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The concept of permaculture emerged during the 1970s energy crisis. This solutions-oriented design system began as a holistic response to a deepening awareness of limits to growth and their accompanying challenges to global survival. These challenges of course are becoming ever more acute today.
Permaculture stresses patterns of cooperation rather than competition, mimicking the relationships found in natural ecologies. It can be applied to pretty much any field of human endeavour from gardening, agriculture, shelter and the built environment, ‘green’ economics, transport and waste treatment through to health care, livelihood and community governance.
Fifty years on, Permaculture: Practical & Radical Solutions for a World in Crisis is the latest book demonstrating that another world IS possible. It’s based on authors Mira Illeris and Esben Schultz’s decades of hands-on experience, including running an off-grid permaculture home and educational forest garden. Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is a practical manual for turning problems into solutions as well as offering an abundance of ways for our homes, gardens, farms, schools, communities and even nations to become resilient and thriving ecosystems.
The opening chapter lays out the permaculture concept, distinguishing it from sustainability – a word often co-opted to the point of meaninglessness – as we tackle what the authors term ‘the five catastrophes’: a lack of clean water, soil degradation, air pollution, biodiversity loss and climate breakdown, and the organisational and structural failures causing them. Rather, the authors emphasise, we need a radical and regenerative mindset that aims to actively leave the world a better place than we found it. Linking to embedded ethics of caring for the Earth and for people, ecological footprinting is introduced as a tool for measuring our environmental impacts. The authors note that global average energy and resource consumption already exceeds available biocapacity and that UK and US lifestyles would require multiple planets if universalised.
A clearly presented set of core permaculture design principles – work with Nature, value and encourage diversity, favour small-scale and intensive systems, and maximise beneficial relationships – and a step-by-step framework for action equip us with the tools needed to become ‘vision engineers’. Instead of dropping out and getting away from it all in our own little eco-paradise, for Schultz and Illeris the role of the permaculture practitioner is very much about modelling the changes we want to see in our world by creating and sharing new positive ideas and stories about the future.
The remaining bulk of the book consists of practical-oriented chapters focused on regenerative cultivation, water usage, energy, construction, community or organisation, and monetary systems. Each opens with a stated vision before moving into a toolbox of grounded and scalable techniques. These include methods of no-dig vegetable cultivation and sustainable market gardening; how to create food forests with perennial vegetables, berries, fruit and nut trees; ways to strengthen resilient rural–urban networks; recycling water through aquaculture and ecological wastewater treatment, and exploring new approaches to democracy and human-scale economies. It’s a format that makes sense for a book with a scope ranging from forest garden microclimate design to decentralised currency theory without losing the thread back to first principles.
A short closing chapter places permaculture in the context of mainstream politics, with thoughts on bridging the dichotomy between taking personal action and the need to scale up our solutions thinking to collective and systemic levels. We urgently need ideas not so long ago dismissed as ‘fringe’ to inform progressive policy-making as energy insecurity, climate collapse and the precarious nature of our current financial and political systems become increasingly untenable. I’m reminded of the truism that we can’t solve today’s problems by using the same kind of thinking that created them, and remain convinced that real change can only come from the bottom up. In the authors’ words, “Permaculture is not an unrealistic dream, but rather an unequivocal necessity.”
Permaculture: Practical and Radical Solutions for a World in Crisis by Mira Illeris and Esben Schultz. Permanent Publications, 2026. ISBN: 9781856232586
