Permaculture: regenerative - not merely sustainable

摘要

September 2015 saw the International Permaculture Conference1, held in London, followed by the Convergence2，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 emphasised3 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, permaculture4 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.