What is permaculture?

“It’s a system for designing agricultural landscapes that work with nature… I like to call it edible restoration, since the tools used in permaculture can help to restore land as well as yield food for humans.” —Amy Stross, The Suburban Micro-Farm: Modern Solutions for Busy People

Permaculture is a set of design principles centered around whole systems thinking, simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, community, and organizational design and development. 

The founder of the permaculture movement, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology at University of Tasmania, Bill Mollison, has said: "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.”—Wikipedia