Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I was challenged by a colleague about wearing a pocket knife, which he pointed out was illegal (without a genuine reason). This was news to me and intensified my feelings of alienation as a country person visiting the centre of a large city. What was the world coming to? But it also stimulated thought about what my genuine reasons for carrying a pocket knife in public might be and how that question was intimately connected to permaculture.
Not many truly American stories begin in a place like Kosodo village.
I have come to question some of the assumptions that underpin mainstream education, and to consider what can be done…to provide an education that is appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century.
What was it that made Transition so comprehensible, exciting, and respectable, while permaculture seemed diffuse, slow-growing, and smelling a bit of patchouli oil?
In Extraenvironmentalist #65 we speak with John D. Liu about his experience documenting the restoration of China’s Loess Plateau from desert into functional ecosystem.
If we had 10% of the population engaged in agriculture rather than the current 1%, we could easily feed the country without petrochemicals or pesticides.
Toby Hemenway, host of the video Redesigning Civilization — with Permaculture, defines permaculture as a branch of ecological design that employs natural ecosystems as a model.
Permaculture is introduced in Hangzhou, China providing an alternative to Chinese Industrial Agriculture.
"It’s possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems with the use of permaculture design principles and techniques."
The fruits of our labor are starting to show themselves. Everywhere in the garden that I look, I am seeing fruits and vegetables that are ready to eat, or soon will be.
When I first encountered permaculture, I assumed it had some new principles to suggest, was eager to test them, discard the lemons, and move on. I was wrong.
“Imagine inheriting a food forest,” farmer and author Ben Falk suggests in The Resilient Farm and Homestead: an Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach.
