Permaculture is both a set of ideas and a way of living. It focuses on why and how to set up self-sustaining systems and processes, and it applies to many facets of society from urban design to exchanging goods and services to the way people interact with animals, down to growing as much of our own food as possible. Permaculture seeks lifestyle changes that will reduce pollution and energy use, improve health, and strengthen our spiritual connection with the earth and knowledge of our place in it.

The term was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren a couple of decades ago to denote "permanent agriculture", or forest gardening. Since then permaculture's many supporters have redefined the term as "permanent culture", a concept that embraces many interlinked aspects of sustainable living.

Permaculture is informed by cutting-edge research and theory in ecology, the science of natural communities. It also seeks to recapture the earthwise intelligence of native and aboriginal cultures and other groups with proven sustainable lifestyles.

• Honor the health of the system and of all components above their productivity; favor slow changes and low levels of work and input and output over the drive to maximize production, which pushes the system out of balance.
• Maintain closed-loop cycles of all materials to keep the system in balance; what we might call waste is re-imagined as a surplus resource, to be used as an input into another process.
• Designate zones of more intense and less intense energy use to maximize efficiency and minimize wasted labor and resources.
• Build in redundancy -- each element has many functions, and each function is performed by many elements -- to ensure stability in the system.
• Do not use stores of natural capital to sustain ongoing processes, but tap them for the extra energy needed when generating a structure or system or putting a process into action.
• Use natural processes and features to guide our use of the land and to do as much as possible of the work required for production.

It will be obvious from the above list that the permaculture point of view favors wholistic, long-range thinking on par with the "seventh generation" approach of Native Americans, much different from (one might even say diametrically opposed to) the modern American lifestyle. Though confronting this enormous culture gap can be depressing, it does offer a broad scope of areas which we can work to change, and maybe within the wide range of possibilities will be one that really excites you.

Here, in no particular order, are a few places a person could start to make lifestyle changes that move toward the permaculture frame of mind: