Design
The Ethics & Principles of Permaculture
Three ethics and twelve design principles that turn "work with nature" into something you can actually do.
Permaculture is often described as “permanent agriculture,” but its founders — the Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, working in the 1970s — meant something broader: a permanent culture, a way of designing human systems that could last. A food forest is one beautiful expression of it, but the same thinking applies to water, buildings, energy, and community.
At its heart sit three simple ethics.
The three ethics
- Earth Care — provision for all living systems to continue and thrive.
- People Care — provision for people to access what they need for a decent life.
- Fair Share — set limits to consumption and return the surplus back into caring for the earth and people.
Everything else is in service of these three.
The twelve design principles
Holmgren later distilled the practice into twelve principles, each paired with a folk proverb. They are less a checklist than a set of lenses — ways to look at a problem until a good design reveals itself.
A few that matter most when you are just starting out:
- Observe and interact. Watch your land across the seasons before you plant. Where does frost settle? Where does water run? This is the single most valuable thing a beginner can do.
- Catch and store energy. Harvest abundance when it comes — rainwater in winter, biomass in autumn, sun in summer — and save it for the lean times.
- Obtain a yield. A design has to actually feed the people tending it, or they will stop.
- Use small and slow solutions. Small systems are easier to build, cheaper to fix, and gentler to learn from. Start tiny.
- Use and value diversity. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket — a diverse system is a resilient one.
- Integrate rather than segregate. Place things so they help each other; the right relationships do the work for you.
You can read all twelve principles, with their proverbs, on our permaculture page.
Why the ethics come first
It is tempting to jump straight to swales and guilds and plant lists. But the ethics are what keep permaculture from becoming a bag of clever tricks. They ask, again and again: does this care for the earth, care for people, and share fairly? If the answer is yes, you are probably on the right track.