Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability

Essential reading for permaculture designers and accessible to a wide range of critical thinkers. This revised edition is more accessible than the original, with redrawn graphics, corrected and amended text, new references and a newly designed layout that invites the reader into the world of whole systems thinking that is permaculture.

When it was originally published in 2002, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability explained the systems of permaculture in 12 design principles that together with three central ethics provided a foundation for a diversity of ecological solutions that characterise permaculture design, teaching, development and activism. Fifteen years on the book has been translated into nine languages and has proved to be the seminal text for extending permaculture beyond its agrarian roots.

Principles and Pathways draws together and integrates 25 years of thinking and teaching to show a whole new way of understanding and action behind a simple set of design principles. Relevant to every aspect of how we reorganise our lives, communities and landscapes to creatively adapt to ecological realities which shape human destiny.

Essential reading for permaculture designers and accessible to a wide range of critical thinkers. For students and teachers of permaculture this book provides something more fundamental and distilled than Mollison's encyclopedic Designers Manual. For the general reader this book provides refreshing perspectives on a range of environmental issues and shows how permaculture is much more than a system of gardening. For anyone seriously interested in understanding the foundations for sustainable design and culture, this book is essential reading.

David Holmgren was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1955. As a child of working class political activists he was greatly influenced by the social revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While travelling around Australia in 1973 he fell in love with the Tasmanian landscape and joined the innovative Environmental Design School in Hobart. Over the following three years an intense working relationship with his mentor Bill Mollison led to the development of the permaculture concept and set the course of both mens lives. As the young co-author of Permaculture One in 1978, David shunned the limelight and focused on further developing his practical and design skills for a self-reliant lifestyle. Since then he has written several more books, conducted workshops and courses throughout Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, the Americas and Europe. As a consultant designer he has developed a great expertise in the temperate landscapes of south-eastern Australia with a strong bioregional focus on his home territory. Since 1985 he has lived with his partner Su Dennett in Hepburn, central Victoria, on their property Melliodora, one of Australia's best-known permaculture demonstration sites.Within the international permaculture movement, David is respected for his commitment to presenting permaculture ideas through practical projects. Together with Su, David teaches by personal example that a sustainable lifestyle is a realistic, attractive and powerful alternative to dependant consumerism. This book is the distillation of a life lived by the principles of permaculture.