What Is Permaculture?
What Is Permaculture?
Grow Food, Save Money, and Work Less With This Simple Design System
Kenton Zerbin
ASA Founder
This question is asked alot…
…and it’s ridiculously tricky to explain.
Have you ever had the feeling that everything’s gotten way too complicated?
Paying bills, maintaining your home, trying to eat well…
… all while trying not to destroy the planet…
… feels like juggling fire while riding a unicycle in a hurricane.
But, what if there was a different way to design your landscape, your home, and your lifestyle in a way that made more sense?
Welcome to Permaculture Design.
Permaculture is a way of seeing and engaging your world…
… from how you grow your food…
… to where & how you build your home…
… to how you thrive in your physical and social world.
Permaculture is especially valuable and practical for anyone interested in buying land, starting a homestead, or living with more intention for impact and sustainability.
If that’s you, this article is your shovel to dig into the world of Permaculture.
Here’s what we’re going to cover:
The Definition of Permaculture
(And History)
(And History)
At its core, Permaculture is a design science.
It’s about consciously designing human habitats, gardens, homes, communities, even businesses, so they mimic and work with the intelligence and patterns of nature.
The term was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s as a blend of “permanent” and “agriculture”, but as it gained popularity, it evolved to become the hyphenation of the words “Permanent” and “culture”.
This change occurred because the systems thinking that Permaculture teaches worked well not just in backyards, gardens, and farms, but also for making and running other kinds of systems, including:
💧Watersheds & communities
🏡Homes & buildings
🤝Various business models
🌍Even social & decision-making systems!
The movement of Permaculture gained rapid popularity in the wake of a book called “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, which documented how the use of the wartime chemical DDT in agriculture caused the loss of an entire generation of birds.
People wanted answers. Different solutions. This set the scene for Permaculture to boom.
The book “Permaculture 1” was already published. It documented patterns and techniques that indigenous peoples around the world had used to grow food and manage landscapes for hundreds and thousands of years.
The book also showed how to apply those concepts to transitioning modern food systems and landscapes to be more sustainable, more abundant, and less work.
Since then, dozens of credible books have been published on Permaculture, including “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual” which is the standard text used to this day for training people in Permaculture Design.
A fascinating trivia detail about Permaculture, is that it has no one definition. This is because the movement was made open-source and grass-roots, allowing for its definition to be defined and refined by its local users.
As a Permaculture teacher, I have collected dozens of definitions for Permaculture and refined my own.
Here are my top 4:
“Permaculture is a design science, guided by ethics, and inspired by nature for meeting the needs of humanity to the benefit of the environment.” ~Kenton Zerbin
“A rational man’s/woman’s approach to not shitting their own bed.”
~Bill Mollison
Permaculture is about “…saving the planet and living to be a hundred, while throwing very impressive dinner parties and organising other creatures to do most of the work.”
~Linda Woodrow
“Permaculture is a toolkit for creating systems that produce more than they consume, regenerate the land, and support thriving humans and ecosystems all at once.”
~Chat GPT
Sounds to good to be true right?
But it works.
Permaculture uses nature as the teacher. Instead of controlling or extracting, we ask:
🌀 What would nature do here?
🧭 How can we design for abundance, not just survival?
💡 What if our lives, like ecosystems, could get richer the longer they exist?
It’s a mindset. A practice.
A quiet revolution happening in backyards around the world.
And once you start seeing the world through a permaculture lens… You don’t go back.
How Does Permaculture Work?
Permaculture works by copying the best designer we know: nature.
It’s not individual solutions like a garden or solar panels…
… it’s how multiple solutions connect together to support one another (just like an ecosystem does.)
Applied to a garden, it’s a systematic way of placing plants, pathways, and everything else, so they are better together. Here is an example of permaculture applied to a background garden:
💧Rainwater captured off house roof, and stored in raised tank to water the garden.
🥕Garden placed to get ideal South/East sun (gets sun), close to the back door (easy to use), and downhill from the raintank (free irrigation).
🌱Compost bay placed next to the garden to process kitchen organics and output free, rich soil for the garden.
🌻Even each plant can be placed next to another strategically. For example, place flowers next to crops (like Marigolds next to Tomatoes) to confuse bad bugs and bring in pollinators.
The concept of “Companion planting” can be applied to everything in life – landscapes, buildings, and even people.
It’s about placing one thing next to another thing for benefits. The key is that they support each other… and get better over time.
It all starts with one powerful shift:
Design with intent.
Rather than jumping into action, Permaculture invites us to pause and observe. To ask:
🤔What resources already exist here?
🔍What are the relationships between things?
🏡How can I meet my needs while building life, not extracting from it?
Think of it like this:
Conventional systems are like factories – they need constant inputs to keep going, need maintenance, and are optimized around efficiency.
Permaculture systems are like forests – they build in richness, resilience, and stability the longer they exist.
With thoughtful intention, we to can design our systems to mimic forests. And when we do:
⚒️”Work” becomes a failure of design.
(Design the work out!)
💩”Waste” becomes a resource.
(Nothing in nature is “waste”).
💰”Wealth” becomes a byproduct.
(We live on the land’s interest, not its capital).
Permaculture works because it reconnects what was never meant to be separate. For example, let’s take a look at the root origins of these two words:
1) Eco-logy – from the Greek ‘oikos’ (means “household”) and ‘logos’ (means “to study”). So “Ecology” translates to “the study of our home.”
2) Eco-nomy – from oikos (“household”) and ‘nomos’ (which means “management”). So “Economy” means “the management of our home.”
The STUDY & the MANAGEMENT of our home? These logically go together!
But in our modern world, our economies have been pitted against our ecologies, as if caring for the Earth and managing our lives were opposing forces.
Permaculture says… what if they’re actually the same thing?
Why Permaculture Is More Relevant Than Ever
Let’s be honest…
…modern systems are breaking, and not just at the edges.
Food security. Climate.
Housing. Energy.
Mental health.
It’s all connected. And it’s all screaming for a better way.
Permaculture isn’t a hippie trend or only for homesteaders – It’s a solution stack, and it’s more relevant than ever.
🌱It helps you grow food and grow resilience.
💲It helps you save money and live with purpose.
🌍It helps you reconnect with the natural world and remember your place in it.
It’s not about going “back” to nature…
…It’s about moving forward with it.
When you do, sustainability isn’t optional.
It’s common sense.
Permaculture is more relevant than ever before because it doesn’t stop at “less bad” or even “sustainable.”
It asks something bigger…
What if we could make things better than we found them?
Permaculture reminds us…
We’re not just consumers.
We’re creators.
Designers.
Regenerators.
And the world is hungry for more of those.
Start Your Sustainable Journey: What to Do First
So you’ve made it this far.
Maybe something inside you is stirring…
A quiet yes. A sense that this makes sense; that this can give you a better way to live, grow, and build.
Good. But let’s be real – when people first learn about Permaculture, they often say the same thing:
“This makes so much sense…
But where the heck do I even start?”
Don’t worry, you don’t need to move off-grid, dig a pond, or plant a food forest tomorrow. (But if you want to >>contact me<<)
The first thing you should do next is learn the basics of permaculture design.
It will make you more thoughtful, strategic, and save you money and time in the long run.
We have trained over 1000 students on the basics of Permaculture design through:
💻 An online course
🏡Week-long retreats
🎓2-week Certification Courses
But to make this knowledge accessible to ANYONE, ANYWHERE, we made a free mini-course.
👉(CLICK HERE) Start the Free Mini-Course:👈
“Plan Your Land Like a Pro With Permaculture Design”
I hope you enjoyed this article, and I wish you luck on your permaculture projects ahead!
Kenton Zerbin
ASA Founder
one person,
one property,
one community
at a time.”
All Rights Reserved.
