
Essential reading for permaculture designers and accessible to a wide range of critical thinkers. This revised edition is more accessible than the original, with redrawn graphics, corrected and amended text, new references and a newly designed layout that invites the reader into the world of whole systems thinking that is permaculture. When it was originally published in 2002, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability explained the systems of permaculture in 12 design principles that together with three central ethics provided a foundation for a diversity of ecological solutions that characterise permaculture design, teaching, development and activism. Fifteen years on the book has been translated into nine languages and has proved to be the seminal text for extending permaculture beyond its agrarian roots. Principles and Pathways draws together and integrates 25 years of thinking and teaching to show a whole new way of understanding and action behind a simple set of design principles. Relevant to every aspect of how we reorganise our lives, communities and landscapes to creatively adapt to ecological realities which shape human destiny. Essential reading for permaculture designers and accessible to a wide range of critical thinkers. For students and teachers of permaculture this book provides something more fundamental and distilled than Mollison's encyclopedic Designers Manual.
Here's some books that I read & recommend re: applied systems thinking & ecosystems.
http://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-Principles-Pathways-beyon...
http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Forest-Gardens-2-set/dp/1890132...
http://www.amazon.com/One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction-Natu...
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/03...
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revi...
http://www.newsociety.com/Books/D/Decline-and-Fall
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael-Gra...
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Scratch-Making-Relationship-Rules/...
The developing of arid lands into something productive (without requiring massive or on-going inputs of energy, nutrients, water, etc) is a common theme among a lot of the big names in Permaculture - you could review some of Geoff Lawton's publications on the work he's been doing in Jordan[2]
FWIW, my experience trying to grow productive trees in areas of Australia with (annual) 3 metre evaporation rates and average 600mm rainfall (with some multi-year droughts) and frequent 45C weeks through the summer period -- the single biggest requirement for success is native animal exclusion while trying to get pioneer trees established.
[1] https://holmgren.com.au/product/treeless-plains/?v=3a1ed7090...
[2] http://permaculturenews.org/2013/11/19/rough-ready-real-nove...
