Permaculture integrates people into Nature's design.

Permaculture is the practice of designing sustainable human habitats by following nature's patterns.

Origins
In the mid 1970s, two Australian ecologists, Dr. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, started to develop ideas that they hoped could be used to create stable agricultural systems. This was in response to the rapidly growing use of destructive post-war industrial agricultural methods that were poisoning the land and water, reducing biodiversity, and removing billions of tons of soil from previously fertile landscapes. A design approach called 'permaculture' was the result and was first made public with the publication of Permaculture One in 1978.

What is permaculture?
The original meaning of the term permaculture was permanent agriculture, i.e., agriculture that is able to be sustained in a place indefinitely. The meaning has since been broadened to permanent culture, thus including the social aspects of sustainability.

There are four main ingredients to permaculture:
1. Shared ethics of "earth care", "people care", and "fair shares" (which is shorthand for limits to populations and consumption, and the fair distribution of resources to further the work of earth care and people care). Permaculture also stresses the importance of taking personal responsibility for one's actions.
2. Ecological principles derived by the observation of natural systems by ecologists such as Birch and Odum, as well as from successful pre-technological societies.
3. Design tools and processes that allow an individual or group to assemble conceptual, material, and strategic components into a "pattern" or "plan of action" that can be implemented and maintained with minimal resources.
4. A plan for surviving the energy descent as oil and gas production peak and begin to decline over the next decade. David Holmgren is increasingly presenting permaculture as the only viable tool for retrofitting the suburbs to survive peak oil in a lifestyle that emphasises the core values above; a wholistic care for local people and ecologies in a local energy based economy.