Perma-wha?

Well, today was my first day at my 4 Seasons VII - Permaculture Design Certification Course at Regenerative Design Institute and let me say first that I am sooo glad I'm in this class. Listening to Penny alone is more than worth the trip.

But let me rewind a little bit for those of you who are scratching your heads and saying to yourselves "What exactly is permaculture?"

Good question, especially if you are trying to keep it to a one sentence answer. So for now I'll cop out and defer to the ever-illustrious wikipedia to provide my answer.. at least until I've gone to a few more classes..

So, permaculture is:

The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies.

Permaculture design principles extend from the position that "The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children" (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth's ecosystems.[wikipedia]

ack!.. getting late and must prepare for tomorrow's journey to Commonwealth Garden and another full day to sponge up the knowledge. wohoo! But don't fret, I pinky swear to wrote more soon...