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A Virtual Geoff Lawton Urges You to Cross the Line

We’ve just happened upon a rather unusual way of sharing the Permaculture ‘get out there and do it’ message. Someone has taken an interview Geoff did in California last year, and turned it into a rather impressive animation. Although it was a bit strange for Geoff to see himself portrayed in such a way, if it helps get the message across, then we figure so be it.

The end of the clip even appears to have cameo appearances from Bill Mollison and David Holmgren:

19 Comments

  1. It would be great if someone made a videogame about permaculture, i imagine as a simulation game like Simcity, where you could sart up with cetain topography and climate having a wide pallete of species to combine and so on…

    1. Yeah great idea! I was thinking of another kind of game to do with Permaculture, where you would have to do things efficiently within a time limit, like moving materials around or something, like you could have a little mini-game where you have to send water downhill in a race against an opponent, turning the elbow pipes in the swales and then running down to watch the dam overflow and stuff :D whoever gets the water to the fishponds at the bottom first, wins! Remember to respect the time limit or the fish will run out of oxygen and die! :P

  2. love that virtual world avatar of you Geoff – might need a bit of work on the mannerisms and form in the rendering but all-in-all imho i think its very effective, especially the use of virtual scenarios to communicate perspective in amongst the interview dialogue – i have to agree with Pedro Rodriguez above too – way cool

  3. Pedro – I work in video games, and I’ve had similar thoughts. It could be a worthwhile project. I’m in the process of designing a permaculture board game, useful for high school and permaculture classes as an educational tool. It can be played cooperatively on one board (everyone discusses how resources should be used), and competitively between multiple boards (the team with the most resources at the end wins).

    1. Hi Tim, would love to hear about your progress with the board game / see it / buy a copy! Do you have some sort of website for your permaculture games design (I know it might just be a side project for you at the moment, but I’m interested to know about it!)

  4. but the good life was designed to stop people breaking away from the system. It ridicules us and talks about self sufficiency. That word designed to keep people in the system.

  5. Pedro, I couldn’t agree more. I’d love to see a sandbox-style simulation of a small piece of land, where you can choose what to plant when and where, how to harvest etc, all modeled on real processes. So it is simulating permaculture principles, and to play it the best you have to learn how everything interacts. It would not only be a fun game, but a wonderful teaching and design tool for thinking about how to approach your own piece of land.

    There is potential here for a really great video game. I just have no idea how to make it.

    SimFarm remake anyone? only instead of tractors and cornfields, small plots and food forests.

    It would be complex, perhaps having climate, water, plant and soil modeling, and the interactions and exchanges between different plants, but it’s not an impossible thing.

    You have a sim-family, the goal is to turn a piece of land, either based on a real place via topographic information, or a randomly generated set of criteria, into a productive piece of land to give your sim-family food as well as profit.

    The fun would come with being open ended, you can do what you like, but the challenge would be doing that in a way that actually works with the system in play to produce a desirable result.

    Please, someone make this.

    1. Yes yes yes! Let’s start some kind of online group to brainstorm ideas! I can’t make games myself, but I am happy to give away my ideas for Permaculture based games :) my email is [email protected] if you would like to get in touch! Thanks.

  6. Some other comments on this video from the PermaScience Channel;

    osdias (19 hours ago)

    I’ve wanted to leave my desk job for a permaculture course… this might have just tipped me to cross the line :D

    AranyaGardens (1 week ago)

    Well done! This is fab a really motivating piece, very nicely done. Look out World, here comes PERMACULTURE!

    thesimulacre (1 week ago)

    At first I thought: “talking about permaculture in a human-created virtual environment is nonsensical!” But then I listened. Now it appears to be a great choice for the words… a GREAT choice.

    And thank you, Geoff. You are right on (at least I presume so by my calculations made from the safety of my [still] suburban surroundings).

    The voices always grow louder as you approach a crossroads.

  7. that video game would rock. Farmville is already one of the most popular games on facebook. Just put a permaculture twist on it!

  8. Erm… isn’t Permaculture a lot about about getting people to become grown ups and plant some real cabbages, rather than just virtual ones? Would hanging in front of the computer wasting time playing computer games really bring us closer to tangible solutions? I doubt it.

  9. Graham,

    well, actually, as you mention it – I’ve had an engineering bachelor student project running this year which was about writing a piece of software to aid in planning of small scale rainwater harvesting earthworks; basically, the idea is to feed it with a topographic map, some soil parameters that model infiltration and give mechanical properties, and climatic data and it allows you to answer questions such as how big a rainfall event would cause the system to overflow in what way, how much extra water in the soil to expect in comparison to not having done earthworks, etc. – and it also gives you a 3-d virtual reality tour of how the thing would in the end look like. (Everything under the umbrella of “computational engineering and design”, actually.)

    The problem with this is that the project student just recently decided to repeat year 3 of his studies, which would put this on hold unless I find someone else (= a permaculture-interested computer wizard who knows a bit about the Python programming language and is not afraid of some slightly more sinister maths than one encounters at school) who would be willing to work on this with me to advance it further.

  10. Hi Tom. The uploader changed the video to ‘private’ on YouTube. I’ve just embedded a public version, so it works now.

  11. Thanks Craig. I keep wanting to tell you that the work you’re doing is awesome. My main source of inspiration – thank you.

  12. Tim Auld –
    Are you still working on a permaculture board game?
    I have been thinking about a permaculture board game for a while now and am wondering if you are interested in collaborating in any way or if it would be possible for me to assist in anything?

    Cheers

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