PERMACULTUREWEST’S treasurer and membership coordinator Peter Austin says he wants to see the association expand its role in Western Australia.

As a long-serving member, Mr Austin wants to educate people about the fallacies surrounding permaculture.

“Though gardening is part of permaculture, it’s only one aspect of it. It provides a framework for people to think differently about how they live,” he said.

“You can apply permaculture thinking in building design and in how you design transport networks.

“So when you’re looking at solving a problem, you are bringing all of those principles into helping form how you arrive at a solution,” he said.

Since his membership with the association in 1988, Mr Austin said PermacultureWest was at its height in the early 1990s with more than 1200 members.

“We brought Bill Mollison over here, we booked out lecture halls at ECU and had public talks, and then we got invited to host the International Permaculture Conference which we did in 1996,” he said.

“That was held out in the Swan Valley.”

Mr Austin said the spread of the internet forced the organisation to discontinue its newsletter and monthly meetings which led to the dwindling of membership.

But he said the work carried out by PermacultureWest was still necessary.

When asked about the state of planning in WA and if permaculture principles had been adequately applied Mr Austin said that was easy one to answer in the negative.

“When you’ve got these houses that are built almost out to the boundary, on tiny blocks, there’s not a tree within cooee,’’ he said.

“That’s poor design.

“That’s designed to get the maximum number of houses into the smallest area, to return the largest profit to the developer.”

Mr Austin said PermacultureWest had two main objectives: to reinvigorate local groups and to engage educators so their students could be involved with the association.

“To provide a place where they can interact with each other and ask for help,” he said.