Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As I took my first breath in this future neighborhood, the air had a fragrant quality that I didn’t recognize. I could hear a person shout something, maybe a block away. It’s much quieter than the world I left. There’s certainly a smell of home cooking in the air. And there’s a lot more plants of all sizes and description wherever I look. That’s it! The air carries a mixture of fruit scents.
What ought to grow in the Global North, where colonialism and capitalism have led to sickening—literally and figuratively—overdevelopment?
In 2010, two women, Sarah Pugh and Laura Corfield co-founded Shift Bristol, fired up by the idea that what people needed in order to make that shift – to a more sustainable, eco-friendly, viable and happy existence – was some hands-on training.
On this episode, permaculture expert and educator Andrew Millison joins us to unpack how we can better design our societal infrastructure and agriculture to be more attuned with the water, solar, and “geomorphic” conditions of our surroundings.
So don’t go by the book. Go by the garden. Learn what is there and how it fits into its community. Then fit yourself into that community.
So…imagine that somewhere, or in many places at once, a self-replicating Gaia movement were to start, whose adherents call ourselves, simply, “Gaians.”
By collaborating with our community members and fellow growers, and sharing a variety of crops throughout the landscape, the diversity of food will expand beyond what we’d be able to manage singlehandedly.
Penny Livingston-Stark is internationally recognized as a prominent permaculture teacher, designer, and speaker. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Permaculture isn’t a form of gardening – it’s a method of inquiry about relationships – that’s all it is. And it’s awesome and in that way it’s similar to traditional ecological knowledge from all over the planet and it’s a constantly shifting evolving body of knowledge too, that’s never the same in the same place twice. Love it!
Permaculture has transformative potential when practitioners move away from promoting it as a depoliticized set of ecological design practices and principles.
Starhawk is an author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, founder of Earth Activist Training, and a prominent voice in modern earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism.
She answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?
While the practices ‘sustainable farming’ promote are important, they do not encompass the deep cultural and relational changes needed to realize our collective healing.
