"Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience. The term was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to modern industrialized methods, instead adopting a more traditional or "natural" approach to agriculture."
https://search.worldcat.org/title/24484204 4th edition of the Introduction to Permaculture should be available for borrowing from a nearby library
The design of the food forest, or community food garden, has more to do with the design of a community rather than what is done in soil. Many have studied permaculture for all the wrong reasons. One naive reason is to have such a garden for yourself or for your immediate family, but go on about life as nothing changes. A more severe wrong reason to study permaculture is as an alternative land exploitation method, to make land profitable, a way to extract wealth from the land and trade it for cash. Exporting nutrients from a forest and out to the ocean and landfills is not sustainable. How can you not get this through some narrow heads?
If permaculture should have something to teach is that you (the community) should be part of the ecosystem you assist nature in creating. You help speed up reforestation and be part of the forest, not treat it as an outsider. Meaning what you get for necessities is out of the forest and what you do stays in the forest. Life of the community is part of the overall life of the forest, and in this the forest is generous and provides plenty, protects the most, and is sustainable as long as you treat it that way. Unfortunately very few have realized that is what permaculture is about, instead they rush into digging, planting, rerouting water, making ponds, eat fast food, use industrial cleaners, and flush them down the toiler and into the oceans. Then they make blogs and videos of their garden creativity.
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