We all know the world is looking for answers to very pressing questions — so it’s high time the mainstream media started to share them! As such, it’s great to see the following article on the New York Times website. Thanks to New York Times writer Michael Tortorello, and well done to Wayne Weiseman, David Cody, Scott Pittman and the many others involved in this piece:
As a way to save the world, digging a ditch next to a hillock of sheep dung would seem to be a modest start. Granted, the ditch was not just a ditch. It was meant to be a “swale,” an earthwork for slowing the flow of water down a slope on a hobby farm in western Wisconsin.
And the trenchers, far from being day laborers, had paid $1,300 to $1,500 for the privilege of working their spades on a cement-skied Tuesday morning in late June.
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 Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground
As per the New York Times, "A version of this article appeared in print on July 28, 2011, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Growing From Underground."
