Exploring the Permaculture Principles. Wilf Richards with Morag Gamble

Sense-Making in a Changing World

Sense-Making in a Changing World
Exploring the Permaculture Principles. Wilf Richards with Morag Gamble
Apr 08, 2026
Morag Gamble: Permaculture Education Institute

What is permaculture design and how can you use it in your daily life?

The permaculture design principles are at the heart of the answer to these questions, to understanding what permaculture is about, and how you can apply it to all kinds of contexts. 

My guest in this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, Wilf Richards, has spent the last three and a half years collaborating with 40 permaculture educators from across Britain and beyond to write The Power of Permaculture Principles - an honest and generous exploration of the permaculture principles. Not a revision. Not a simplification. An invitation to think more deeply about the tools we already hold.

This book shares a history of each principle, its development since being formed and an analysis of how they are being used, understood and applied.

In our conversation we explore where the principles actually came from, how the language around them has evolved (and where it still needs to), what's missing (resilience, anyone?), why the principles might best be understood as a living system — a tree still growing, still branching — and how they can help all of us, wherever we are, find our way back into right relationship with the rest of nature.


Wilf is a permaculture designer and teacher based near Durham in the UK, co-managing a cooperative smallholding since 2001, and a Senior Tutor in the British permaculture diploma system. He came to permaculture through the road protest movement of the mid-1990s — that classic arc from anger at destruction to the desire to build something better — and has been living it on the land and in the community ever since.

The Book: https://www.permanentpublications.co.uk/port/the-power-of-permaculture-principles/

Wilf's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/wilf.richards

Wilf's email: wilf.abundantearth@gmail.com

Wilf's Substack: https://wilfrichards1.substack.com/

I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

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_____

MORAG GAMBLE

Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

I am a possibilitarian and I believe HumanKINDness.

In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care. 

This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Gubbi Gubbi country.

If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.

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