BILL MOLLISON’S PERMACULTURE PRINCIPLES

The permaculture concept was created by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren at the University of Tasmania in the 1970s. David was Bill’s student and together they published the groundbreaking Permaculture One, (Corgi, 1978) which offered the first description of what permaculture was.

After this book was published, David and Bill went their separate ways. Bill travelled the world, spreading the word of permaculture. David set about gaining skills and putting what he had come up with into practice.

Both David and Bill have come up with their own sets of principles. In Pip, we have mostly focused on David’s 12 permaculture principles. In this article, however we would like to share Bill’s with you, focusing on 14 of the principles that feature in his book Introduction to Permaculture created with Reny Mia Slay (Tagari Publications, 1991).

PRINCIPLES OF ATTITUDE

1. The problem is the solution

A well-known quote of Bill Mollison’s was, ‘You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency’. If you have an abundance of pests, turn the problem into a solution and use them