Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My hypothesis is the following – permaculture as a third wave green movement, with its strong emphasis on a philosophical lifestyle and holistic paradigm, lacks a strong political approach, which eventually will forbid the movement to go from a middle-class lifestyle to a more general model of society.
This lively reference book offers great insights and practical advice for those striving to embrace sustainable, nature-based ways of living—and to liberate themselves from the pernicious, ailing technosphere that dictates life for most people in the industrial world.
As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability.
I’d like to share with you my three favourite tools to use in the garden. These tools are used the most often and get the most work done in the shortest time. Generally I prefer hand tools to powered ones because they’re quiet, they don’t emit noxious fumes, and I can work up a sweat.
Though the high-level side-by-side comparisons I shared in the last post have their place, it would feel inappropriate to reduce each of the design process treatments we looked at in the last post to only one column in a table.
In this second Making Permaculture Stronger inquiry, I consider the relationship between designing and implementing within current understandings of permaculture design process.
Recently I had a chance to chat with Diego Footer from Creative Destruction, formally known as Permaculture Voices, on a podcast series featuring “honest, hard conversations about farming, business, and life with those trying to make a living doing something that they love and dealing with life in the process.”
The use of hand tools is one of the definitive characteristics of our species. We even go so far as to define our preindustrial past by ages of hand tool technology: stone, bronze and iron.
The magic of fire and hammer is truly transformative and I am marvelled by it every day that I work at the forge. An abandoned railroad spike is reborn as a hori hori and a truck’s leaf spring becomes a heavy duty trowel. This marvellous process has been around for millennia and it still appeals to many
The focus of this initial circuit has been the popular practice of defining permaculture design as, above all else, a process of assembling elements into whole systems.
I spent Saturday night under a 100 year old pear tree with David Holmgren, Su Dennett, and a spirited gathering of Victorian permaculturalists, for their annual summer solstice party. My household’s urban homestead doesn’t compare…
On the afternoon of June 30, 2016, we talked, walked and worked with a friend, Adam, on the overall design of the five hectare (12.5 acre) block of land Adam shares with his partner Tink.
