
These ethics guide the use of several design principles, as (for example) no production of waste and the observation and interaction with natural ecosystems.
The term was initially developed and coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. It was a contraction of "permanent agriculture" but later got expanded to mean permanent culture, due to the more broad meaning of the discipline.
