Archive for the ‘Permaculture’ Category
“TH: Can a person who wants to experiment with permaculture principles try them in an urban environment?
DH: Yes. For example, weve had a presentation on our website that is a positive view of the suburban towns, which are usually seen as the most unsustainable form of living, since they are car dependent.
From a permaculture point of view, the suburbs are very adaptable to the future of continuous energy descend were facing, whereas the high density cities are more problematic to redesign.
There are many strategies about how we can change the way we live in the suburban landscape producing food in the gardens, start adapting buildings to make them more independent self heating, self cooling, collecting water of the roof and reusing it.
Another powerful idea connected to food supply in cities is community supported agriculture, where a group of people have a financial relationship with a farmer usually not far away from where they live, who provides most of their organic fresh food in a box every week and they pay in advance for this.
This forces the farmer to grow many different things, and makes the consumer eat with the seasons. So it drives the production system towards a more ecologically balanced approach, and the consumer to change his behavior in a way that is synchronized with the region and environment where they live.
This is expanding rapidly in Australia and is popular in California, but comes originally from Japan, where 5.5 million households get their food directly from farmers.”
via The TH Interview: David Holmgren, Co-Creator of Permaculture : TreeHugger.
“The ethic of permaculture is the movement’s Nicene Creed, or golden rule: care of the earth; care of people; and a return of surplus time, energy and money, to the cause of bettering the earth and its people.”
“Fourteen of us had assembled to learn permaculture, a simple system for designing sustainable human settlements, restoring soil, planting year-round food landscapes, conserving water, redirecting the waste stream, forming more companionable communities and, if everything went according to plan, turning the earth’s looming resource crisis into a new age of happiness.It was going to have to be a pretty awesome ditch.That was the sense I took away from auditing four days of a weeklong Permaculture Design Certificate course led by Wayne Weiseman, 58, the director of the Permaculture Project, in Carbondale, Ill.The movement’s founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term permaculture in the mid-1970s, as a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture.In practice, permaculture is a growing and influential movement that runs deep beneath sustainable farming and urban food gardening. You can find permaculturists setting up worm trays and bee boxes, aquaponics ponds and chicken roosts, composting toilets and rain barrels, solar panels and earth houses.Truly, permaculture contains enough badges of eco-merit to fill a Girl Scout sash. Permies yes, they use that term like to experiment with fermentation, mushrooming, foraging also known as wildcrafting and herbal medicine.Yet permaculture aims to be more than the sum of those practices, said David Cody, 39, who teaches the system and creates urban food gardens in San Francisco.“It’s an ecological theory of everything,” Mr. Cody said. “Here’s a planet Earth operating manual. Do you want to go along for a ride with us?” ”
via Permaculture Emerges From the Underground – NYTimes.com.
Dig deeper into permaculture ….
“Fourteen of us had assembled to learn permaculture, a simple system for designing sustainable human settlements, restoring soil, planting year-round food landscapes, conserving water, redirecting the waste stream, forming more companionable communities and, if everything went according to plan, turning the earth’s looming resource crisis into a new age of happiness.
It was going to have to be a pretty awesome ditch.
That was the sense I took away from auditing four days of a weeklong Permaculture Design Certificate course led by Wayne Weiseman, 58, the director of the Permaculture Project, in Carbondale, Ill.
The movement’s founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term permaculture in the mid-1970s, as a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture.
In practice, permaculture is a growing and influential movement that runs deep beneath sustainable farming and urban food gardening. You can find permaculturists setting up worm trays and bee boxes, aquaponics ponds and chicken roosts, composting toilets and rain barrels, solar panels and earth houses.”
via The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground.
arnoneumann 