Permaculture (Permanent culture)

What is permaculture?

Permaculture is a useful approach of designing highly productive and sustainable gardens, balconies, orchards, parks, forests or farms as well as whole human settlements, villages and towns.
Permaculture design has been tested on all continents all around the world and under all types of climatic conditions and cultural background and could be applied to all spheres of human activities.

Definition of permaculture

Someone define permaculture as system for designing of edible ecosystems.
Technically speaking some can define it as “software” for sustainable living, where “hardware” is our human bodies.
There are those who declare, that this is the best-known complex package of practical techniques for meaningful and healthy living on Earth, known to humankind at the moment.

What’s it based on?

Truly, core of permaculture is ethics and respect to life in all of its form. This ethics could be divided into three fields:
1. Caring for Earth which means everything what could be found on Earth whether living or inanimate,
2. Caring for people, therefore to secure our basic needs and
3. Using our spare time and surpluses for purposes of caring for Earth and mankind

Apart of that permaculture respect inner native value of all goods, whether they seem to man useful or not.
This ethics suggests, that in permaculture we design our human systems according to the patterns similar to natural ecosystems, while applying traditional wisdom and knowledge of modern science, including our experience and or own findings.

How it works?

In permaculture we combine features and capabilities of plants, animals and human including our settlements into so-called “structures“.

We co-operate and apply the principles common in nature in order to run and maintain ecosystems useful directly to humans or for successful and healthy survival of these ecosystems itself.

We try to place individual components so that:
A) among them a maximum useful connections and mutual useful relations can be established
B) every single components is able to fulfil more tasks
C) every important function is provided by more components
D) components as well as whole system consume as minimum energy as possible
E) we can first of all use biological and natural energy sources
F) all products of system are used within this system which means all product are recycled and thus no (or minimum) “waste” is produced
G) we can create rich and diverse culture of mutual supportive animal and plant species
H) we create rather smaller high productive systems than large scale extensive systems, requiring expensive external energy and material support
I) we can use not just area, but also other dimensions – space and time and synergic effects of individual biological compounds
J) we maximize use of perennial plants
K) we can use natural patterns and marginal effects of ecosystems

“How it works” you can find out on our permaculture courses

Permaculture courses…

The mission of nongovernmental organization Alter Nativa is to put sustainable principles into practice. That’s why we organize permaculture courses (up to now in Slovak language only. English language courses could be arranged after prior request).

Thank you.