Urban Permaculture: A Practical Handbook for Sustainable Living

Urban Permaculture: A Practical Handbook for Sustainable Living is a small book published in the UK in 1993 as an easy introduction to many of the ideas involved in permaculture. It's a quick read, thanks to the short chapters, averaging 2-3 pages, and lavish visual aids, averaging every other page. The main sections of the book are introduction and background concepts, "putting our houses in order," "control of your food," "using what you've got,"creating your own food supply," "animals," epilogue, and 3 appendices listing various resources.

Sustainability is a baseline concept, which tends to mean focus on local economy, reduce/reuse/recycle, capturing energy and making waste another productive resource on-site, buying show more well-constructed, durable goods that can be repaired, becoming as self-reliant as possible. Very much a back-to-the-land anticapitalist ethos. Some of the information feels very dated, not surprising for a 20-year-old book. And it covers the basics in a lot of directions, including such things as basic stain removal from clothes, and money circulation in local businesses vs large corporations.

I wouldn't call this a handbook though, as it doesn't provide detailed instructions, and while the many drawings show various examples of such things as solar water heating systems, rainwater collection systems, greywater circulation systems, pit toilets, garden layouts, chicken runs, etc. they are not accompanied by any explanations beyond brief text descriptions of the graphic elements in the illustrations, which I tend to find abstruse, since I have no background in plumbing, etc. I couldn't take most of these drawings and turn them into reality (assuming I had the locale and means, in the first place) without accessing a lot more information and instruction somewhere else. And even though I am a homeowner with a large yard, a lot of the examples provided simply wouldn't work in my ranch house constrained by a great many municipal ordinances. How much less so for the many urban dwellers who live in apartments or condos.

And frankly, given the increasingly personhood status of companion animals in urban lives, I think plenty of people would be horrified at the thought of raising and eating guinea pigs, rabbits, etc. However, urban beekeeping and chickens have really taken off in the last 20 years, to the point that our local chicken ordinance was recently revised to accommodate rental tenants who want to keep chickens. Again, the book extols the virtues of these practices, but there's little mention of the serious investment in time and money and daily responsibility to incorporate any of these practices, especially those involving animals including bees, so novices seeking to transform their lifestyles cannot be fully informed based on this book alone. Also, the book doesn't cover a full spectrum of possibilities, just a limited sampling. For example, solar panels/water heating are the only source of alternative energy collection mentioned. No mention of wind power, geothermal, biothermal (think methane), etc. I mean, if you're going to profile options beyond the reach of most readers, you might as well give them a sense of the range of possibilities that can't be achieved. And in the sections on gardening and animal husbandry, no mention of heirloom and heritage varieties and the obligatory diatribe against agribusinesses with GMO and hybridized crops that keep consumers dependent annually on their products.

To sum up, a quick read, with multitudinous drawings, many different concepts to consider, somewhat dated, and not necessarily best geared toward an urban audience, but some of it certainly could be adopted. And there's enough different material covered that almost anyone could take away something to try (with consultation of additional resources), despite the limitations of the book. It'll either whet the appetite to seek out books with more comprehensive discussions of the underlying permaculture concepts and/or applications or generate disgust at the pie-in-the-sky impractical idealism in the hardened cynic resigned to the status quo. Permaculture was coined in Australia in the 1970s, and it has continued to develop and expand over the decades, becoming more widely known and seeping into mainstream consciousness. Perhaps someday it will become as ubiquitous as reusable shopping bags. show less