What is permaculture? The ethics and principles, explained plainly

A design system, not a garden style

Most of what goes wrong on land comes from parts that work against each other: water running off one place while another dries out, compost far from the garden, the garden far from the kitchen. Permaculture is a way of designing so the parts work together.

David Holmgren, one of its founders, defines it as a design system for resilient living and land use, based on a set of ethics and ecological design principles. He also says what it isn't: not simply a trendy form of organic gardening, and not the gardening techniques themselves.

Where it came from

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the word together in the mid-1970s and published Permaculture One in 1978. It began as a blend of "permanent agriculture." As the idea grew from farms to whole households and communities, Mollison redefined it as "permanent culture."

According to a 2014 review by Rafter Ferguson and Sarah Taylor Lovell in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, the founders were worried about farming that depends on cheap energy. They drew on earlier writing about permanent agriculture, including J. Russell Smith's book Tree Crops, and on the systems ecology of H.T. Odum.

The three ethics

Permaculture starts with values, not techniques. Holmgren names three ethics, and describes ethics as ways cultures have learned to keep self-interest in check.

• Earth care: look after soil, water, and living systems, because everything else depends on them.
• People care: meet people's needs, including your own, in ways that don't wear them down.
• Fair share: set limits, and pass on the surplus.

Twelve principles, in plain English

Holmgren's twelve design principles are a checklist for thinking, not rules. Here they are as he names them, each with an example of what it can look like on the ground.

• Observe and interact: watch a full year of sun, water, and wind before changing much.
• Catch and store energy: hold rainwater in soil, ponds, or tanks; store the summer's sun as firewood or preserves.
• Obtain a yield: make sure the work feeds you, in food, shade, income, or joy.
• Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: notice when something isn't working and change course.
• Use and value renewable resources and services: let chickens scratch, bees pollinate, and leaves become mulch.
• Produce no waste: turn scraps into compost and prunings into paths.
• Design from patterns to details: get the big shapes of water, sun, and access right before choosing plants.
• Integrate rather than segregate: put things where they help each other.
• Use small and slow solutions: start with one bed, one tree, one swale.
• Use and value diversity: many kinds of plants spread the risk.
• Use edges and value the marginal: the edge where woods meet meadow is often the richest ground.
• Creatively use and respond to change: plan for the landscape you'll have, not just the one you have.

Zones and sectors

Two simple tools turn the principles into a plan. Zones arrange the land by how often you visit it: the things you tend daily go closest to the house, and the things you rarely touch go farthest away. Many teachers number them from 0, the home itself, out to 5, land left wild.

Sectors map the forces that arrive from outside: sun, wind, water, and in some places fire. Ferguson and Lovell describe how a design can block them, as a firebreak does, channel them, as a windbreak or swale does, or welcome them in, as an open sunny bed does.

What the research shows, and what it doesn't

Permaculture has a mixed relationship with science, and it is worth being honest about that. Ferguson and Lovell found that its principles largely complement agroecology, and that its approaches to perennial polycultures, water management, and farm layout go beyond what science has studied, which makes them promising research areas. They also found that permaculture writing tends to underplay the complexity and risk farmers face, and that the movement has been relatively isolated from research. Few if any of its techniques started within permaculture; many come from traditional farming systems.

Newer evidence is encouraging. In 2024, Julia Reiff and colleagues compared nine permaculture sites in Germany and Luxembourg with nearby fields farmed the usual way. The permaculture sites had about 27% more soil carbon, 20% less compacted soil, and far more earthworms, plant species, and bird species. The authors are careful to note the sample was small and that they didn't measure crop yields.

Permaculture, agroecology, and regenerative agriculture

These words overlap, and people use them loosely. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization describes agroecology as at once a science, a set of practices, and a social movement. Regenerative agriculture has no legal or widely agreed definition; a 2020 review by Peter Newton and colleagues found it defined by practices like cover crops and reduced tillage, by outcomes like soil health, or by both.

Permaculture's distinct contribution, according to a 2018 review by Julius Krebs and Sonja Bach, is its emphasis on conscious design. The point isn't a list of methods. It is deciding, before you dig, how every part of a place will work with every other.