Permaculture: regenerative – not merely sustainable

September 2015 saw the International Permaculture Conference1 held in London, followed by the Convergence, which occupied 6 days at Gilwell Park, on the Essex–London border, where its practitioners gave presentations and workshops on various aspects of permaculture, which is a sustainable design system intended to emulate the principles of living ecosystems. While it has been emphasised that such terms as sustainable development, and sustainable agriculture, are really oxymorons, since neither untrammelled growth nor our present form of industrial food production can be maintained in perpetuity, permaculture has a value-added factor that extends beyond what might be merely maintained or sustained, which is the quality of regeneration. All sustainable solutions are unsustainable over the longer term, if they are not also intrinsically regenerative. Nature offers the ultimate example of a design that is both sustainable and regenerative, and it is logical to appeal to natural principles for solutions to many of our current problems. This is sometimes taken to mean that we need adopt more “simple” lifestyles, abandoning our technology in the process, but the reality is more complex. Within a broader perspective of regenerative design, permaculture identifies the elements of sustainable living which are harmonious with nature. Discordant practices which lead, e.g. to soil erosion3, fret the environment, and are neither sustainable nor regenerative, but degenerative.