I had not heard about permaculture before reading/viewing this, but the principles are somewhat familiar. Be sure to watch the video, it's quite impressive what can be done in an extremely dry piece of desert.

very interesting indeed! almost unbelievable this has been thought of in the late 70ties, and is still only used in some smaller projects/testing projects...

the video reminds me a bit about dune: there the "vrijmans", a desert people, have a plan to gather water and fertilize the desert... this plan succeeds, but then they find out that changing the dessert means changing the people who lived there  as well ( so changing themselves), and many people discover that changing the people is not the easiest part...

 but i'm digressing