Earth Restorer's Guide to Permaculture: Revised and Updated Third Edition

With decades of hands-on teaching experience in a wide range of settings and circumstances, Rosemary Morrow brings a lifetime of global knowledge to this completely revised and updated edition of her classic text, Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture.

This new edition also features a foreword by Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and author Dr Vandana Shiva. “In this book, Rosemary Morrow shows how regenerating biodiversity is regenerating resilience,” says Dr Shiva.

From its origins in Australia, to now being a global movement, permaculture has provided an ethical and environmental design framework for personal and household self-reliance, rural resettlement and community development. Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture covers practical permaculture essentials such as soils, water, microclimates, trees, seeds, design, pattern literacy, pests and weeds. It has new chapters on marine permaculture, crowded margins (including refugee camps), emerging economic models, livelihoods, and patterns in nature and their design applications. The book shows us that by working in our local patch we can help restore our global ecosystems.

In addition to homeowners, it is especially useful for planners and community designers and is a valuable primary text for teachers of Permaculture Design Courses.

2021 marked the start of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration; a critical period for preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of ecosystems around the world. In recognition, Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture equips readers with the tools, and 40-years of evidence-based permaculture practice, to lead the movement by empowering us to launch a new restorative relationship with all life.

Born in Perth, Australia, Rosemary Morrow was claimed early by the Earth; plants, animals, stones, weather. Some years in the Kimberleys as a young girl confirmed it. She trained in agriculture science with which she was very disappointed, then moved to France where she lived in the L’Arche community. Later at Jordans Village in England she realised she would become a Quaker. Back in Australia in the 1980s Rowe’s Permaculture Design Course provided the basis for a concern for Earth restoration. She considers permaculture to be ‘sacred knowledge’ to be carried and shared with others. Since then, when asked, she has travelled to teach the PDC to others who, due to circumstances, could not access it any other way. This took her to immediate post-war Vietnam as well as Cambodia, Uganda, Ethiopia and other countries. Rowe’s present concern is to make teaching sustainable and encourage others to succeed her as teachers.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books, among them Oneness vs. the 1%; Making Peace with the Earth; Soil Not Oil; Globalization’s New Wars; Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard; and Who Really Feeds the World?

Shiva is the recipient of over twenty international awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (1993); the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (1998); the Horizon 3000 Award (Austria, 2001); the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Grant for Peace (2008); the Save the World Award (2009); the Sydney Peace Prize (2010); the Calgary Peace Prize (2011); and the Thomas Merton Award (2011). She was the Fukuoka Grand Prize Laureate in 2012.