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Permanent Culture 3.0 — a design framework grown from nature.

Every question on this site — transit, homelessness, housing, crime, belonging — is really the same question asked in a different room: how do you build something that lasts, without it turning rigid, extractive, or brittle? Permanent Culture 3.0 is a free, complete answer to that question, worked out over years of hands-on design practice and then stress-tested against real history before anyone was asked to trust it.

The question it starts from

How do we learn from nature and everything humanity has studied to build a stable design framework for humanity to grow and evolve within?

The framework's own one-breath answer: learn nature's design grammar, hold four ethics fixed, and grow everything else. Permaculture began in the 1970s as permanent agriculture — and its founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, said from early on that it implied permanent culture, since no culture survives without a sustainable agriculture underneath it. Permanent Culture 3.0 takes that claim at its widest: the same design discipline nature uses to build things that last — forests, watersheds, immune systems — generalized and named plainly enough to apply to a garden, a team, a technology, an economy, or a city, and tested rather than just asserted.

What's inside

One governing question, three axes of observation, four ethics that never change, eight lenses read off nature's own layers (from thermodynamics to culture), six movements, and thirty-six principles — plus a design cycle for using them and an honest evidence program that scores the framework against real historical cases rather than taking its word for it.

Four ethics — the part that never changes:

Six movements, thirty-six principles — in their shortest form

Thirty-six principles sounds like a lot to hold. The framework itself says: don't memorize them, remember six movements instead, the way you remember seasons — see, ground, shape, connect, steer, renew. Every principle lives inside one of them. What follows is each principle's own short name; the full book behind each one is one download away.

SEE — before you change anything, look

GROUND — build on what actually feeds you

SHAPE — make the first move small and safe

CONNECT — place things so they feed each other

STEER — correct course as you go

RENEW — leave it more alive than you found it

Read the whole thing

The short list above is a door, not the framework. The full book carries every principle's reasoning across eight domains (land, community, the inner life, technology, information, economics, communication, and organizations), its sources, its glossary, and its evidence program — including the historical case studies run against it and the places it strained or was amended because of what they found.

📄 Download the full book (PDF) — Permanent Culture 3.0

Free, forever

This framework is offered as a commons, in keeping with its own fair-share ethic. No paywall, no login, no signup, nothing to join. You're free to read it, share it, and build on it for any purpose — including adapting it for your own project — under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: give credit, share your own changes under the same terms, and it's yours to use. It was built to be planted in other soil, not kept.

Version 1.1 (release candidate). This is a living framework, not a finished monument: it carries its own open questions, and it's built to be amended as it meets more evidence and more practice. Published on this site 2026.

Something to add or correct?

The framework's own truth-care ethic asks for this: if you find a claim that doesn't hold up, a case history it gets wrong, or a place it strains against your own experience, say so. You don't need credentials or a polished argument — a sentence is enough to start.