The widespread practice of modern industrial farming has led to the homogenization or simplification (Krebs and Bach, 2018) of landscapes. According to a study by Lanz et. al entitled “The Expansion of Modern Agriculture and Global Biodiversity Decline: An Integrated Assessment” (2018), this translates to the loss of global biodiversity and subsequent habitat loss. According to a study by Firbank, et al., “Assessing the impacts of agricultural intensification on biodiversity: a British perspective” (2007), biodiversity loss also affects the functioning of ecosystems services like pest control in the form of natural predator-prey relationships, pollination as a result of fauna-flora interactions, and nutrient cycling which contributes to the health and well-being of people in the long term as described by Tscharntke et al (2005) in “Landscape perspectives on agricultural intensification and biodiversity—Ecosystem service management.” However, with the use of permaculture as a framework, agricultural landscapes can become functionally complex in terms of regulatory, habitat, production, and information functions (de Groot et al (2002), simply because with such a framework, a set of principles is made available to create and maintain resilient agroecological systems according to a research by Krebs and Bach (2018) justifying the scientific foundations of permaculture in “Permaculture—Scientific Evidence of Principles for the Agroecological Design of Farming Systems.”
In actual practice all over the world, many studies provide evidence that farming systems that were designed using permaculture have the following characteristics: a) grow organic crops and livestock (Bethany, 2017) ; b) require less inputs (resources are cycled in a closed system); c) establish dense food forests (Roberts, 2017); d) have a high biodiversity (Roberts, 2017); e) apply popular management strategies such as intercropping (Engels, 2016); f) invest in perennial trees (Roberts, 2017); g) use appropriate technology (Corker and Barker, 2012); and h) maximize precipitation using rainwater harvesting (Roberts, 2017). Recent studies have also shown that the application of permaculture is already broadening its scope to include a) rural development (Rivett et al, 2018); b) climate change and social unrest (Karim, 2018); c) marine permaculture array technology (von Herzen, et al, 2017); d) the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals (Isaac, 2016), and over-all social systems in general (Krebs and Bach, 2018).
Permaculture can also be viewed as a type of “new ecology” which focuses on meaningful interventions according to Hobbs et al. in “Intervention Ecology: Applying Ecology Science in the Twenty-First Century” (2011). Interventions are not limited to agriculture but also extend to all social structures and institutions. A study in Japan by Chakroun (2019) points out that permaculture is unique in such a way that it merges internationally-shared sustainable agriculture goals with the socio-cultural components of a sustainable lifestyle. Through the years, permaculture has been imagined in different ways but with a shared emphasis on design and ecology.
Thus, permaculture was defined in published work as a systems design approach directly working with nature (McManus, 2010); a design system for sustainable human habitats, rooted in ethics of environmentalism, humanism and equity (Henfrey, 2017); a design system guided by the principles of nature (Peeters, 2011); a holistic system of design that promotes the harmonious relationship between humans and nature (Caraway, 2018); and an agro-ecological systematic design tradition for maximizing the sustained flourishing of resource renewing cycles (Cassel, 2016).
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