permaculture design

A Delightful Day of Designing with Dave Jacke

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For those that aren’t aware, Dave Jacke is a world class ecological designer, writer, and teacher. Lead author of the acclaimed two-volume Edible Forest Gardens books, I have long respected Dave’s sophisticated and comprehensive grasp of design process. While he prefers the phrase ecological design process1 over permaculture design process, he unquestionably has helped / is helping permaculture lift its game in terms of a design process that not only starts by deeply tuning into people and place, but embodies the principle of starting with patterns and ending up with details.

Permaculture Sewage Treatment – First Aid and Future Proofing for our Rivers and Seas

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If we want to create sustainable, healthy systems to support us, we cannot rely on such a fickle friend as fossil energy for electricity generation to keep our sewage treatment systems running smoothly. Quite apart from the increasing potential for power cuts in a changing world, when conventional sewage infrastructure “runs smoothly” it is still heavily reliant on the constant use of electricity to convert biomass and nutrients into somewhat less polluting effluent before disposing to our rivers and coastal waters. Clearly in a world desperately in need of solutions that work, this needs to change.

Start Small – The Story of Bec Hellouin Permaculture Farm

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You have to take the time to train yourself. You have to take the time to convince yourself or to test yourself in the profession, to dirty your hands in the soil and to really see what it’s all about. There is a lot of fantasy around these projects but there’s also a reality which is difficult. It can be absolutely incredible, but it can be a nightmare if it’s done without preparation, without a good human design, without a good design for the site.

Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design: Review

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It is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Stefan Geyer, an artist and hotelier with many talents, models his book Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design on. The book, a light, bright blue novelette, is Geyer’s meditation on a life of permaculture and meaning, and hints how to use permaculture design to shift one’s perception to both the natural world and our own human nature using the lens of Zen Buddhism techniques.

Another Way of Learning

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I’m sure there are people out there who are much cleverer than me. What I’ve spent my life trying to do is make these welcome solutions accessible to people. You see – it’s not how clever we are individually, it’s about how effective we are. And ethics sit at the heart of permaculture. Create surplus and share it. So the surpluses we can create might be food… But what if they were happiness, insight or knowledge?

Permaculture Design as a Pedagogical Resource

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Major societal change in the coming decades necessitates new pedagogical design and sustainable instructional methodology. This proposal makes the case for using a permaculture design model as a resource to create an ecologically regenerative pedagogy for a sustainable future.

Advanced Permaculture Planning and Design Process 2017: The Fourth Day

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My opinion that the design process at the core of permaculture currently lacks soundness and coherence. As a result, in spreading permaculture (which is above all else a design system), we are unintentionally spreading ideas that are unsound and incoherent. Ideas that will, if inadvertently, undermine the ability of permaculture to deliver real solutions in different domains. To deliver on its incredible promise.

Advanced Permaculture Planning and Design Process 2017: The Third Day

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It was downright thrilling to see David uncovering, literally dusting off, and sharing the initial sequence of Melliodora design diagrams. David was putting design process on the table, when in my opinion it has been far too long hidden away in the cupboard (or in some cases swept under the rug!).

Advanced Permaculture Planning and Design Process 2017: The Second Day

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I explored the parallels with reading landscape in that you are not only iterating between inspecting, aspecting, and sidespecting as you get to know your clients, but you are iterating between what you observe or feel and guesses about what this is indicating, which you then test with further questions and so on. As you immerse in the parts of the clients being shared with you, you slowly build up an increasingly complete and coherent picture of the whole. This process is integral to sound design process and has traditionally not been a strong point in permaculture.

Advanced Permaculture Planning and Design Process 2017: The First Day

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I’m grateful for how everyone rode out this session, which as you’d expect had a tentative and exploratory feel. It also broke with any expectation the course was going to be about David and I simply sharing stuff we’d already worked out in the past, and was a direct taste of actually exploring new territory together. However I knew then and know now that this session was a first step for a way of integrating design principles and design process that I feel in time will have great potential to help strengthen permaculture’s design process weak link.