Stuff You Should Know What's Permaculture All About?
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Mar 20, 2026 A deep dive into permaculture as a smarter way to design farms and backyards. They explore zones, sectors, forest gardens, rain-catching swales, and using animals, insects, and plant pairings to make landscapes work together. There is also a look at how it stacks up against industrial agriculture and where the science is still catching up.
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Sustainability Means Fewer Outside Inputs
- Permaculture aims to grow food by designing systems that need few outside inputs instead of depending on fertilizers, pumps, and monocultures.
- Josh Clark contrasts it with modern farming's fossil-fuel fertilizer, runoff, algae blooms, and fish kills.
Permaculture Grew From Shared Ethics And A Split
- Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined permaculture in 1978 around earth care, people care, and limits on consumption and population.
- Josh Clark says Mollison became dogmatic while Holmgren stayed more pragmatic, helping create competing strains inside the movement.
Ancient Farming Already Looked A Lot Like Permaculture
- Charles Bryant says permaculture revives older practices like forest farming, crop rotation, composting, and growing multiple crops together.
- He frames it as returning to how people worked land before industrial monoculture, not inventing something entirely new.
