The Power of Permaculture Principles is both inspiring and practical, written from years of experience and testing the ideas. Full of stories and case studies, it will enable you to enrich your knowledge of permaculture and how to apply it to your own life.

What is permaculture design? How can you use it in your personal daily life, in your community or in land-based settings?

Permaculture has spread across the world since it was originated by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s as a response to the degradation of land and loss of species caused by industrial farming methods and the rising cost of fossil fuels. The problems of the world today are far more complex as technology advances at an accelerating pace, along with the ever-growing inequality caused by greed and the concentration of power. Viable solutions and emerging alternatives are commonplace but political will has been destroyed by the super-rich.

Permaculture offers principles that are part of a holistic framework and a set of thinking tools that allow us to creatively re-design our environment and our behaviour in an unravelling world, and like a living system, it has evolved and grown. We can demonstrate and develop that these alternatives work, bringing us back to a unity with nature and community.

In this collaborative book, Wilf Richards and a cohort of many of the most experienced permaculture teachers and elders from across Britain and beyond, explore Holmgren’s 12 permaculture principles, retrieve many of Mollison’s original ones, and include principles from many other worldwide permaculture designers. Together they share a history of each principle, its development since being formed and an analysis of how they are being used, understood and applied.

These principles have evolved from indigenous knowledge, observations of nature’s cycles, and the living, teaching and practice of permaculture, over the past 50 years, in many different climates and cultures. They can be applied to our personal, economic, social and political reorganisation. The ethical foundation of permaculture guides us to use these design tools in appropriate ways for the betterment of the land, our wild relatives, and human culture.

The book seeks to comprehend how indigenous knowledge systems of local communities can be effectively used in disaster management of various types. A prime example is the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, promoting indigenous environmental management knowledge and practices. Traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples includes information and insight that supplement conventional science and environmental observations, a comprehensive understanding of the environment, natural resources, culture, and human interactions with them which is not documented before. A great deal of this knowledge have been lost in translation. In this book, the authors attempt to keep a record of each and every traditional knowledge study of the indigenous communities in managing the disasters. The use of indigenous knowledge systems in disaster understanding and management is the primary focus of the chapters.   This book is organized into four major sections. The first part gives an overview and help in conceptualizing the different concepts of hazard and disaster perception and how response and adaptation are connected with it. This part also discusses the concept of the connection between hazard and sustainable development and how the understanding of risk reduction and resilience can happen with the help of indigenous knowledge, insights, and strategies. The second part of the book introduces the different approaches to disaster and risk management. It establishes how vulnerability influences the risk associated with a hazard and the responses can be both positive and negative in disaster management. The approaches of the indigenous communities in managing a disaster, their resilience, capacity building, and community-based preparedness will be the area of prime focus in this chapter. Part 3 of this book describes the concept of sustainability through indigenous knowledge and practice. The sole highlight of this chapter is the indigenous knowledge efficacies in disaster identification, risk reduction, climate risk management, and climate action. The last section of the book explores how to meet the gaps between local knowledge and policy formulation. It highlights how traditional knowledge of the indigenous communities can prove to be beneficial in developing a holistic regional-based policy framework which will be easily accepted by the target stakeholders since they will be more acquainted with the local strategies and methods. This section ends with an assessment and discussion of the gaps and future scopes in disaster risk reduction through integrating local knowledge and modern technologies.

The most pressing problems facing humanity today - over-population, energy shortages, climate change, soil erosion, species extinctions, the risk of epidemic disease, the threat of warfare that could destroy all the hard-won gains of civilization, and even the recent fibrillations of the stock market - are all ecological or have a large ecological component. in this volume philosophers turn their attention to understanding the science of ecology and its huge implications for the human project.
To get the application of ecology to policy or other practical concerns right, humanity needs a clear and disinterested philosophical understanding of ecology which can help identify the practical lessons of science. Conversely, the urgent practical demands humanity faces today cannot help but direct scientific and philosophical investigation toward the basis of those ecological challenges that threaten human survival. This book will help to fuel the timely renaissance of interest in philosophy of ecology that is now occurring in the philosophical profession.
Provides a bridge between philosophy and current scientific findingsCovers theory and applicationsEncourages multi-disciplinary dialogue"