A Holiday Smorgasbord Part 2: Permaculture, A Vision of a Post-Oil World

[David MacLeod]

Today’s installment of our holiday smorgasbord features an approach to the environmental crisis and the energy crisis and the economic crisis that I’m very thankful for…Permaculture.

Permaculture, A vision of a post-oil world

Yves Cochet

Yves Cochet has written the preface to the French edition of David Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Yves Cochet was a minister for the environment in the French national government, and is now an elected member of Euro parliament for the Greens.

In his own Preface in the original, Holmgren was very clear that “Permaculture is a creative design response to a world of declining energy and resource availability…” and that it “was predicated on the likelihood of some degree of collapse and breakdown in technology, economics and even society…”

In my copy of the book I have a star by this paragraph:

Insofar as permaculture is an effective response to the limitations on use of energy and natural resources, it will move from its current status as “alternative response to environmental crisis” to the social and economic mainstream of the post-industrial era. Whether it will be called permaculture or not is a secondary matter.

- David Holmgren

In the new French edition, Cochet shows a keen understanding of Holmgren’s thought. It is clear, it is succinct, and I think very well captures David Holmgren’s message on the essence of Permaculture, and I highly recommend taking a look at the English translation.

More than an agricultural technology, permaculture is a vision of the societies of tomorrow, ours, which will be confronted with the evolution of energy and climate systems. Permaculture is not only another way to garden: it is another way of thinking about and acting on the world, a global philosophical and concrete change. At the same time permaculture draws together strategies of resilience in the face of imminent radical transformations, if not collapses.

- Yves Cochet

Download the entire translated preface from David Holmgren’s website here: Permaculture, a vision of a post-oil world.  And join me today in giving thanks for Permaculture!