What is Permaculture?

In brief

A design system for sustainable human habitats modelled on natural ecosystems, developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s.

Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human habitats (gardens, farms, settlements and communities) by consciously imitating the patterns and relationships found in natural ecosystems. The word is a contraction of "permanent agriculture", later broadened to "permanent culture", reflecting the idea that food production, housing and social organisation can be designed as one integrated whole. The word contracts both permanent agriculture and permanent culture, and the thinking behind it is older than the term: Mollison had been making the observations it rests on since 1959.

The concept was formulated in the 1970s in Tasmania by Bill Mollison, a researcher and naturalist, and David Holmgren, then his student. Their book Permaculture One (1978) introduced the approach; Mollison's Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988) became its standard reference work. Holmgren later condensed the practice into twelve design principles (among them "observe and interact", "catch and store energy", "produce no waste" and "use edges and value the marginal"), resting on three ethics: care for the earth, care for people, and fair share.

In practical terms, permaculture designers study a site's water flows, sun exposure, wind, soil and existing life before intervening. They then arrange elements (trees, ponds, buildings, animals, paths), so that each serves several functions and the outputs of one element become inputs for another. The goal is a system that, like a mature ecosystem, largely sustains itself.

Tap a petal to see where permaculture reaches.

Domain 1 of 7

Land and nature stewardship

Where permaculture began: soil, water, plants and animals, cared for so that the land grows richer with every year.

In the TerraWiki

After David Holmgren’s permaculture flower. The spiral path leads from the personal and local to the shared and global.

How Terra Humana understands permaculture

For Terra Humana, permaculture is more than a gardening technique: it is a way of thinking that treats humans as participants in ecosystems rather than managers standing outside them. That reading connects directly to our mission: restoring the earth and restoring humanity are, in our view, one movement, not two.

We value permaculture's insistence on long observation before action, its ethics, and its refusal to separate ecological questions from social ones. At the same time, we do not treat any single school as doctrine. At Sa Medada we combine permaculture design with syntropic agriculture and ecological restoration practice, and we let the specific conditions of Sardinia (its droughts, its granite soils, its ancient olive groves) correct the textbook wherever the two disagree.

Permaculture in practice

At Project Eden, on the Sa Medada site near Jerzu in the Ogliastra region of Sardinia, permaculture principles inform how the land is being developed. The site serves as the foundation's living laboratory: a place where design decisions are tested against a Mediterranean reality of hot, dry summers and intense seasonal rain.

Concretely, this means the work begins with mapping: understanding where water arrives, where it runs off and where it can be slowed and stored; which zones suit intensive planting and which should remain wild. Food-producing areas are planned as layered, tree-based systems rather than open fields, drawing on both permaculture zoning and syntropic succession planting.

Project Eden is a long-term undertaking, and much of it is still in the planning and early implementation stage. We describe here what we are building, not a finished showcase. Visitors and members follow the process as it unfolds, including the setbacks, because honest documentation of what works in Sardinian conditions is itself part of the knowledge we want this site to produce.

Sa Medada

What this looks like at Sa Medada

At Sa Medada, Project Eden combines holistic permaculture with syntropic agroforestry. Planning works from maps built on LiDAR data, drone and satellite imagery that show water paths, the course of the sun and the slope. A permaculture academy that passes this knowledge on is part of the plan.