It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political.
I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.
You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.
If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.
Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.
Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.
