More than a fad or mere buzzword, permaculture offers positive solutions for many of the environmental and social challenges confronting modern society. And nowhere are those empowering remedies more needed and desired than in our cities.
In his latest book, bestselling permaculture author Toby Hemenway (Gaia s Garden) demonstrates that the same nature-based approach that works to grow food connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways applies perfectly to our need for water, shelter, energy, livelihood, and community.
As Hemenway demonstrates in The Permaculture City, urban permaculture is about much more than gardening in the city. Growing food is only a small part of the challenge we face in solving our essential and increasingly urgent problem of coexisting with a finite planet and with each other.
Urban permaculture takes what we have learned in the garden and applies it to a much broader range of human experience, writes Hemenway. We re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures.
Permaculture s ethics lead us on a path to ecologically and socially sound decisions, ruling out the acts and ideas that harm people and planet. Its principles, however, do more than just rule out foolishness, they encourage us to think like an ecosystem, helping us spot solutions that enhance diversity, resilience, productivity, interconnectedness, and elegance and encourage lean use of resources.
In The Permaculture City, Hemenway provides readers with practical tips and new information from around the country of how people are using permaculture principles to live in more sustainable, and deeply connected, ways to each other and their community.
The Permaculture City documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practioners, and provides hope and opportunity for our cities, towns, and suburbs."