DISCLAIMER: These are my thoughts and experiences on what can be a deeply cultural, charged and personal topic: diet. There is a lot we don’t know, especially when it comes to what a sustainable diet is. For one, most studies have been centred in high-income Western countries (Jones et al., 2016); it’s also still largely unclear exactly what a “healthy diet” should consist of, nevertheless what a truly sustainable society […]
Permaculture design can be about much more than deciding where to put plants and landscaping particular sites. Indeed, many people who practice permaculture do not have a piece of land in which they can create a design. We can utilise permaculture to help with design of our finances, time management, social structures, or a myraid other applications (see for example 1, 2); and indeed as I have said in previous […]
Water is essential to life on Earth and therefore governing bodies like the UN must play a role in protecting it as water scarcity becomes a greater issue year by year. Water scarcity and contamination is already life threatening to many communities around the world. The UN World Water Report serves to combat issues surrounding development and the ease of access to clean and healthy water. The UN has provided […]
The world is shrinking. Not literally, of course. When it comes to mass, our planet is the same size it’s been for billions of years. However, when one instead considers available land mass, that’s a different story. Over the next 30 years, the world population is expected to grow by 30%. This means that by 2050, our planet will be trying to support approximately 9.6 billion people. For a world […]
Money, though valuable in its own way, probably should not be the motivating factor for adopting a permaculture lifestyle, that is unless the idea is to escape the perils associated with it. Nonetheless, how and where money will come from seems to be one of the more frequently asked questions when I tell people my plan for setting up a small homestead somewhere, building a home, and growing food. Most […]
This is the third year of Balkan Ecology Project’s Market Garden Polyculture Study. The trials include a comparison between growing vegetables in polycultures and growing them in more traditional blocks as well as other experimentats with annual vegetable polycultures
We´ve all heard of climate change and probably understand the basics of how excess greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide produced by our society´s burning of fossil fuels is causing the earth´s temperature to rise. We´ve most likely seen maps of what the world will look like when the glaciers and icebergs melt causing the ocean to rise and most of us probably accept that it is a danger to our […]
Even before permaculture vernacular had become commonplace to us, my wife Emma and I were active in our pursuit of living more in keeping with how we wanted to treat the planet, its animals, and our fellow humans. We were already ardent boycotters, believers in fair wages, in animal rights, in corporate responsibility. We signed petitions. We were vegans who mostly cooked from scratch. We even shopped locally, utilizing farmers’ […]
The Way Nature Provides Imagine walking down a country road. On one side of the road, you see acres and acres of corn grown in neat rows. On the other side of the road stands an old-growth forest filled with towering trees and a thick underbrush. If you were to ask anyone which side of the road produced the most food, almost everyone would say that the cornfield is a […]
There was a time, some years ago, in which I aspired to be a fiction writer, and in those years, I found inspiration in the words of authors who wrote fiction (Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins are two that feel prominent). From there, I entered the world of travel writing, and I studied the works of people (Pico Iyer, Paul Theroux, Tim Cahill, Bill Bryson) prominent in that field. I […]
After thirty years of engagement with Permaculture, it never ceases to amaze me how the Permaculture Design Course (PDC) changes peoples’ lives. This brilliant understanding of how to meet peoples’ needs, without working so hard, and at the same time learning to minimise waste was crafted by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren before I came along to connect with it. I’m also hugely aware that it has always been a […]
As a permaculture teacher one of the very first things I want to offer my students is a conceptual way to understand what permaculture is made up of. I want to answer the question, likely not yet asked, of ‘how do we make organisational sense of all this content that is being or about to be taught in a Permaculture Design Certificate?’. Permaculture is a vast field of knowledge, there […]
