The destruction of most of the world's ecosystems is the result of inappropriate and short-term extractive use of natural resources, a pattern at odds with the regenerative cycles of nature.

For example, clear cut logging, slash and burn agriculture, intensive monoculture cropping, and cattle ranching in the tropics is rapidly destroying forests, eroding soils, and killing downstream ecosystems like coral reefs - a harsh contrast to the balanced cycles of nature developed over millennia. In order to reverse the destruction of ecosystems, the root cause of the problem - inappropriate land and resource use - must be addressed.

Permaculture is a philosophy of land use and community planning based upon the natural patterns of energy and material flows within nature. It is one of the most holistic, integrated systems analysis and design methodologies found in the world. Permaculture is not limited to a specific method of production, but is a land use planning philosophy. Its principles may be adapted worldwide to farms, homes, neighborhoods, and cities. It is site specific and therefore adaptable to local climates, cultures, and techniques of production.

At the core of permaculture is the realization that all systems are organized around energy flows. Permaculture involves analyzing existing energy flows through a system, and then positioning and interconnecting all the elements in the system (whether existing or desired) in beneficial relationship to each other and to those energy flows. Each element in the system has multiple functions and each function supports multiple elements.

A well designed permaculture system will, like a natural ecosystem, become increasingly diverse, highly efficient, non-polluting, and self-sustaining. The capacity of permaculture to change land use patterns and environmental health conditions is astounding when one sees a site before and after the application of permaculture principles.

Common technologies that are interwoven in a permaculture system include:

• Agroforestry, edible landscaping, greenhouses, and perennial and tree cropping systems.
• Standard organic farming and gardening techniques utilizing crop rotations, cover crops, green manures, composts, and mulches.
• Integrated farming systems such as pond-dike aquaculture, aquaponics, intercropping, companion planting and polyculture, trellising, and worm composting.
• Water collection and management systems like greywater reuse, rain & runoff catchment, swaling, constructed wetlands, and fungal systems for wastewater treatment.
• Passive solar heating, and solar and wind power, and solar water pasteurizers.
• Straw bale construction and other energy efficient housing.
• Conservation of natural habitats and integrating them into regional conservation strategies.

Below is a before and after photo showing the first stages of a permaculture site in Peru from where ELF sources pecans, lucuma, and dozens of other crops. The site includes hundreds of species purposefully interwoven into a web of life.

Permaculture systems utilize simple technologies to harness solar power, local natural resources, and the inherent natural power of ecosystem functions. The methodology is built upon the concept of applying minimum energetic input to generate maximum positive energetic output, largely by harnessing the "free" assets of the natural environment like the sun, wind, rainfall, gravitational pull, seeds, nitrogen fixation, decomposition, wetland filtration, methanogenesis, microclimates, medicinal plants, and many others.

Essential Living Foods believes that the application of permaculture principles and technology has a great capacity to reduce growing pressures on natural resources and restore degraded landscapes while and improving nutrition and human health conditions. Sharing the benefits, lessons, and techniques of permaculture and helping to increase the growing body of permaculture activists and example projects around the world is a mission that will certainly yield positive benefits for the planet and all that inhabit it.

The positive human benefits for communities are numerous, and with a worldwide increase in permaculture education and seed funding for project development, many of our planets most pressing social problems like starvation, nutritional deficiencies, and water born diseases could be solved. Benefits of well-developed permaculture projects include:

• Conserving and building healthy soils, the basis of food systems.
• Diversifying and greatly increasing local food production (typically from a few sources to dozens, even hundreds), which increases the nutritional quality and pleasure of local diets and buffers against market fluctuations in food prices.
• Eliminating use of toxic chemicals that cause a variety of health problems from immediate toxic poisonings to longer-term chronic problems like cancer, birth defects and the destruction of healthy natural food source (i.e. toxic fish).
• Maximizing efficient beneficial use of local water sources, the critical lifeblood for people.
• Practically eliminating pollution of water by human wastes, thereby dramatically reducing water born diseases.
• Creating clean drinking water sources, further reducing disease.
• Increasing tree crops, which retain soils, slow water runoff, increase groundwater storage, and provide cooling shade.
• Increasing the beauty of the community though the creation of diverse life forms - flowers, insects, birds, frogs, and hundreds of others that create a pleasant and inspiring atmosphere for people, especially children.
• Harnessing natural renewable energies to create comfortable home living conditions.

At the permaculture site pictures above, products are fertilized organically and natural pest control is performed using beneficial insects, homeopathogenic fungi, pheromones, and macerates with native biocidal plants. Pictured below is a phermone trap for insects made from a recycled water bottle.

The direct benefits to people are met equally by benefits to the environment like increases in area wildlife, reduction of toxic chemicals from entering local food chains, decreases in erosion and sedimentation of downstream habitats, increases in water availability for wildlife, and many more.

The limitation of the power of permaculture is the lack of knowledge about it.

Essential Living Foods works to empower people with permaculture knowledge and provide consumers an opportunity to purchase premium quality products that are benefiting people and the environment.

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