About Ansa

Ansa Permaculture Design is a permaculture teaching and design service that matches your needs with the unique gifts and micro-climates of your site to create a productive, harmonious environment. Good permaculture design can improve your sustainability in food production, shelter, water and energy while lowering waste, work & maintenance.

Since I was a teenager I dreamed of combining my wide range of interests including design, nature, gardening, food growing, sustainability, architecture, engineering and art into an holistic design service. In 2016 I founded Ansa Permaculture Design and realised this dream. I write more about my life and interests here: about Paul Lynch.

Ansa Permaculture Design is Based in County Cork, Ireland in the Muskerry Gaelacht near my home town of Macroom. Read more about the permaculture demonstration site here: https://permaculturedesign.ie/origins-history/

Permaculture Symbolism

Ansa is Irish for dear/beloved/favorite and is also the name of an Indian solar-deity. Across cultures sun-gods bless by bringing order from chaos. The theme of intelligent organised solar design is central to permaculture and is a good symbol of what this design service is all about.

The Ansa logo features a tree drawn to represent both art and technology. When this is “blessed” by Ansa as sun-god, it represents the reunification of art, technology and belief or philosophy. Dividing knowledge into categories is useful, but the process of differentiation that has been in progress since the times of ancient Greece has been so successful that we have experts in specialties but less and less ability to take a broader view of the whole. Permaculture is a multidisciplinary design process with the scope and power to intelligently integrate seemingly disparate subjects of sustainability.

Permaculture Philosophy

As it stands, science and technology are great servants but very poor masters. Science can tell us how we are destroying the environment but it doesn’t have an opinion on whether this is a good or bad thing – it’s just true. We need philosophy and beliefs to direct science to useful and moral purposes.

Our current economic system is based on continuous endless growth. We need to move away from this model before the earth is entirely consumed towards goals of happiness, the restoration of nature and inner growth. We can use science and technology in strategies towards these aims, rather than as ends in themselves.

The ethics of permaculture mirror the tenets of social, environmental and economic sustainability founded at the Rio earth summit in 1992.

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create.

Masanobu Fukuoka

Here is a list of influential books guiding and confirming my philosophy: https://permaculturedesign.ie/inspiration-and-influences/