As increasing numbers of people across the globe are realizing there must be something more, something solutions-based they can do to positively shift their relationship with others and the natural environment, permaculture is growing in reach – not just in numbers, but also in sectors of our society. As a professor, higher academia is an area of peak interest where permaculture is setting roots. Andrew Millison, Senior Instructor 1, Permaculture, and I sat at a coffee shop on Oregon State University’s (OSU) campus in Corvallis discussing his journey, permaculture, and how that has taken form at the major land grant university where he works. You may assume he wound up here due to a job posting, but it was actually climate change that prompted his move from Prescott, AZ (16 inches of rain a year), to Corvallis, OR (43.7 inches of rain a year). At 9.5 inches of precipitation a year in Moab, UT, I’ve often worried about climate change and whether our water-strapped community drowning in new development pressure is right for our family. However, I’ve seen too much hope to migrate north in the form of local movements including a 100% renewable electricity commitment by local government, our health department interest in rewriting greywater policy and composting toilet code, community meetings to re-envision our recycling center and waste stream as a whole, community potlucks and more. That said, I and many others can relate to Andrew’s concern and decision, and many more will move north. Upon arriving in Corvallis, Andrew delivered a talk on peak oil and permaculture at a local food coop. Coincidentally, a student group had just formed a permaculture club and one active student, recently having emerged from a PDC, lobbied to create a permaculture course at OSU with Andrew as the teacher. Yes, past PDC participants have many ripples. The Horticulture Department agreed to trial permaculture and funded one class as an experiment. However, despite great reviews, there was no more funding. The university wasn’t looking to hire a permaculturist, but was open to the idea if Andrew could make a go of it. To solve the financial issue, Andrew launched a summer site-based PDC. This course involved installation projects at the OSU Student Sustainability Center, which had extra funds for Andrew to provide another summer course. It was through online courses, however, where Andrew secured his position at OSU. This catalyzed when someone within the State of Oregon: Oregon Housing and Community Services, which builds low income housing throughout the state, had heard of permaculture and Andrew was funded for a year to develop an online course and a large conference for the state agency (Jude Hobbs, Toby Hemenway, and others presented) and the group toured Portland-based permaculture housing developments. This opportunity allowed Andrew to design an online PDC through OSU’s Ecampus and generate a revenue stream. Oregon State University’s Ecampus is ranked third in the country for online education. Shortly after, he produced a PDC for non-credit through Professional and Continuing Education (PACE) and the growing enrollments began impressing administration. Where Andrew has seen the greatest impact and potential, however is through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). These are free open source courses, in which he developed Introduction to Permaculture. Students post their work publicly, get feedback from other students around the globe, and must hold themselves accountable for earning their badge of completion. Forty-five thousand people have partaken in the course, and that is just in five iterations. These large numbers helps attract students into Andrew’s online PDC, as students who complete the MOOC receive a 10 percent discount on their enrollment. Students can also enroll in his Advanced Permaculture Design for Climate Resilience online course. He is now working on a Permaculture Water Management four-week MOOC and on two paid courses: Rainwater Harvesting and Permaculture Food Forests. Why all online? Besides the large numbers and reliant revenue stream, Andrew sees many advantages. He has received feedback from some who do not want a social experience in class, and only want to learn how to design their home site differently. Others have families and can’t dedicate two or more weeks to an in-person experience. Many people live remotely and don’t have access to a PDC anywhere near them. Many are also attracted to the legitimacy that a PDC issued from a major university carries. Thus, online has allowed him to reach a wider pool of people. When describing permaculture in an elevator pitch, Andrew says “sustainable land design.” From his Introduction to Permaculture course page, the definition states “Permaculture design is a method of landscape planning that can be applied to anything, from a home garden or farm to a city block or entire village. Permaculture uses design principles from nature itself and takes into account such things as how indigenous people use the land; how water, fire and wind flow through the land; and how soil, water, vegetation, buildings and habitats can be managed in a stable and enduring way.” His goal in permaculture is “to elevate permaculture design further into mainstream knowledge and discussions so this valuable design system can be used to transition civilization to a future with clean water, safe and abundant food, renewable energy and resources, healthy watersheds, and prosperous people and ecosystems.” Working in higher academia, I wondered if Andrew liked the word, ‘permaculture.’ He does. “I think that the word now encompasses a powerful vision…it’s almost a gateway to a possible reality…The meaning behind permaculture and the imagery associated with that meaning is developed and just gets bigger.” When students leave any of his courses, Andrew hopes they can “put on their permaculture glasses” and see the world through a solutions-based, whole systems lens. From there, “I want them to have actual, actionable tools at their disposal” Despite his incredible enrollment numbers, support has not been ubiquitous. “I would say I do not have blanket administrative support. All of the administrative support I have, I’ve had to build relationships through mutual trust and prove that I can be self supportive and economically generative overtime, and then suddenly they want to support me because there is reciprocity and respect.” Now, after eight years of incremental work, Andrew has a Fulltime Equivalent (FTE) position. The vast majority of that position is funded through his online course income, and the horticulture department covers a portion of his position. In his promotion process to Senior Instructor 1, Andrew recounts his presentation to the Horticulture Department’s faculty “‘I’m not really teaching [students] horticultural techniques. I leave the details of tree fruit breeding, vegetable production, greenhouse management, and plant pathology to you folks.’ My students are taking soil science, they are taking landscape maintenance, they are taking berry and nut crop cultivation, they are taking organic agriculture. They are taking this wide sweep…I’m teaching them a design system to help them organize and use the things they are learning in all of your classes.” I was excited to hear this framing. As a whole-systems design framework, permaculture could be housed in horticulture, in English, watershed science, business, or any major because it brings together what students are learning into a solutions-based action framework. I see potential here and am excited about where we will take permaculture in higher academia. To discover more about Andrew and Oregon State University’s permaculture courses, visit: https://horticulture.oregonstate.edu/users/andrew-millison
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For those of you working in – or passionate about – the subject, you have inevitably been asked “what does permaculture mean?” When defining the term, eyes might gloss over as you struggle to portray the importance embedded within. As a Sustainable Communities professor, I have seen the value in clearly articulating what I mean by the often-used term ‘sustainability.’ Similarly, as an internationally respected permaculture teacher, Jude Hobbs emphasizes the importance of clearly relaying what permaculture means. When asked to define the term in our interview, Jude, co-founder of the Permaculture Institute of North America (PINA) and Cascadia Permaculture Institute (CPI), clearly and confidently says permaculture is “a new buzzword for an old way of being.” We could stop there, or if the inquirer is curious, then expand further with “Think about how your ancestors lived – they purchased things local and they worked within their community. They didn’t waste resources as much – everything was precious. Water was precious, wood was precious…Talk from where they are comfortable and then expand out from there.” Another way she defines permaculture, as I do with sustainability, is “it’s a whole systems way of thinking.” Jude clarifies “I’m not using resilience, I’m not using regeneration, I’m not using harmonious relationships. I’m not using any of those words.” Instead, the focus is on a tangible, sixth-grade-level understanding of what is becoming a widely used (sometimes misused) and interpreted term…just as with sustainability. It’s not an issue with the word, it’s the struggle with a clear definition. In our interview, Jude rhetorically asks “What other word describes this system? Sustainability? Yeah, true sustainability. People say ‘oh, I don’t want to use the word sustainability. It’s greenwashed. But if you define that to what it is truly meant to be, that’s what permaculture is.” It’s true, when we analyze the intention and meaning of sustainable living, the three pillars often referenced – environmental protection, social responsibility, and financial justice – with the intention of creating a better life for future generations can be interchangeable with the three main ethics of permaculture. Jude was trained as mental health professional, but in 1979 her career underwent a much-needed turn through taking a master gardener class. After then working as a program developer with master gardeners, she moved into traditional landscaping. A course on edible landscaping in 1984 further shifted her direction. Then, in 1985, she was invited to learn about permaculture on Whidbey Island at a 5-day workshop and fell in love. In her words, “I’m a whole systems thinker by nature. Mollison used to tell this story that he did all this research, with Holmgren as his apprentice, seeing what worked and didn’t work. Then he went on to public radio and was talking about the [permaculture design system], and he gave his address out. As his story is told, he says that within a week, 5,000 people wrote him and they all said the same thing…‘you expressed what I have been thinking about and have given me a way to act.’ And that’s what is so unique about permaculture to me. As a systems thinker and how to encapsulate all of these elements, those principles and ethics give you the toolbox of how to make change.” Since her first exposure to permaculture, Jude has been practicing on various landscapes and teaching both the traditional Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) and more advanced courses. Around 2000, Jude started offering teacher trainings “guiding people to have the confidence to talk about this.” She has found her niche and passion in teaching teachers, which she does through her business of Cascadia Permaculture and her Advanced Permaculture Course in Teaching, which counts towards the PINA permaculture diploma (an advanced certification level beyond the PDC). As with language, ethics are critical to Jude. In co-founding PINA, Jude helped create an option for professional development for PDC graduates. She mentions how some refer to her strong focus on credibility and ethics as a sort of “permi-police.” Jude is passionate about credibility as “My ethical stance is very strong. Ethically, that 72-hour curriculum with Mollison doesn’t include hands-on, doesn’t include field trips. That is 72 hours of lecture and if you have ever seen him, that’s what he did. He told stories and talks and wrote on the board. And he was magic because he could tell great stories. My courses were 92 hours so we could do all these different things. I’ve come to balance that out a little bit because I think that field trips and hands on, well-done, are an integral part of the educational process. But there are people who offer 8-day courses and they give certificates. And so that’s where we are saying ‘no’, that doesn’t work for us…What we care about is the integrity of the movement and of what is being shared as knowledge learned. So that is why I invested my hours in PINA.” And she is still serving as an advisor despite her other responsibilities. In addition to running Cascadia Permaculture, Jude also works with a nonprofit called Salmon Safe through her Agro-Ecology Northwest business. In this role, she is helping farmers and ranchers to assess management practices for water quality. This is lessening the toxic chemistries applied to the land and making their way to waterways and to increase biodiversity. “I’m really familiar with conventional agriculture, even as a rabid organic follower, just because that’s where I feel the change needs to go.” In her spare time, Jude also sells at the farmers market or trades produce from her homestead in Cottage Grove, Oregon, called Wilson Creek Gardens and she is writing a book about multifunctional hedgerows. Going back to her advanced teaching courses, Jude reflects “my goal is to change the educational paradigm one person at a time.” She describes her teaching as interactive, both in the classroom setup and in the content. This interactivity is accomplished in asking herself “How do you create wonder and awe in the classroom setting for adults or children? That’s the premise I would like to move forward with in education.” In teaching teachers, Jude is “very interested in working with people who are professional because I feel like permaculture has suffered from the hippy syndrome and that’s why I wanted to teach at the university.” We aren’t just talking traditional teachers either as less than 5 percent of the participants in her classes are traditional teachers. Participants range in nature from farmers looking for tools to teach their interns to librarians. Jude sees in this older group of people who are proactive learners more of a mission they want to accomplish in life. In regards to that mission, “My goal is giving them a way to act. How are they going to take what they’ve learned and utilize it? I’m not there to just entertain them – edutainment – I want them to make change and that’s what is so fun about doing the advanced courses is they will write me…with examples of how they have utilized what they have learned”. In regards to doing this as her career, “It’s a passion that can be set to reality and that I can make my living at it because I’m really FOCUSED ON right livelihood. Every time I teach, especially when I was doing PDCs, every single module we taught covered how can you make a living doing this. It doesn’t have to be la-la-land.” And unfortunately, many see permaculture as an idealistic ‘la-la-land.’ Thus, “The more professional that we are, the more the mainstream will embrace the concepts.” This hits home for me in working within academia. Jude also points out that “If we hold our stance of integrity then it will pass the test of time. I tell all of my students, if we do have collapse, you are going to be the ones people call. You are going to be so busy you’ll be grateful you have followed this path.” To discover more about Jude, Cascadia Permaculture, and the Permaculture Institute of North America, visit: https://cascadiapermaculture.com/ and https://pina.in/ “Egosystem restoryation.” For Brock Dolman, Co-Founder and Program Director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), that is the hopeful outcome in our exposure to permaculture. Learning about watersheds, gardens, landscape design, composting toilets and more are all important pieces of the web within which we must enact change. But at the heart of that web and Brock and OAEC’s work, is re-storylining the ego. When exploring this in our interview, he elaborated “permaculture to me is an egosystem restoryation effort. We are trying to re-story the storyline of the egosystem. How do I personally and us collectively as a bunch of humans learn how to understand how the natural world works and then get on board with that 3.8 billion years of evolutionary intelligence that life has brought forward on this one crazy planet in our universe?” We must re-story, rediscover, rethink and reclaim our role and potential on this Earth. The OAEC, located in western Sonoma county, CA, is one of the longest standing permaculture demonstration and education sites in the U.S. In the 1970s, before funding was cut by the Reagan administration, the Farallones Institute Rural Center that eventually morphed into OAEC was already offering workshops ranging from passive solar design to building ferrocement tanks, and also served as a peace corps training center. Chefs, especially Alice Waters with her Chez Panisse restaurant, kept the site running following federal cuts by purchasing fresh, diverse salad mixes and other farm goods in an era where farm-to-table was not yet popular. In the early 1990s, the site served a few years as a western hub for Seed Savers Exchange and in 1994, Brock and the six other Sowing Circle LLC and OAEC co-founding partners put together a winning proposal and vision for the property out of around 150 submissions. As a result, the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center was formed as a 501c3 and now nine people and their families co-own the site’s 80 acres. Brock was first exposed to permaculture in the early nineties. On an 8-hour car ride to a permaculture convention at Sandy Bar Ranch, he wound up with Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual in his lap, and deeply pursued the entire book. This book and Brock’s endeavor into permaculture provided an umbrella framework linking together his thinking and education in agroecology and conservation biology. Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s mission is to cultivate ecological literacy and build the “capacity of civic and social movement leaders and organizations to guide their own communities to an ecologically regenerative, economically viable, and socially just future.” Programs range from ecological literacy to climate justice, and expertise branches into extensive international work, especially in Africa and Latin America. In their programming, the OAEC weighs heavily on the traditional ecological knowledge of local Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people. Trainings and policy rule changes are major pieces as well. For example, Brock is heavily involved in county and state-level policies including California’s greywater policy and policies regarding salmon and beaver restoration. As a result, they are enacting positive change from the bottom-up and the top-down. The OAEC offers two-three permaculture design certifications (PDC) a year for the public. When reflecting on the PDC, Brock said it gives participants “a framework that with planned redundancy supports them with some confidence that there is a way to see the world, the connectivity and opportunity, as a whole-systems thinker. Because then you are going to leave and next week a ‘propportunity’ [problem/opportunity] is going to present itself. How do you comport yourself to say ‘oh, alright, what have I got, what do I want, what does success look like?’ And then do [solutions-based] design.” Regarding their permaculture programming, “we often start with basic earth systems science, energy flows, matter cycles of life webs, and you figure out how to redesign your civilization to get on board with those thermodynamic realities upon which the evolution of life comes. It’s amazing, not that complicated, and fungus is ready to party with you!” He goes on to add “when people leave the PDC…we hope they feel they are networked into a global community. That people are working hard on these things. There is a shared vision of earth care, people care. There’s a set of principles that they can cling to and are really helpful.” Outside of PDCs, a large focus of OAEC programming concerns resilient community design. For example, Kendall Dunnigan (Permaculture/Resilient Community Design Program Co-Director) is leading a collaborative project working with 20 Miskitu villages in northeast Nicaragua on women’s food sovereignty programs as they were illegally removed from their homeland. The OAEC also partners with the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, bringing together activists and artists from social justice organizations around the nation to participate in two three-day Justice & Ecology Retreats at the site. Retreat participants then have the opportunity to implement regenerative designs in their communities by participating in a 2-week long “Permaculture for the People” design course, subsidized through extensive fundraising efforts. When reflecting on this Permaculture for the People course, Brock clarified that “OAEC has a very explicit radical, progressive, social justice-based orientation as an organization collectively. And so, to that degree that we are supporting increasing the diversification in expression of who has access and can reclaim their appropriate relationship to what is the indigenosity of permaculture for many of these people…I think we are pretty forthright about the social, cultural, political, spiritual, economic, governance set of permaculture skills that we all have to learn to figure out how to get along with each other to then develop and work with these systems that have integrity intergenerationally – through time – to actually express all of our aspirations of what a regenerative future might look like.” At the center of all this work, “it’s the people. And at least in the U.S., I know my upbringing the schooling I got in public schools there wasn’t anything about cooperation or…inclusive, participatory – it was just read and write and arithmetic…I think we are unfortunately afflicted with that as a societal malaise a little bit. And ecological illiteracy is the greatest epidemic happening on the planet in my humble opinion. We are just radically ecologically illiterate on all the cycles.” The good news is, each one of us can undergo egosystem restoryation and re-write the storyline of our understanding and relationship with this beautiful planet. To discover more about Brock and the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, visit: http://oaec.org The terminator seed, formally known as Genetic Use Restriction technology, would render seed saving impossible due to a sterile second generation. News of this development in genetic modification germinated Erik Ohlsen’s path into environmental activism and regeneration: “I remember we were learning about this and we were 18 years old, about seeds and plants and that a seed was going to be released with sterile pollen and if it got out into the world it could sterilize the vegetation of the planet and the biosphere could collapse. Kind of having an ‘ah-ha!’ awakening moment of ‘holy s*#%t, there is stuff happening in the world that is so devastating, why would we do anything but try to be a solution to that?” So, at the young age of 19, Erik and his friends started an organization called Planting Earth Activation giving heirloom seeds away in events they dubbed the “Great Garden Giveaway.” His goal was to create an abundance of heirloom open-pollinator seeds as a solution to the news released of Genetic Use Restriction technology. The group would focus on one neighborhood at a time and plant 6-10 gardens in a weekend using all donated materials and seeds. Over 40 people volunteered each weekend and they transitioned one lawn after another. Musicians and dancers would perform and the group would celebrate with a big potluck where many neighbors met each other for the first time. While running Planting Earth Activation, Erik and four of his friends travelled to Seattle in 1999 to gather donated seeds and also attend a World Trade Organization meeting protest. According to Erik, “that was a life-changing moment. I had never been in a really big protest before and I was just learning about what the World Trade Organization even was and the more that I started to learn about it, the more fear and grief for the world sprouted up in me…that was a very intense time. I remember one of the first big days of the actions, I had no idea what to expect. We get down into the city and all of the activist blockades were already up and there were riot cops on every corner…And so we joined the civil disobedience and blockaded the delegates from getting to the World Trade Association meeting. There was one instance where I remember I was walking down the street and there were all these monarch butterfly puppets and all of these sea turtle puppets and I look around and every race is in the streets with me. There are punks and there are people wearing suits and there’s people with their children and there’s every age – grey haired people and kids – and then in front of me, there is a wall of police officers and they are shooting tear gas at us and it was that moment where something inside me changed. I realized at that time ‘here is a representation of people and life on the planet here in the streets together and there is the corporate empire that is protected by these weapons.’” Erik then formed an organization called Green Block and spent years traveling the world building gorilla gardens, distributing heirloom seed balls, and more at civil disobedience protests. He then experienced a major burnout in 2005 and developed a chronic nervous system illness that he is still coping with today. Suddenly he couldn’t travel and fight in the front lines for global justice, and he underwent a crisis in identity. Like a true permaculturalist, however, he turned the problem into the solution and developed the Permaculture Skills Center (PSC) in 2012. The PSC is a five-acre demonstration garden and farm that had been neglected for decades and was dominated by invasive bunch grass. It now hosts a food forest, over 2,000 feet of water harvesting swales and raingardens, water harvesting habitat ponds, over 300 fruit and nut trees, and various hedgerows. Erik had purposely looked for a site on the highway that was easy to find, accessible, and close to the Bay Area of California. In addition to trainings and self-guided tours, multiple ecologically-based organizations work out of the site. This includes businesses such as Erik’s Permaculture Artisans (a landscape design contracting company installing permaculture regenerative systems at all scales throughout California. Erik has hired around 20 employees representing a mix of cultures and languages) and Transition United States (providing support for transition initiatives across the nation). Regarding skills building, Erik remembers “really clearly this one day I went out to dinner here in town and the waiter was like ‘oh hey, you taught my permaculture course’ and we had a little chat and I remember him saying something like ‘all I want to do is permaculture but I can’t figure out a way to make a livelihood doing it so I’ve gotten back into waiting tables and I just work my garden on the weekends.’ And that’s a story I kept hearing over and over again. Being in the permaculture movement so long you start to wonder ‘why aren’t the solutions more widespread? Why aren’t we implementing them at large scales when the crisis is so huge? Why are we not meeting the need to regenerate at that scale?’ And for me, one of the things I realized was that without having a more professional angle to doing this work, a way for people to have careers and livelihoods, it was always going to be more-or-less nonrelevant to most people.” Given the common scenario Erik experienced at a restaurant that day, the Permaculture Skills Center focuses its efforts on empowerment, with the mission “to empower students with the knowledge and skills to create regenerative and resilient ecosystems, communities, and economies.” In addition to on-site trainings and opportunities, online courses include a “Regenerative Landscape Business Training,” “Regenerative Agroforestry,” and an “Eco-Landscape Mastery School.” These types of job-building trainings are a major driver for Erik, given that “so many folks that get turned on to this work, that feel the grief of the world and the weight of our responsibility to take care of earth and people, struggle in finding a way to make a life doing that. They are stuck in the economic system that we are in.” When walking away from a PSC experience, Erik says “one thing that I hope people would take away with them is a feeling of empowerment that they can make a life regenerating the planet.” He goes on to include “that they feel like they’ve got a set of tools that is more than just concepts. That they feel like they have a feeling of competence around the tools of land regeneration or starting a small business. There’s competence there, it’s not foreign and elusive.” Many pieces of Erik’s journey resonated directly with me. I recall when news of the terminator seed was released. I was walking mono-cropped fields as a farmer’s co-op employee, making recommendations to spray and ensuring the herbicides had worked effectively, and had already accumulated many questions about our degenerative model of industrial agriculture. There comes a point when it is too much. You know too much, your heart has broken too deeply, but the shattered pieces reconfigure into action and guide you down an alternative path. Your knowledge becomes power in enacting positive change. Our interview brought us both to tears. The pain of social injustice and environmental destruction is still close enough to the surface that it wells up, like a fresh water spring feeding life into our collective efforts towards an alternative future. To discover more about Erik and the Permaculture Skills Center, visit: https://permacultureskillscenter.org/ Suitably, we met on in a busy street-side café in downtown San Rafael. Kat Steele was Director of the Urban Permaculture Guild from its inception until 2008, when she left to become the Sustainable Development Manager of the Esalen Institute until 2015. After leaving that position, she launched and still runs the Woodland Institute and Retreat Center in Fairfax, CA. When I asked Kat to share with me what her ‘title’ is, she paused, contemplating for a second, then said “permaculture educator and activist, and Climate Reality leader.”
At 24, as media maker with Universal Studios, Kat worked on a project in the former Soviet Union. The group arrived in Kazakhstan, where Kat vividly recalled having “met with the people who had been harmed by nuclear radiation poisoning…it was very heart opening and mind blowing and activist-making.” Shortly after, she visited an intentional, international, spiritual community where she saw what was possible with both healthy communities and a positive relationship with nature. It was in the these worlds of activism and creative expression that Kat found her home, which she had never discovered in her traditional mainstream catholic upbringing in Miami, FL. After visiting the former Soviet Union and her first intentional community, Kat enrolled in her first PDC decades ago. The experience, although beautiful regarding in the concepts and potential, resulted in anger and frustration at the rural farming and ranching focus. “I was living in Oakland at the time and my daily experience was with people with very little economic means, a lot of racial and economic diversity, lots of young activists who were struggling financially and it felt like a big disconnect. ‘Wow I’m learning all of this really amazing permaculture stuff but how does it really relate to me and my community? I don’t have a farm. I don’t have a husband and lots of children and a white picket fence. I don’t have land, so how does this relate to me?’ At that time I got really excited about this possibility of bringing permaculture to the urban setting.” So Kat formed the Urban Permaculture Guild. She was living in Oakland, CA, when growing food in the city wasn’t very popular. Through an outlet of helping people grow gardens in urban front and back yards, Kat interwove permaculture design as a way to help people “gain more empowerment by seeing the world through a permaculture lens.” Now, permaculture weaves its way into Kat’s daily life is as “a platform, a view, a perspective that I can use in making very simple daily choices about how I spend my time and money and energy. What food I put in my body. My politics. Where I can use my power to uplift people that may not have as much privilege as I do…to recognize the parts of my inner world that have been colonized by patriarchy or consumerism.” From those earlier days in the permaculture movement to now, Kat is feeling hopeful. “I am very heartened and inspired by the recent shift in perspective around the value and also upliftment of the voices of indigenous people who have inspired so much of what permaculture design is all about – that love of the land, the relationship, that reciprocity. There’s a huge opportunity for more inclusion in the permaculture movement…and I also think that in the past two years especially there’s a lot more women practitioners and leaders in the movement, there’s a lot more men in the movement who have a deeper understanding about how the lack of inclusion has impacted them and all of us and I see a lot of waking up that’s happening.” In the form of movements ranging from “Me Too!” to youth globally walking out on classes and demanding action on climate change, we have woken up and are taking action. On this national journey, I’m learning what may be the most critical role of permaculture in serving as a platform to guide that awakening into solutions-based thinking. When I worked as an environmental educator in rural Georgia for less than $10 an hour, freshly graduated from 22 straight years of education, something happened that forever changed me. We were hosting a group of 8th graders from Atlanta, many boasting gang symbols and flat expressions upon first arrival. As the day progressed, I witnessed layers of heartbreak, inadequacy and anger flow away downstream as we searched for macroinvertebrates. One young man ran towards me in pure joy, shouting “Ms. Brain, Ms. Brain, a bird!” This bird was a Tiger Swallowtail – yes, a butterfly – but my correction was swallowed in the light of his joy. The classroom had never fostered such hope for humanity as that day in a Georgia stream. What happens when we touch, taste, are scratched by, and cry in awe over our natural environment? Our natural environment. Something can move us unexpectedly into the realm of the people care ethic of permaculture, closely interwoven with earth care. Large portions of our society have never immersed themselves in nature. This is a byproduct of our developed, plugged in, concrete, artificially lit, busy is better operating system. Many have not had any opportunity to develop a passion for the elements that allow our survival as humans on this beautiful planet. And we are longing to fill the void. We do not have to grapple through life under the overwhelming message that we aren’t enough. Nature immersion, whether on a small urban plot or protected wilderness area, allows us as educators to offer a meaningful alternative to the broken message of inadequacy where the best way to fill the void is through our credit cards. Quail Springs Permaculture was created in 2004 by Warren Brush, internationally renowned permaculturalist, to address this gap in nature connectedness. Targeting young at-risk high school students, the site offered a deeper connection with nature, themselves, and their peers in a place where the water comes from the watershed and food from the farm. The site is a 450-acre former cattle ranch in the high desert rain shadow of coastal California. Back then, the property included a hanger, an air strip, arid heavily grazed land and a pond. Through years of passion to regenerate the land and contributions from educators, students, interns, and donors, that pond is now in the middle of a food forest and is filled with great western toads and common snipe. Quail Springs offers what Brenton Kelly, Watershed Steward, calls “nature awareness programming.” This type of programming includes all aspects of tracking, recognizing the behavior of specific organisms in the environment, inner tracking or reflection, primitive/origin skills, integrated organic farming, healthy and humane butchering, and more. A dedication to reconnection. About 2,000 program participants engage with the site each year, immersing themselves in nature through programs generally ranging from five days to two weeks. Numerous surrounding schools visit representing all grade levels, along with people come from all over the world. Course offerings include traditional Permaculture Design Certifications (PDCs) (their last PDC had 34 enrolled) and an international development design course for agencies and organizations sending people to various countries to do aid development work; critically needed people care and earth care training. A youth program is offered each summer called Sustainable Vocations that includes a green jobs fair with information ranging from beekeeping to solar installation (which provides youth an understanding of what a green job is outside of the typical nonsensical imagery of a man standing in a green field wearing a business suit with a leaf in his pocket, holding a briefcase). For those wanting a full immersion, a farm internship program is offered and so is a natural building program with a variety of construction methods demonstrated and implemented. Regarding natural building, Quail Springs is also engaged in advocacy for this design approach. They serve as a research site for physics majors at California Polytechnic Institute, writing the codes for monolithic adobe walls and Influencing international and American building codes. What do people get when they come to Quail Springs? According to Brenton, they “get an experience this landscape offers that is not something we can even put on a brochure.” When they walk away, two areas of knowledge and skills change are hoped for: “one is that permaculture is never a perfection. I love to say that our systems are completely in chaos and need an infinite amount of energy that we now know we would want to redesign differently because we learned something in the last iteration of the process…you don’t come to Quail Springs or look at any permaculture site as going ‘oh, there’s the answer! There’s the solution! There’s the one size that fits all!’ I’m a big reactionary to the permaculture dogma syndrome where ‘berms and swales, berms and swales, save the world with berms and swales. Every design ought to have a spiral herb garden’ – all of the check the box kind of approach in permaculture …The other part is inspiring the optimism that it will require to maintain enough energy to solve these problems. If it is possible to live in this high desert and address some of those issues and come up with some real tangible solutions and live in a world that has ethical balance between those three permaculture ethics, principles are engaged and responsibility is held for our metabolic transactions, then there is a future. If we can do it out here with high desert minimal resources, then surely we can find a way to survive in the luxury of our larger metropolitan areas and in the lives that most people live in.” At Quail Springs, participants give through contributing to the site financially and manually. “Most of the buildings that we live in are built through workshops where people came, ate our food, crapped in our toilets, made their footprints and fingerprints on the walls of our homes and went home with enough of a knowledge base that they could actually put mud on a wall and build something, or plant a tree, whatever their next step in integrated living is.” When reflecting further on the meaning – and misperceptions of – permaculture, Brenton stated “permaculture, that’s organic gardening right? Or permaculture, that’s natural building. They are facets on a gem that’s too dazzling to really observe in its integrated true self. So how we do that is through experience.” And according to Brenton, it is the experiential aspect which has helped create a stronger connection with nature and more hands-on skills then the stand-alone academic nature of the PDC. At Quail Springs, participants might milk goats, butcher a chicken, turn a compost pile, harvest produce, and more. “I mean at some point you are going to have people all academic’d up and no place to go.” As a result, “we do a lot more hands-on workshops where permaculture isn’t really what they are signing up for. They are signing up for a natural building course or an edible wild landscape culinary course, or a garden farm community course. It’s all permaculture.” And these facets of the permaculture gem are helping to re-immerse and reground us in the natural environment that allows for our survival. Programs offering this reconnection with nature through human bonding and hands-on experience allow a reshaping of our relationshis. We hold limitless depth in potential to regenerate our social and environmental systems, and moving away from a parasitic relationship with others and our planet brings me back to that light of hope I felt over a decade ago in a Georgia stream. To discover more about Brenton and Quail Springs Permaculture, visit: http://www.quailsprings.org The Permaculture Academy, although established in its current form only five years ago, has existed in one permutation or another since 1989. It began as the Great Northwest Permaculture Institute, one of the first permaculture nonprofits established in the US, under the influence of Bill Mollison. I walked across blocks of urbanite (broken concrete that is generally otherwise landfill-bound but makes for great stepping stones, terraces, and more) to Larry Santoyo’s front door in Ventura, CA, to conduct our interview. Larry founded The Permaculture Academy, is its lead instructor, and has been teaching permaculture for almost 30 years. In his words, Larry joined the permaculture movement “kicking and screaming” as a result of being injured on duty as a law enforcement park ranger. Given his injury, he had to retrain through the state and ventured down a land planning professional development path with a specialization in natural resources management. This led him to a conference in Olympia, WA, where he met Bill Mollison and began traveling the country teaching design courses with him, thrown in “trial by fire.” At the time of our interview, Larry had just finished teaching a Permaculture Design Course in Los Angeles with The Permaculture Academy; 66 people were enrolled. The Academy’s focus is on urban situations and they generally don’t focus on gardens in the class. If they do, they design a prototype that could be used for thousands of gardens – part of bigger picture thinking. According to Larry, “I think that people still believe permaculture is about gardening and I don’t think that it ever was. I worked with Bill Mollison and the stuff I saw him doing, very little had to do with gardening.… one of my biggest things is that we don’t do permaculture, you use permaculture in what you do. It opens it up to pick a field and you can use permaculture design. So that’s why I kind of cringe when people talk about permaculture and all we talk about is gardens. It’s not a gardening system so I don’t know how to evaluate it that way. It’s not an agriculture system. It’s decision making and problem solving protocols based on natural systems. That’s my definition, and with that I can pretty much go anywhere.” On the first day of his permaculture classes, Larry asks people to shout out what it would take to make a sustainable human future. He maps out what everyone says and organizes comments by infrastructure and invisible structures – concepts he revisits later. After reviewing the ethics and principles, he revisits the board and brings home that what was said is permaculture. Agriculture and/or gardening is just one bubble on a large concept map. In teaching courses at various universities and colleges, Larry sees a strong need for more skills-based education. “I’ve taught at horticulture and landscape architecture departments where some of the kids have never planted a tree! And I’ve taught at architecture departments where people have never framed a house, you know? How is that possible?” As one way to help build hands-on opportunities Larry has a design firm as a wing of the academy. People can tag along who are enrolled in a permaculture course and learn first-hand. Granted, this creates a bit of a paradox for Larry. “As much as I talk about permaculture not being about gardening, I have a landscape company so there you have it. I’m the reason why people think it’s gardening!” We live in a busy society, and Larry admits that it can be hard to get people excited about attending a six-month certification, which is how his Permaculture Design Course is structured. In his words, “People are bombarded. Everyone’s dangling carrots in front of an audience. Oh we could get tattoos this weekend, or we could go save the whales, or we could learn permaculture. There’s a million things going on.” And who are these people that decide to come? “It’s so much different than before. The audiences are pretty sophisticated wherever I go, anywhere in the world. That’s one thing I learned from Bill Mollison – never dumb it down or never dumb it up. This is the curriculum. Don’t change it or try to make it simpler. That’s ridiculous and arrogant and not very pattern literate to assume people won’t understand something…What’s interesting about audiences of the past is that people really did work in the field. No one ever said ‘we want more hands on.’ I don’t even think we had that vernacular: hands-on…These days, people are coming to the class that have been exposed to it through media, so there’s a lot that they already have in their minds about what they want and what it is. But very few people have practical experience. Very few people are building stuff.” The people coming are wanting a career change, or to homestead, or to get out of the film industry and learn new ideas and wind up returning reinvigorated about their work. From Larry’s experience, it is incredibly variable why people are seeking permaculture design. But permaculture courses cost a lot of money and those who want landscaping done with Larry’s design firm pay a whole lot more. According to Larry, “I used to get a lot of shit because I work for the one percent, but if they are switching to organic then who can help them? Very few people emulate the bottom.” I wondered who these people in the movement as a whole are. The permaculture community. Larry responds with: “Whackos, nut-jobs. But I love it. It’s always the whackos and nut jobs that not only create change, but also stand by it.” Looking ahead, despite his knowledge that our planet will inevitably one day die, Larry concludes optimistically with “the future is abundant.” When it comes to our legacies, he clarifies that what is important is to ensure our handprints are bigger than our footprints. I like that line of thought and hope more people are inspired to grow their handprints, creating the positive change they wish to see. To discover more about Larry and The Permaculture Academy, visit: http://www.permacultureacademy.com What drives you? Whether your passion manifests in increasing local food access, preserving farmland from development, providing straw bale housing for low-income families, or reducing the waste stream, it started somewhere. Perhaps you had a serious health scare as a child and now want to prevent that for others. Or maybe you witnessed farmland surrounding your hometown get eaten up by concrete and monocultured subdivisions. Whatever it is, it ignited with a spark. For Evan Marks, founder of The Ecology Center, that spark was surfing. Evan grew up in Orange County, California. Through surfing, he often saw and started picking up trash on the beach as a teenage volunteer, at which point he began understanding the negative impacts humans were having on the environment. He then discovered the number one negative impact on ocean health globally: Agriculture. This discover led Evan down a path to sustainable agriculture and a degree at U.C. Santa Cruz in Agroecology. After farming for a year on a homestead in Santa Cruz, Evan wound up in Latin America for seven years designing large-scale permaculture sites. His role as an ecological designer in Costa Rica resulted in creation of agroecosystems on diverse sites ranging in scale from 1,000-acre corridors to eco-villages and community farms. After Costa Rica, Evan began doing similar ecological restoration work in South Africa for USAID, but he felt a calling home to Orange County. People need more ecological literacy everywhere. In his words, “I decided to come back to where I came from in this community of consumerism and cul-de-sacs. We need more ecological literacy and a real strong point of reference – what does that look like, what does that taste like…The design challenge is how do we take these fairly universal but also fairly obscure ideas of humans living in harmony with nature to the masses…we have to use design as a tool.” In an empty 140-year-old farmhouse on a one-acre lot of broken concrete with a palm tree and one citrus tree, Evan began using design as a tool in Orange County, founding The Ecology Center. Over the past 10 years, he has been building community around agroecology. One way Evan embraces his entire community is through careful consideration of inclusive language. “We’ve pulled a lot of the traditional language and lexicon of permaculture out of all of our work by design because this is for everyone, it’s not a clique. This organization is designed for the most amount of people, so we don’t need to have it feel exclusive.” Evan is very familiar with permaculture. He has taught 15 permaculture courses. According to him, “I love it, I’m in it, and, I’m less impressed by the insular-ness of it.” When considering permaculture, he clarified “it’s actually not a series of techniques and technologies, it’s a philosophy. The manifestation of the work is not in a garden, but it can be.” Instead of potentially limiting terminology, Evan is aiming to simply show people through engagement “this is what an ecosystem looks like in this climate, and this is what a community looks like at the table.” And after a decade, his one-acre agroecosystem has recently grown with the incorporation of 28 acres of farmland surrounding the original site. Following a fundraising campaign, Evan is excited to put his experience and passion to work. The redesign of the surrounding farmland will involve a strong integration of nature. He will incorporate native hedgerows bisecting the farm to provide habitat and forage. Perpendicular to those will be agroforestry operations called alley cropping. A hundred varieties of fruit trees will be grown with flowers, fruits and vegetables in between that involve a rotation of cover crops and animal grazing. Evan is planning on 40 varieties of citrus alone, and 20 varieties of apples and pears. Through this design he is creating redundancy. The site will provide Community experiences through U-pick, a restaurant café, farm stand, value-added products, and a farm share CSA. With this growth and funding campaign recently launched to finance it, he has chosen the inclusive and broad-reaching name “Institute of Food, Agriculture and the Arts.” On his one-acre site, The Ecology Center already operates as an institute of food, agriculture, and the arts. They have mentored over 100 schools in their food lab – providing hands-on experience of the harvesting, cleaning, preparing, eating, and composting life cycle. They also host farm dinners with numerous talented local chefs. It’s no wonder celebrity chefs like Alice Waters have come to see and cook at the site. In an impressive step to further ripple out their work to the community, The Ecology Center partners with developers as consultants on ecological community design and they work with school districts and municipalities. They have opened opportunities for leadership development with the underserved population -part of their charter. This allows for those who otherwise would never get to work with the best chefs and the best farmers to do so. In referring to this focus on underserved youth, Evan rhetorically asked “How do we start to expand the polyculture of culture in permaculture?” Going back to redundancy, in empowering youth to practice agroecology, developers and school districts provide land to literally grow the movement. There are two sister sites of The Ecology Center now, 10 acres on school district property providing food for nine elementary schools and another 10 an hour south of the main site. In the world of permaculture, it can become quite comfortable to stop at teaching Permaculture Design Certifications. I asked Evan why he moved beyond focusing on teaching those and he said “I just have a much bigger vision for the world…you can tell people things all day long but if they don’t touch it, taste it, it doesn’t actually mean a difference…it doesn’t change your behavior if you haven’t actually done it. So this place becomes a place where people can do it on their own terms.” Show them, not tell them what change looks like. And it works. At his site, I tasted the most delicious carrots and greens. And the strawberries were love at first bite. They were the size of most farmed strawberries, but the flavor sent my mind to the wild strawberries I grew up eating in the forests surrounding my childhood home in southern Ontario. Although it isn’t in his public Lexicon, Evan clarified “I love permaculture. Because what is permaculture? Permaculture is care for the earth, care for people, and redistribution of the surpluses. That sounds exactly what humans need to be doing.” This relates to his goal of what people would take away with them when they leave the site, a positively reinforcing and addictive feeling “that there’s infinite possibility for humanity.” To discover more about Evan and The Ecology Center, visit: https://www.theecologycenter.org/ Imagine an integrated system where edible annuals and perennials are interwoven with solar energy production. Now, imagine that this food and renewable energy producing system could improve the soil microbiome and harvest all water needs from rainwater off of the solar panels. Gary Nabhan is trialing this integrated system, known as agrovoltaic, in the Sonoran Desert where he lives and is seeing a 40 percent increase in yield of stevia, basil, and chiltepin Chili peppers planted under and around the solar panels. Instead of relying on center pivot and flood irrigation, he is using micro-aspersion, wicks, deeply buried clay pipes, porous capsule and micro-olla irrigation to efficiently transfer water to the root zone of plants better than any conventional form of drip irrigation. I was excited to dive deeper into Gary’s thoughts about permaculture after reading his incredible book, “Growing Food in a Hotter Drier Land.” And after visiting his home recently, I see Gary is walking the talk and more, if possible, when it comes to doing just that. From a mere baseline of 5 food producing trees at his home, Gary is now growing over 130 fruit and nut trees, all with water-wise irrigation based off of his international journeys to discover how indigenous cultures grow food with little water. When asked where he feels the permaculture momentum is taking us, Gary answered “I think it’s taking us back to how Thomas Jefferson thought about the world, that being a food producer is one of the highest intellectual callings that we could have. That we introduce plants, evaluate them, and share them with our neighbors. That we tell neighbors…what combination of plants work together in catastrophic years when we have flood or drought or freezes. So that we have a community of people that are sharing solid information with one another that is place-based. That’s why - even though permaculture has universal principles - all of it is about paying attention to the particulars of your place…I think its reminding people that universal theories that are like a drop-down formula imposed on the land are bound to fail. That we need to be attentive and see what the land needs.” Before whisking me away for a tour of his home site, Gary ended his interview with, “Permaculture gives us the observational tools and then the pattern recognition - I really think it’s about thinking in patterns and thinking in whole systems that permaculture lends itself to better than anything else. It’s an observational process and thought process and then response with design. And I think – as you and I have already agreed – those design principles can be applied to any place and any scale of agriculture but first you have to know your place really well and build on the natural and cultural assets there. I think we skip over that in other ways of thinking about food production. So, in a very odd way, permaculture is an ideological movement as much as it is a humbling process where we see what is before us and dance with it.” In addition to the book that deeply inspired me, Gary has written or served as primary editor for over a dozen books, with subjects ranging from “Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity” to “Renewing America’s Food Traditions – Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods.” He also co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH – a nonprofit conservation organization working to preserve place-based Southwestern agricultural plants as well as the knowledge of their uses – and served as founding director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. Now, Gary serves as a Kellogg Endowed Chair in Southwestern Borderlands Food and Water Security, founding the University of Arizona Center for Regional Food Studies. In working with the University of Arizona, Gary helped with the recognition of Tucson as the first UNESCO designated City of Gastronomy in the US, he received a Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grant to install over a dozen pollinator hedgerows, is researching climate change adaptation, phenology change and agrobiodiversity, and much, much more. Regarding “Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land”, a writeup about the book by Alan Weisman (should you be inspired to learn more and dive into the book yourself) states “Nabhan, one of the world’s experts on the agricultural traditions of arid lands, draws from the knowledge of traditional farmers in the Gobi Desert, the Arabian Peninsula, the Sahara Desert, and Andalusia, as well as the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Painted deserts of North America to offer time-tried strategies, including:
To discover more about Gary, his books, and his work with the University of Arizona and beyond, visit: https://www.garynabhan.com With an interest in punk music and a knack for questioning the systems we operate within from a young age, Brad Lancaster suites his role of enacting large-scale environmental change and helping shift our way of seeing the world. I visited with Brad for an interview at his passive solar, solar PV, composting toilet, outdoor rainwater-fed kitchen, solar clothes drying, food producing, greywater-fed oasis of an urban landscape in Tucson, AZ. Brad was one of the first people who introduced me to permaculture, and he was also a teacher in my Water Harvesting Certification course with the Watershed Management Group years ago in Albuquerque, NM. His in-person teachings, online videos, and books (Harvesting Rainwater for Drylands and Beyond Volumes 1&2) have had a permanent positive impact on me. When I had Brad as a teacher, I vividly remember him holding his hand pa lm-down in a mound formation, saying “this is how we usually plant in the Southwest. Where the plants are high and dry, and the paths are low and wet.” Then he flipped his hand over and showed a new way of seeing and planting our landscapes. A way that plants the rain with plants low and wet in basins and swales, while the paths are suitably high and dry. Since learning these simple, obvious, and often completely overlooked concepts from Brad, I have used his images and videos each year in my Communicating Sustainability undergraduate course to help students engage in systems thinking. Planting the rain. When it was still illegal in Tucson, Brad went out on a Sunday morning while no one was watching and cut his curb. This way, storm water flowing down the street could enter through the curb cut and infiltrate into the basin he created. Now, instead of harvesting only direct rainfall in a rain event, he had tapped the millions of gallons of rainwater previously untouched. Yes, one mile of neighborhood street in Tucson drains over a million gallons per year. In fact, more rain falls on the city of Tucson in a year than is used annually in municipal water by the city. And yet, Tucson relies on the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal for its water; an open canal transporting water 336 miles from the Colorado River. The CAP canal cost four billion dollars to construct and over 80 million dollars a year to operate. It is the highest consumer of electricity in the state of Arizona and also the highest carbon emissions producer. Brad lights up as he talks about rainwater harvesting – you can see the passion emulating from him. So why is he shifting water policy? City employee practices? Neighborhood rules and regulations? Delivering workshops across America on rainwater harvesting? Why was the last Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) he taught almost a decade ago? According to Brad, “I was burnt out on the PDC. I couldn’t do it anymore…that’s not the whole answer. It comes back to the desired effect, what do I want to see happen? I was seeing all these holes…I didn’t think I was so uniquely skilled to teach the PDC. If I see that I’m easily replaceable in the work I’m doing, I quickly lose my will to do that work. So I have to shift to see where work needs done that no one is doing.” And now? “The big thing I’m trying to shift now is to change the practice of planting trees and other plants. So instead of planting a plastic pipe before you plant the plant, you plant the rain before you plant the plant. So that it’s not pumped water – typically imported water that’s irrigation sourced – it’s our free onsite water, it’s rainwater, it’s greywater. Water flows downhill so make the low-point first. Put the plant in beside the low-point so all water will go there anyway. Then we are not dependent on the city system right off the bat. We aren’t even connected to it! Instead, we are connected to the system we want to be connected with – the living system, the free system, the rain system. That’s got to drive the design. So what are we aiming for? Let’s not [&*$@%#] talk about it, let’s do it! And that has to be the driver.” In all the talks he gives, I was wondering what Brad hoped people would walk away with, if it was only one or two things. He responded, “I definitely want them to walk away with a new way of seeing, where they can see potential they didn’t see before. So they can hopefully see how water sediment, energies, people are moving through a system. They can actually image it and start to work with that. Becoming more aware of what’s really happening. I’m hoping they can think more critically and constructively with toolsets and frameworks that can get them to consider a larger whole, and…that they are going to leapfrog me, take me to places I can’t even envision right now.” And it isn’t only people interested in doing something in their backyard that Brad is working with. He is impacting designers, city planners, engineers, Extension Master Gardeners, and more. Beyond water, Brad’s efforts are also getting people to recognize that the native and drought tolerant plants he is planting are more than just for wildlife and of ornamental value. He is helping people to engage with their landscape; “it’s not just this pretty thing that has to be manicured. How can it be this dynamic thing that we engage with, that is influencing us and we are influencing.?” When Brad first moved into his Tucson neighborhood, he described it as a bleak solar oven leading to his experience of eco-depression. But now, over two dozen native birds have returned, there are community mesquite harvesting and cooking celebrations, neighborhood foresters, better bike connectivity, and curb cuts and swales on every street. With regards to curb cutting, thanks to Brad’s skills with policy and speaking the language of others, now it is not only legal in Tucson but the city even promotes it. Discover more about Brad and Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond at: http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/ |