Some of permaculture's key guidelines for designing a garden (or a lifestyle) include:

* Honor the health of the system and of all components above their productivity; favor slow changes and low levels of work and input and output over the drive to maximize production, which pushes the system out of balance.
* Maintain closed-loop cycles of all materials to keep the system in balance; what we might call waste is re-imagined as a surplus resource, to be used as an input into another process.
* Designate zones of more intense and less intense energy use to maximize efficiency and minimize wasted labor and resources.
* Build in redundancy -- each element has many functions, and each function is performed by many elements -- to ensure stability in the system.
* Do not use stores of natural capital to sustain ongoing processes, but tap them for the extra energy needed when generating a structure or system or putting a process into action.
* Use natural proces

I did a course in Permaculture a few years back, the political component of the course wasn't really my bag, but the permaculture instructors were great, I really enjoyed it.

www.earthactivisttraining.org