The permaculture chapter: sources of information

See HERE for the provisional contents page of the study,

which gives you a proper chronology of sections.

Note: the content below is all in first draft format. It will change considerably during the time it takes for the study to be completed (especially by way of more academic support, generally). I post now ‘for interest’s sake’.

Sources of information

Note: this is a first draft of a section of my research. It will change considerably during the time it takes for the study to be completed. I post now ‘for interest’s sake’. Click on the PhD tab if you would like to find sections referred to in this post.

Three main sources of permaculture information are used in this chapter:

Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (1988) is the most official, most extensive text of the permaculture world; informally, one could refer to it as the permaculture bible. It is a veritable tomb of 574 ‘A4’ size pages, the vast majority of which contain two columns of small text, the rest consisting of diagrams and relevant images. Mollison (1979: 1) provides a brief indication of what the book ‘is about’ when on the first page of the introduction he writes that although “this book is about design, it is also about values and ethics, and above all about a sense of personal responsibility for earth care”. Note already that the first sentence is explicitly aligned with an Orphic agenda due to the explicit focus on earth care.

The second source is the Permaculture Association – permaculture.org.uk – where condensed information about permaculture is offered. It is a national charity in the United Kingdom “that supports members and the public with advice, support, information and training about the theory and practice of permaculture.”[1] This site is one of several excellent sources of information about permaculture theory and practice; it has been chosen over the other sources because the researcher deemed it to be structured in manner that makes navigation of the site very convenient, and also because of the succinctness of information available.

Finally, additional information will be provided in the form of examples of application of permaculture theory as seen appropriate by the researcher of this study, who obtained a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) in 2012 in the United Kingdom alongside his ‘life-partner’ and who returned to South Africa to try and put what they had seen and learned about permaculture into practice in their own lives.

[1] https://www.permaculture.org.uk/about accessed 18 January 2016

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