The Rocket Powered Oven: How to Build Your Own Super-Efficient Cooker

Reading this book, although in the beginning a bit of a dense and sluggish read, was a major pivotal moment for me. Holmgren presents a visionary perspective and context of humanity's position, provides profound and thought provoking discourse on the underlying philosophies and patterns of permaculture design, and projects an image of an inspiring future and a path to get there with confidence. Once I got to the second half of the book, the pace picked up and I felt positively engaged right through to the end. It has supplied me with valuable tools and concepts which I use and refer to almost daily, as I am confronted by the bull-headed, sometimes irrational, sometimes blatantly parasitic structures humanity has surrounded itself with. But Homgren's greatest gift to me, from the end of the book, was his argument for not needing to denigrate our forebears' roles in the situation we find ourselves in today; especially as permaculture design provides us with some of the key tools of thought that will empower us in todays times of monstrous change. This really helped me to release any stress I was creating around blame, freeing up that mental space to be employed in creative problem solving.

I read this book and could see how this thinking about use and re-use, planning and observing will help not just my garden but my life. Really useful examples of each principle and in depth discussion of what they mean, how they can be applied in lots of cases.

That the world we now live in is unsustainable goes without saying. Our skyrocketing population puts enormous pressure on the productive and absorptive capacities of the land, outstripping the natural carrying capacity of the planet by some twenty percent (see Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel). In effect, we are stealing away the life of the planet and the life of future generations. As ever more fisheries collapse, forests shrink, rangelands deteriorate, soils erode, species vanish, temperatures rise, rivers run dry, water tables fall, ozone depletion expands and polar ice caps melt across the globe, the single most important question humanity has faced resonates ever louder: How can we live sustainably? Amid the cacophony of scholarly and political debate surrounding this issue, the hushed emergence of permaculture has by and large gone unnoticed. Defined as the use of systems thinking and design principles to consciously design "landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs," the permaculture concept is nothing less than the science of sustainability. And since the joint publication of Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (now out of print) by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-seventies, permaculture has become a veritable movement - a legitimate answer to the environmental and agricultural crises which plague humanity. Unfortunately, for the past twenty-five years, those who wished to learn more about permaculture were limited to joining expensive seminars and workshops, thereby ensuring marginal public exposure. All of this has changed, though, with the publication of this book. Holmgren provides us with a no-nonsense guide to permaculture, accessible to laypersons and scholars alike. If you are interested in moving away from consumer dependency and becoming a responsible productive person, this book is for you. The skills and ideas imparted here are not only necessary for those who seek to create a healthful, sustainable way of life, they are empowering. In my opinion, permaculture is the best tool we have with which to begin creating a viable, perhaps more-than-merely-sustainable future. To get an idea of what permaculture actually looks like on the ground, check out Ecovillage Living, by Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson, and visit the Crystal Waters Permaculture Village website. A remarkable resource. j.w.k.

This book has rekindled my interest in Permaculture.The author, David Holmgren, is the co-creator, with Bill Mollison of theterm "permaculture", and the co-author of the original permaculturebook, _Permaculture One_. Now, some 25 years after that seminalbook, Holmgren has written a timely and comprehensive synthesis thatbrings permaculture principles together in an exiting new way.The book highlights our place at a unique moment in history: at the peakof the global oil production curve; at the beginning of the end of cheapfossil energy. This is, for me, the book's most compelling motif: itpositions permaculture as a strategy for a future of inevitable "energydescent". Although Holmgren hints that this energy descent may take anynumber of horrific pathways, he appears to have chosen the term"descent" as a hopeful alternative to collapse, crash, or dieoff.Holmgren insightfully points out that is not just our reserves of fossilfuel that we've been burning through. Since the Reagan/Thatcher years,he claims, global capitalism has been on a frenzy of job cutting and"just-in-time" inventory reduction. This amounts to a destruction ofthe embedded intelligence and a severe draw-down of the capital stocksof our institutions: a severe loss of embedded energy. Furthermore, heworries that due to privatization and short-term bottom-line thinking,maintenance on our built-environment and physical infrastructure has beenneglected: another huge loss of embedded energy.On a hopeful note, Holmgren compares this situation to a forest fire: asthe conflagration of global capitalism burns through its huge pulse ofembedded energy, the time will be ripe for pioneers to take root andproduce a flush of new growth. It is a moment of high potential forsystemic change, and Holmgren's book hopes to provide "Principles andPathways" to seed and guide that change.The subtitle of this book includes the phrase "Beyond Sustainability".It is a well-established insight of permaculture that sustainability isnot enough: in a world that is already degraded, we need to achieve anexcess yield beyond sustainability that we can feed back into the greatwork of restoration. Holmgren's contribution to this area is to pointout is that it is hard to even give meaning to the term "sustainability"while we are in the midst of a dramatic energy descent with constantlydeclining energy availability. We must, of course, aim for a softlanding and a smooth transition to a sustainable future but ourimmediate problem is to safely negotiate the descent itself.All this is in addition, of course, to Holmgren's wise and fresh take on the more traditionalsubject matter of permaculture design. This book is a must-read, equalin stature to Mollison's _Permaculture: a Practical Guide for aSustainable Future_.