I’ve seen a fair amount of folks reaching out on the internet for help with permaculture design. “How do I add permaculture to my property!” “Help make this more permaculture!” The one thing that I most often recommend to them to give structure to their project is the scale of permanence. It lets us know …
Category Archives: Permaculture Design
Permaculture and the Garden
I want to take a moment to address the idea that permaculture is only a kind of “gardening”. Nothing can be further from the truth! We create our world from the things around us, permaculture helps us arrange and optimize them. Sometimes, for any number of reasons, a garden is just not possible. Permaculture still …
Permaculture Prime Directive
Whether you’re for or against him, the election of Donald Trump to the POTUS is a clear signal that levels of disorder are increasing around us. If this trend continues the next shock of disorder will be even bigger. I think the direct results of this will be that which sustains us eventually will be consumed …
Permaculture Flower II
I’m feeling really good about my new thinking on the permaculture flower, my thinking has congealed a bit since I first posted on it. All of a sudden I see what I previously perceived as a mundane categorization, as a valuable tool when examining and balancing any system. David Holmgren, the co-originator of permaculture says …
Leveraging a Job
“…Although people deeply involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points, more often than not they push the change in the wrong direction.” – Donella Meadows This morning I had a realization that having a job is a very important leverage point; there is so much effect that we can create by how we work …
Design Intention
Permaculture seeks to impose thoughtful changes on both us and the land. Often these changes can require continual upkeep and burden us with chores. Perhaps that’s the lure of modern life, trading many little chores for a job and shopping. Creating systems that work on their own or very easily cuts down on the to …
Iterative Design Process
Simple in it’s form, complex in it’s function. The iterative design process (IDP) works recursively and is best used fractally. Fundamentally it is observation of all interacting parties to find leverage points that move us in the direction of goals, the greater the depth of the observation the more accurate the design. Goals & Ethics …
The Permaculture Flower I
So I’ve been working with the GLPDC to create lectures for our ongoing PDC. We’ve adopted using the permaculture flower, by David Holmgren, as a landmark for each topic but I’m thinking it works differently than we initially understood. Before we thought that a topic, say water, would manifest certain petals of the flower. Now I think …