Permaculture is about taking personal responsibility for solving our particular problems, not looking to an expert for a generic answer.

Permaculture is a design technique, not a dogma! There is no repository of “Correct Answers” into which one can dip to find a ready made solution to a problem. There no “right answers” to any particular problem. This may at first sound strange, even disappointing, but a little explanation will show it to be one of the great strengths of Permaculture.

What we do have are a set of design tools which allow us to observe, analyse and understand the individual components and interrelationships which make up a landscape (I mean both the animate and inanimate aspects when I say landscape). By using these tools we can fit our human centred desires (e.g. food production, energy requirements, aesthetic needs) into the landscape with minimum disruption. Another useful outcome of minimising disruption of natural systems is that we minimise the effort required to maintain the outputs.

(Extract from R. J. Bambrey”s article; “Permaculture” What”s That?; Country Smallholding Magazine April 2006)