EcoExplorers Madagascar 2010 from Shannon Kohlitz on Vimeo.

Here we are past July’s time for fleece, hat and socks, wouldn’t you believe! Manintsy – cold (25/16 °C day/night or less) was the semiarid southwest Madagascar in winter; winter in the dry southwest where ‘it never rains’. Well, never say ‘never’ and/or be prepared for rain in the no rain season and for beautiful double rainbows arching gently over the glowing morning skies….

Since our last update in February, ho avy has been on a ‘high season rainbow ride’ – exciting in a way, admittedly speedy and bumpy some of the time – more like a downhill slalom race against time, where falling over exposed tree roots is unavoidable. Retrospectively, it’s been a valuable growing time: our trees are growing and we are growing with them.

We especially enjoyed the rainbow of colors left behind the pens, pencils and brushes of Eco-Explorers – talented undergraduate students of the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design. These young students overflowing with creativity came to Madagascar expecting no rain. Although they got some, they seemed to greatly enjoy this mad ride, and so did we on ho avy & Madagascar Eco-Explorers’ tour and project service work in Ranobe.

A double rainbow morning

Some truly beautiful pieces of art were born on this three week long trip from mid May to June, exploring Madagascar and spending five days doing projects with ho avy in Ranobe. The students painted two interpretation panels: one for the native tree nursery and another one for the reforestation research center. Several oxen carts (and finally also oxen horns) were colorfully painted. Without doubt, the favorite motif is Star Wars. With pride this cart has been riding to the next village and the city of Toliara! Bar relief sculpturing on adobe walls on the reforestation center has adaptively used the wet walls leaving our planned spiny forest mural for another occasion in the future. A treadle pump for easier and playful water access has been built during the days of the group visit and another one completed in even shorter time by one volunteering student staying beyond the expedition.

Bar relief

Deep impressions have anchored in minds and hearts of these young people exploring Madagascar on their first step out of their secure homelands into the unknown. Madagascar is quite an experience.

Wildlife theme on centre

The 19-person art student group was the largest we’ve hosted in Ranobe since last December, adding significantly to the 4 Czech, 2 American, 1 French, 4 Israeli, and 2 Spanish visitors already spending several weeks with us – sharing their skills and expertise to advance various aspects of our program, from forest habitat description, GIS to business development. They have been a refreshing change for ho avy as well as our hosting community.

The most recent partner of ho avy was a team of four engineering masters students from the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan (www.hazomanga.org), who came to Madagascar with the group of the art students. The engineers give sustainable energy assessments and make conservation management recommendations. They collected solar data, built housing for ho avy’s solar system, designed and built a solar dryer, water filter and evaluated the feasibility of biofuels. The students interviewed the Ranobe community on wood, charcoal and water use issues. Mapping of land use, deforestation and forest recovery, set a good ground for a long-term monitoring research. Being a well organized, dynamic and enthusiastic team with women in majority, they creatively filled their free time with experimental baking in our solar box oven. Banana bread, chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin cookies, among others, turned out being delicious field yummies. Nicely done!

Clair, Brennen and Olivia taking solar data

Patty and Brennen constructing solar dryer

Ho avy’s daily interactions with the villagers since October 2009, with international visitors and cultural and language exchange, have been raising environmental awareness and building capacity. Needless to say, information starvation and curiosity is apparent among villages of all age groups. Ho avy has been collaborating with the GTZ and Sokapila organizations on implementing the Kit Mad’ere, a tool introducing environmental education to schools and community. A workshop was held in early April for teachers from the schools in Ranobe and Ambolimalailaka. In March, ho avy organized a workshop to improve farming methods: introducing the system of rice intensification (SRI). The workshop has been well attended and the method is now practiced on several FIMPAHARA fields.

Olivia with Tsiforse and Malai mapping deforestation

Improved and alternative technologies brought by ho avy seem to get adopted: the fuel efficient stove was in full operation, the biogas digester has been producing methane for the ladies to cook with for several months now. The output of the biogas digester is an excellent fertilizer and FIMPAHARA used it for their crop fields. Ho avy’s well, installed in December last year got a manual pump and has been in non-stop use by the villagers. Results of interviews show, the pump is greatly appreciated for easing everyday chores. The solar box oven has not had a break and delicious variations of bread, cakes, muffins, or roasted peanuts for snacks indicate a growing appreciation of solar energy as a passive cooking option.

Housing for solar panels designed by the MSc students

Speaking of solar – ho avy’s solar system is now located on the second floor of ho avy’s research center. Ho avy spiny forest research center will generate knowledge about how to conserve biodiversity through research, sustainable development and forest restoration. The center has been under construction over the last months – largely natural building, designed by Anthony, who has worked closely on it with the FIMPAHARA men. The building progress has been exciting, considering the tool limitations, e.g. a non-functional drill, so much of the building was done creatively – by hand and off the grid, with local wood, rock, roofing material, bamboo and adobe mix. The building is not far from being completed; we plan for an inauguration by the end of this year. The center’s surroundings are developing into a demonstration site of integrated sustainability, home gardening, multi-crop plots, agroforestry and more.

Agroforestry has been our focus activity since March. We raised fruit trees along with native trees in three tree nurseries on an area of 184 m2. Nearly 10 000 native trees and 5500 fruit and multi-purpose trees have been nurtured. FIMPAHARA collected 75 species of native and 5 non-native species for medicines, non-invasive fast wood propagation and oil-rich seeds. Up to June 2010 over 800 native and 750 fruit trees have been planted on 1.35 ha of FIMAHARA land: on edges of forest, in agroforestry polyculture plots and in live fences/hedges. Jointly with FIMPAHARA, we planted diverse fruit trees on ca 3 ha of crop fields. These efforts, i.e. planting indigenous and fruit species on disturbed forest edges and reforesting in belts, aim to assist ecological forest recovery. We want to create ‘ecotones’ (transitional habitats) favoring wildlife colonization and assisting seed dispersal. Planted trees have been monitored for survival and growth.

Just hanging out in the village

The local community has been enthusiastic to participate and support these agroforestry trials. The planted species included native fruit trees ofen harvested from the forest, locally planted bananas, papaya, mango, guava, lemons and tamarinds and tested varieties of species that are on the market, but not grown in Ranobe, such as litchi, clementine and orange, cashew, annona, passion fruit, pomegranate, avocado, loquat, date and coconut palms.

The community helps build the reforestation center

Ho avy’s involvement on site for the last quarters of a year has been an invaluable experience which allowed observing and figuring seasonality in terms of food growing. One has to skin-experience it, especially when coming from completely different climate. By living through the ‘cold’ parts of the year – we got it right now with April/May potato planting time. Besides potatoes, 1 ha of garden has onion and garlic, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, red beets and radishes, carrot and parsley, basil, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, a variety of beans, peanuts, sesame, flex, several kinds of squash and melons. A few sunflowers have made our gardening efforts more cheerful. Malagasy people like rice, but they also like flowers and so do we. This is indeed a very exciting step forward to community-scale gardening, greater diversity of food production and important dietary supplements, that have been largely lacking.

Watering the nursery

For filling these gaps, we need to continue our mission; we let the exciting energy of the upcoming spring enter: rising temperatures, new beautiful flowers and fresh leaves or magnificent courtships of birds, bring inspiration to the next phase of ho avy’s efforts in Ranobe. We have a few exciting goals and future prospects and will mobilize our efforts to reach them before this year’s end, moving step by step towards a sustainable future. Stay tuned if you’d like to hear more in few months….

Photo galleries:

• Forest, wildlife and research
• Eco-Explorer’s art student trip
• MSc. students
• Ho avy and community interactions
• Technical alternatives
• Center construction
• Nursery, agroecology, agroforesty & gardening

You could spend $50,000 and the rest of your life visiting all these amazing people and seeing their projects, or a hundred dollars now to meet them all in the one place at the same time. – Sarah-Jane, Star APC10 Volunteer, talking with Cairns locals at the Sustainable Living Expo last weekend.

Only One Month to go! We are not booked out. But you must register now!

This is our last APC10 Update before the event, which we have come to realise is likely to be the most important gathering of permaculture minds. The key themes in this convergence will be transition initiatives, engagement with the mainstream and renewing our networks and movement’s structure. In our extensive correspondence with permi people world-wide, there is a call for permaculture to move away from the margin to become an effective and credible voice in the future of Australia’s planning and preparations for the changes that will come as a result of climate change, peak oil, economic pertubations, migration shifts, etc.

We have summarised our plenary presenters below but we have an impressive line-up of speakers from around the world – in all about 50 people. Our programme is a conventional conference style programme, but interaction, discussion, round tables and time-out to network are vital to the convergence’s success. We will be testing our capacity to skype in speakers from around Australia and the globe – doing so on a shoe-string budget with volunteers. The complete and final programme is on the website: www.apc10.org

This is not a big-league corporate event with money to burn, yet it has attracted the attention of some of the world’s most influential environmental philanthropists including our own Dick Smith and Sir Richard Branson who, though unable to attend, is very interested in the potential of permaculture. A couple of the Branson’s family members are coming to do the PDC and attending APC10. This is a statement about the credibility and reputability of permaculture and its transformational potential. This comes from the decades of very hard work put in by permaculture educators, business developers, community organisers who have been determined to make the principles and concepts of permacultue work in practice. We pay tribute to Bill and David, and the generations of people they trained, and feel honoured to be able to carry the mantle onwards.

APC10 would really not be possible if it wasn’t for our sponsors. We have built genuine personal relationships with each, and we thank them for their involvement in helping APC10 – bringing speakers from overseas, supporting registrations from developing countries, providing IT services, catering and staging, advertising and promotions, and of course, the venue itself. And also our volunteers and members of Permaculture Cairns who have never doubted what our small group can achieve and have thrown their all into making this a world-class, memorable, celebratory and professional event. We love each and every one of them.

So if you have not yet registered please do so without delay. Your attendance, at APC10, is vital.

Plenary Guest Speakers:

Major General Michael Jeffery, CEO, Outcomes Australia. One of the challenges Australia faces in the 21st century is that of making the transformation from old technologies used in our current, predominantly industrial, farming systems to the new reality that we need to be more ‘in tune’ with nature. In so doing, we need to recognise the new realities of climate change, such as more erratic rainfall, desertification of the landscape, degradation of our soils, the impact of a burgeoning population, the shrinking of the farm sector and the explosion in costs of petroleum based inputs on sustainable food production.

The philosophy of Permaculture advocates the need to work with nature rather than against it, and this goal complements of Outcomes Australia. Both recognise that water should be seen as our primary national strategic asset and managed accordingly and that restoration of the health of our soils is fundamental to the sustained productivity of our agricultural landscape.

Sonya Wallace and Janet Millington, Transition Towns. As part of Australia’s first Transition Initiative, Sonya and Janet delivered Australia’s very first Energy Descent Action Plan. Since then they’ve been working on a peak oil and climate change policy group for their local government authority, and have presented at national government conferences on Transition Towns, Energy Descent Action Planning and how permaculture can be successfully applied to communities and regions.

Gunter Pauli, ZERI – Skype from Belgium. Gunter Pauli is a passionate proponent of green development and a clean economy. In 1994, Mr. Pauli founded the Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives ZERI a network of 100 Universities around the world, developing pilot innovations that could change prevailing economical business models. A worldwide network of business systems and communities could create a hundred million jobs, establish social funds and guide economies and societies toward sustainable zero waste production.

Gunter Pauli’s Blue Economy promotes a business model that speaks to permaculture principles. In nature the output from every natural process provides an input for another. There is no waste. A business model that supports less waste and emissions should be established as a global standard. Solutions to problems that are elegant in their simplicity and striking in their effectiveness, demonstrate that a new economic model is feasible and permits innovation and creativity to identify possible paths towards a better future.

Bill Mollison, Co-founder of Permaculture & Geoff Lawton. Inspiring, authoritive, thoughtful and often ‘off the cuff’, Bill, Geoff and their families are visiting APC for 2 days of our 4 day convergence and will provide the Saturday evening keynote presentations.

Russ Grayson, Permaculture V3.0. Russ kicks off the Official Convergence on Sunday 26th encouraging the movement to self-reflect. He will ask us to consider some key questions about the effectiveness of permaculture as advocates for change and asks how does permaculture need to change to more fully engage in public and enlarge its influence? How dow we go about creating a new Permaculture 3.0?

Daryl Hannah, Environmental Campaigner, actor and permaculturalist, Gala Dinner Keynote Speaker. Daryl will come to APC fresh from gaining her design certificate with Darren J.Doherty, but she is not a permaculture novice. Attracted to simple living, sustainable housing design and wholistic management principles in agriculture, Daryl is one of the most down-to-earth celebrities on the planet. For her environmental activism in North America, she’s rated amongst the top three most influential American actors alongside George Clooney, Leonardo di Caprio and Brad Pitt. Daryl believes in using media focus on promoting ethical and progressive causes and has used her fame to draw attention to renewable energy, indigenous people’s rights, and food security issues. She’s humble and honoured to take a place within the permaculture movement and wants to understand how she can help promote, educate and progress its goals.

Mark O’Connor, Can Permaculture survive Population Growth? Australia is set for a population of 140 million by 2100. High density cities, where most Australians live, will leave little space for gardens and making permaculture a pipe-dream for many. Mark, co-author of Overloading Australia, shows how this push works, and how we can beat it.

David Holmgren, Final Keynote Speaker, Permaculture for the future; understanding the lineage and preparing for surprise (via Skype). In the final plenary of APC10 David Holmgren co-originator of the permaculture concept, draws on lessons from over three decades of permaculture thinking and activism to distill pointers for using ethics and design principles to surf the energy descent future (without being dumped by king waves). This will be an upbeat presentation that encapsulates how the next generation of permaculture activists can confidently and creatively face the cascading crises that are unfolding all around the world. In keeping with the theme of creatively adapting to the energy descent future, David will be giving his presentation via Skype from his home, Melliodora in central Victoria.

We’ll see YOU in September!

Warm Tropical Permi Blessings
The APC10 Organising team and volunteers

Tongue-in-cheek instructional video

Note: This is an update on PRI’s position and direction, and an opportunity for you to get paid to help!

The short version: We’re now paying you to write for us! Click here to get started.

The background/long version follows:

Over the last two years since I took over the running of this site, I’ve been pleased to see significant growth in traffic. I’m not so narrow-minded as to believe this is just due to my efforts or Geoff and Nadia Lawton’s or the rest of the PRI team, however. Aside from the tremendous support and input from the wider permaculture community, I also note that current events and the spread of information through the internet is threatening to actually wake the world up – and this ‘awakening’ is seeing an unprecedented growth in interest in sustainability, transition and the creation of resilient people systems. This interest certainly isn’t coming too soon, but better late than never.

For whatever reasons, though, this site is today regularly recognised as one of the, or even the, leading permaculture website worldwide. This has come about with a lot of help from readers like yourself, and permaculture project leaders and workers worldwide. This growth is helping increase permaculture exposure, and is helping our aim to drive permaculture into mainstream consciousness. (Examples: CNN, SBS, ABC, etc..)

But, whenever a site or entity grows, there are always questions about its purpose. I want to share the Permaculture Research Institute’s intentions as succinctly as possible here, and also solicit your support to help us in our goals – goals I believe many of you subscribe to. And no, I’m not asking for donations! (Although these are always appreciated!)

The Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) is an independently audited (annually) non-profit entity. But, it’s a non-profit with a difference. While a large part of our focus is on project aid work, where we seek to implement permaculture solutions in some of the most challenging places in the world, we don’t subscribe to the traditional strategies that NGOs often ‘utilise’. It was my personal prediction that many NGOs will, as our energy and economic woes intensify, lose their funding as charitably-minded people and businesses lose their liquidity and reprioritise expenditure. From some of the NGOs I’ve worked with and spoken to over the last couple of years, these predictions seem to be coming to pass. More and more people and businesses are finding they just don’t have excess funds to pass on to ‘feel good’ causes. In a peak oil world, this can translate to huge humanitarian disasters as dependent populations find supports removed.

In other words, if we only ran on donations, we’d be as finite an endeavour as industrial civilisation.

The PRI, instead, wants to see permaculture education and uptake spread – despite a failing/flailing economy. We thus seek to be as resilient financially as our on-the-ground systems are biologically. As such, our methods differ not only in the solutions proposed (we prefer to teach a man to fish, and how to manage fish stocks sustainably, rather than just dump piles of them at his feet) but also in the financial model that keeps our permaculture evangelism growing and working while we’re still, reluctantly, in the ‘money economy’ era of the society we find ourselves in and are trying to transition ourselves out of.

Another point of difference, while I’m discussing this, is that we regard the suburbs of Los Angeles or Brisbane just as ‘challenging’ as rural Ethiopia or Vietnam – in that people in ‘first world’ countries are acutely vulnerable in so many ways (economy, energy, centralised food systems, etc.), but just don’t see it, nor where they’re headed – and thus don’t see the desperate need to transition to a life based on real-time sunlight. In contrast, ‘two thirds’ world people are generally struggling on a day to day basis, so can be highly appreciative of tools that make their lives more productive, resilient and efficient – and they are often barely only a generation or so removed from a sustainable, low-impact lifestyle, so their skill-set is usually far more practical. As such permaculture ‘aid work’ is just as essential in London and Melbourne as it is in Lesotho and Mombai. Given what’s looming on the horizon, some might say even more so….

The Permaculture Master Plan

Anyway, the PRI seeks to develop and support the growth of successful, mutually beneficial, interdependent relationships (both between individuals and communities, and between these and the land at their feet), with these successful interdependencies occurring by largely self-reliant individuals cooperating with each other to meet human needs in holistically sound ways. The emphasis here is that we seek to build relationships that are mutually supportive/symbiotic, and not competitive. Just as in the plants and organisms around us and at our feet, we believe the success of the permaculture movement as a whole is entirely dependent on our leaving behind the selfish ambition that most of us in the west have been programmed with through our education, media and through our participation in the contemporary, competitive economic model almost universally applied today – and instead to find ways to interact harmoniously to support each other.

Furthermore, we seek for our projects to transition to localised resilience in food and other base human requirements (housing, clothing, etc.), but also to become financially self-sufficient. As we do not believe in contributing to globalisation, but, rather, to help transition away from it, we do not encourage projects to be self sufficient through sales of produce or goods, or at least not to make this their primary endeavour, but, rather, to sell knowledge, so the people around them can begin to grow and produce their own goods. The idea, expressed by our Permaculture Master Plan, is to educate the world in permaculture design principles and application – making each project site both an impressive demonstration site of what is possible and achievable by and for local people in their respective regions, as well as a professional education site sharing the ‘how’ of it. Following this demonstrate-and-educate recipe enables project leaders and their teams to concentrate on transitioning/building the community around them while course and consultation fees finance this evangelisation.

We don’t see any losers in this scenario. The ideal and ultimate goal is that these projects will self-replicate to the point where they will saturate the global landscape with mutually interdependent and resilient communities of knowledgeable permaculture practitioners – setting the stage for a softer landing on the peak-oil downslide. Although the income from course fees would gradually diminish over time, as more and more demonstration/education sites multiply – this income would become increasingly redundant/unnecessary as the growth of resilient permaculture sites and communities fills the void created by a crashing money economy.

Time is of the Essence

If you’re following the logic so far, you will recognise that time is of the essence. To have paying students finance the ballooning of permaculture demonstration/education sites worldwide, we need to get a large portion of this ‘evangelisation’ work done before the economic mayhem born of peak oil and climate change begins to hit us even harder than it already has. At the moment, increasingly, people are seeing the need to get permaculture-educated while they still have the finances to do so. Many can still afford to take flights to learn at locations where their hardish western currency can not only train themselves in modern permaculture design systems whilst gaining valuable indigenous knowledge but also subsidise the training of poverty-stricken locals. This will not always be the case. We’re working in a window of opportunity that will close in the ensuing years.

Making the Most of the Time Window We Have

As such, we feel that leveraging the impact of this website (www.permaculture.org.au) is paramount. I note many permaculture individuals endeavouring to develop their own readership in fragmented efforts that, often with the best of intentions, fail to achieve much. The reason they fail to achieve much is that it takes a lot of time and dedication to grow a website, and that growth is largely dependent on a consistent stream of quality content that keeps people returning to, and linking to, your site. People are too busy on the ground to maintain such sites, or dedicate staff to the task. A million small websites sharing intermittent posts is not nearly as efficient as a few larger sites with far higher traffic counts sharing regular engaging content. I like to think of the networking and leveraging of grass-roots permaculture labour and resources – to build mainstream momentum in all things permaculture – as represented by that largest of all biological organisms: mycelium. While various plants and rocks and microorganisms appear independent of each other, there is a common link – in soil biology – that connects them all. In like manner, the internet, perhaps one of the few real gifts the industrial revolution has given us, is enabling us to connect and share our energies in symbiotic and synergistic ways for the benefit of all. For us to reach mainstream consciousness, funneling our experiences and knowledge through reliable website ‘portals’ is, I can say categorically, far more efficient than expecting readers to browse a thousand sites to get the information they need.

How to Leverage Our Collective Energies to Spread Permaculture Fast

The lifeblood of my work, that of trying to drive permaculture thinking into mainstream consciousness, is found in sharing quality reports from around the world. My logic goes like this: when people in mainstream consumer society confront permaculture, if they believe it’s only practiced by a few sandal-wearing souls living on the fringes of society, they’ll conclude "nice idea, but it’s too little, too late", and they’ll write the concept off as being idealistic dreaming. But if, instead, they realise the reality – that this is a movement of many tens of thousands of people working, right now, in almost every country on every continent of this jewel of an earth we call home – then they’ll instead think to themselves – "hell, change is afoot, and I’m getting left behind – I want to get involved, and now!"

The work is happening, and it’s building momentum. But while the word ‘Permaculture’ is now finally in the Oxford English dictionary, it needs to be on the lips and in the hands of everyone if humanity-saving goodness is to reach that tipping point where it’ll take off and meet the enormous challenges we face today.

Those tens of thousands of people are working hard, accomplishing great things, but they’re often too busy to look up and around to view where they fit in the big picture – the big mycelium fungal net, as it were. I would like to say to those people that by writing articles and sharing your work, frustrations, challenges, successes, observations and inspiration, your effort to report, as an ‘element’ in your system, does in itself serve several ‘functions’.

1. You inspire others to imitate/emulate your example.
2. You educate people in the ‘how’ of it.
3. You make your work known. People can’t help and support you if they don’t know you or your work exists. Such assistance can come by way of encouragement, gifting practical knowledge/information that is relevant to you, and actual physical involvement and financial support.
4. You enable us (PRI) to better understand your situation, and tailor support to assist, assuming you are seeking such assistance.

As many of you will know, I regularly undertake to do such reports myself, and have done so in places as far afield as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Chile, Jordan, the West Bank, Slovakia (and), Australia, (and, and, etc.). But, while I will continue to seek to profile successful examples of permaculture around the world, we want to hear your views, your experiences, your challenges, your successes and gain knowledge and inspiration from your particular observations. You don’t have to understand the science of web promotion – that’s my job. You don’t have to understand how to deal with websites, image optimisation and editing – that’s also my job. I get tired of hearing my own voice, as I’m sure do our readers. We want to hear yours! I want to see the permaculturists out there, from novice to guru expert (we don’t believe in gurus – but rather, real people doing real doable things), sharing their knowledge for the benefit of all.

Get paid to spread knowledge and inspiration

And guess what – we’ll even pay you to do it! Recognising people are very busy, and that in today’s world time is food, we will pay to hear your stories on a per-post basis. Click here to learn more.

We of course still welcome volunteer posts. Again, we’re a non-profit, so the more money we save the more we can inject into starting and assisting projects worldwide. In the last year, for example, we have donated approximately $100,000 to projects worldwide, either by way of direct donations or through teaching or consultation time. Over the next year we anticipate this figure will increase again. And we’ve assisted further through my time – utilising this high-traffic website to bring course adverts for diverse locations worldwide to the attention of our readers. We’ve seen sites where they were struggling to find students, but after an advert here the courses filled up. This is what it’s all about! This is funneling information and resources to spread permaculture as fast as we can!

This website and our forums (which we’ve recently upgraded by the way) have been a gift from PRI to the permaculture community. We’re very glad to see them getting utilised. I still see many people, however, not quite understanding our ’services’. Many almost appear to think we’re some kind of independently wealthy (or even publicly funded?) entity with a duty to spread research knowledge and long term analysis of various aspects of permaculture systems, and share it freely, not understanding that within our current capitalist framework such important but time-consuming work is impossible to do, simply because it’s price prohibitive. We remain financially independent, yes, but only due to the hard work of people within the team – and that work is based on classroom and field education. We’d love to initiate research-and-document projects, and create unending ‘how-to’ videos and articles, but doing so takes time and money. As such, we encourage all permaculturists to undertake these tasks as they are able, and to share them to the largest audience possible. We’ll help subsidise this work, by paying per-post as an encouragement/incentive to take the time out to do so.

So, in the busyness of life, I hope you will see that, as I’ve often said to PDC students, reporting on your work and observations is just as important as the physical design work itself. Make your voice heard. Share your knowledge and we’ll ensure it gets maximum exposure.

I look forward to receiving and sharing your articles!

P.S. Until today we’ve had excellent results from our arrangement with people interested to advertise their courses on our site. In exchange for a separate non-promotional article (i.e. something inspirational or educational or both), we’ve put their course adverts up at no charge. This arrangement will continue.

Experience? Well yes, but that’s something that you can learn along the way. You don’t need to be the World’s best Graphic artist or AutoCAD genius, but you do need to be creative, have an eye for landscape patterning and a PDC in hand.

I just finished my first Permaculture design commission and I was hoping to share some of the process with you. Within the 11 years of experience with my own landscape design firm, I rarely put pen to paper with design. I found success even while employing experienced people to draw plans and document. My job then, like now, is main-frame design. I leave the finer points to specialists.

Your job as a designer is to know the process. You have the contacts in place to co-ordinate, instruct, manage, and even educate, if the professionals you engage are not permaculture systems trained.

What’s the process?

The process is the series of events that you will need to successfully master over time and refine to suit each client. Don’t think just because you’re now in the realm of the Permaculture world, full of ethics and good will, that people’s attitude towards paying money for your services will change, or the value they place on your time. I spend a lot of time speaking with my clients on the phone before I even think of getting out of my office chair to go and see them! (Mind you that office chair looks over the Pacific Ocean, and that’s hard enough to leave!)

Google map with topo map overlay for property.

The reason I question my potential clients so much is to look at some basics: 1) What’s their vision? 2) How do they plan to implement a permaculture design once the design is completed? 3) What do they think it’s going to take to achieve their vision? You can go and spend thousands of your clients dollars on reports, colour plans, graphs, and yet a client may still look at your work and won’t be able to find north on the map.

In my experience, it is easy for clients to have grand visions of what it means to live a sustainable lifestyle. Many have romantic ideas about growing their own food, reusing their waste and building compost without considering that yes(!) it is a lot of work: it’s going to take maintenance! I often refer my clients back to question three from above. “What do they think it’s going to take to achieve their vision?" "Oh that’s easy, we’ll just plant some veggies in the corner and use the water from the water tank". Stop!!! At the moment a client says “Oh that’s easy” that’s a warning bell that the clients you’re dealing with don’t understand the undertaking or commitment of what they are dealing with…. and your backside has not event left the seat yet.

The vision they expressed to you was one of abundance. They saw food growing from every corner of their property, water harvesting systems, and miles of food forest and animal systems. Yet, a realistic and practical maintenance schedule wasn’t a part of their vision. Home renovation and landscape gardening TV shows that flood our screens sell the easy 30min crash course of how to construct a garden. From that, so many feel capable and experienced enough to chuck in a garden. The television’s easy sell often misses the accounting related to the cost of design, cost of project management, labour and the amount of people behind the scenes coordinating the process. So often their vision doesn’t match the reality of implementation. As a designer, it’s your job to look at the process and find the best process to suit the client’s needs and, most of all, the client’s time & budget.

It is encouraging that we’ve seen a popular trend in going "green" or "sustainable" these days. Yet, whatever the trend may be, you’re going to get calls from people that have the money to do great things and have all the good intentions but very little of the design skills needed to make a practical system work. If they don’t understand how permaculture systems work and how to use them, it is your job to look at the process with them. There is an education element in that process that will allow you spend time with your client. You can show them how their plan will evolve and come together, realistically. I find it helpful to remember the small steps. Humans are very funny creatures. You don’t want to scare clients away with over-the-top architect plans or overly complicated specifications. These will be the parts of the design process that you will need to break down for your clients and incorporate into your plans: reports that you will receive from the consultants you engage.

Once you’ve worked with your clients to articulate a comprehensive vision, how do your clients plan to implement a permaculture design once the design is completed? Well, if they say to you “we plan to tender it out, get it installed by professionals and have a gardener look after it”. That’s fine and that will happen, but the questions you have to ask your self are: Are you cut out for the massive commitment to do the planning to a standard from where a contractor can pick up the plans and give the client a price to construct based on your plans? Could you set out a bill of quantities? Can you draw scale technical plans?

Your client may express "We want to install it ourselves!" O.K.! But even if they install it themselves, do you know the construction process to document for your client to follow? Will you need to do site visits during the design process? How do you move forward as a designer here? So this is where you need set out what your skill level is; how you could service this client without biting off more than you could chew. Are you capable of setting up a process by where you consult to your new clients, get the vision, and engage your technical professionals? Do you know how to find professionals that have the skills to put full landscape architect designed plans together with your permaculture main frame experience (water, access, structures)? Can you engage a horticulturalist, engineer, drafts person, etc?

These are very important questions we as permaculture designers need to ask before we leave the chair and get our minds around the design process. That’s just the first phone call! A good use of a website in this process can show your potential clients how you work and what services and processes you follow to get them a result. I have found that putting prices for types of design work, like consultation, looking at sizes of properties (urban – suburban – small farms – broad acre) and giving clients prices on deliverables within each design size works well.

Google map overlay with proposed design systems placed as a concept

I have included some concept pictures of plans throughout the process on this first commission. I used Google maps to place a contour map overlay over the Google image to give me very rough idea of how the farm looks and where I can start looking at the big three (water, access, and structures). It is wise to never fully trust a contour map unless you have had a surveyor on site with a highly detailed topographical plan. Being on the ground with a laser level for a day will save you in the long run. Whether a small urban garden or a 500 acre farm, walking the site step-by-step, meter-by-meter, is the only way to do it.

I use a very simple program – Microsoft Paint. I know of others out there using Google SketchUp and other programs that allow more flexibility. You can see where I mark, using different colours, elements that would be used as the base of the concept. I then print out the Google map on A2 size paper. I then use tracing paper to draw in property lines, and contour lines. I mark the swales, dams, farm tracks, roads, swale crossings, and then structures. While on the property the whole day is spent with a measuring wheel in hand looking at revegetation areas and pasture cropping. You might say, “Why don’t you just use a scale plan to mark them out?” You don’t know the farm until you walk them and take notes on what each area is and what it requires. I then, again on the tracing paper, colour it with different markers to show swale trees, bamboo, gabion, fences, rock outcrops for non workable land, etc…. Then once I have enough detail (and you will only know this once you hand it to your AutoCAD genius or in my case a graphic artist, if they can look at it and make sense of it then you job is done), then you end up with what I have shown in the site plan Master Plan.

I like a graphic artist’s finish. It looks more natural in its application and more detailed. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being very basic and 10 being very detailed, this master plan would be about a six. If my approach interests you, I’m setting up (Landscape) Permaculture Designing Courses next year in Victoria, NSW & QLD.

These courses will spend time looking at the steps of consultation, designing, drawing, pricing your time and quoting while also focusing on business management and how to get yourself started. The details are listed below.

The Aim of the Program:

I’m committed to training creative, confident and professionally superior permaculture designers. On completion of your course you will be entitled to design within the permaculture field, fully competent to undertake the following tasks:

• Creating sustainable, functional permaculture designs. (Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. It seeks to provide a sustainable and secure place for living things on this earth. Functional design sets out to achieve specific ends, and prime directives. Every component of a design should function in many ways. Every essential function should be supported by many components.)
• Designing concepts and plans for urban, rural and aid projects with water, access, structures.
• Producing concept plans, planting plans, and site maintenance schedules.
• Preparation of concept drawings for land re-contouring and retaining.
• Preparation of construction and working drawings for hard landscaping items (not requiring specialist engineering and when permitted by law).
• Managing the contractor bidding and the installation of the design on behalf of the client.
• Running a professional permaculture design business.

What you will learn?

The Permaculture (Landscape) Design covers every aspect of garden and landscape design as well as other topics concerned with the setting up and running of a professional permaculture design and consulting business. You will learn things a professional permaculture designer needs to know.

1. Project Assessment: You will learn how to talk with the Client about their concerns, assess the potential of the site, ascertain the client’s needs, suggest the best course of action, and give a written quotation for design work.
2. Site Survey: You will learn to measure a site, including surveying ground levels, and use this data to draw an
   accurate and useful survey (base) plan.
3. Concept Plan: Showing a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the proposed design, this drawing is the starting point in the development of a new garden. You will learn to create exciting and functional designs and present them to your clients as attractive concept plans.
4. Planting Plan: You will learn to design the planting scheme to complement the new design. Preparing detailed
   planting plans and schedules are covered for your climate.
5. Hard Landscape Construction: You will learn about hard landscape construction and materials. This will enable you to design viable permaculture hardscapes and structures to enhance your designs.
6. Ground Contouring Design: You will learn to recognize a site’s greater potential through re-contouring, and how to produce concept plans detailing the new ground levels, swales, dams and house pad levels.
7. Running a professional design and consulting business: You will learn all the aspects of running your own business in a professional manner. This includes dealing with Clients, effective communication, getting new business, industry protocols, working to a Client’s budget, bidding and tendering, and writing technical specifications.

How long does it take?

Intro Design (intense 24 hour) courses run over a Fri – Sat – Sun weekend will cover all the areas and give you a basic idea of design to get your business started. There will be one teacher plus two teacher aids per course. This gives the course a very personal touch and attention to detail.

Full Design courses (96 hours) will cover the process in depth and home work set during the week. The course is run over 1 month, 3 days a week. Fri, Sat, Sun for 12 days. There will be one teacher plus two teacher aids per course. This gives the course a very personal touch and attention to detail.

Course Cost

• Intro Course 24hr 3x 8-hour days = $295 per student, limited to 30 students.
• Full Design Course. 96hr, 12x 8-hour days = $1250.00 per student limited to 10 students.

Program Content

This is a brief outline of the main topics included in the program. The course material informative with many pictures and diagrams used to illustrate concepts. You will be taught and encouraged to think and solve problems.

• 24, information-packed study modules covering all aspects of professional Permaculture design.
• 3 relevant, hands-on assignments reflecting the actual work done by Permaculture designers.
• Several useful portfolios to aid you in developing your designs.
• 3 full, real-life permaculture design projects (no installation is required for any projects).
• several small urban design projects (no installation is required).
• continual assessment and feedback to keep you informed of your progress.

The Study Modules

1. Course overview; Equipment and Materials; Drawing to Scale.
2. Classification and Naming of plants; Plant physiology; Soil in the landscape.
3. Introduction to the different types of landscape drawings; learning to draw.
4. The design process; analyzing a site; discovering the client’s needs; introduction to site surveying; writing a design proposals.
5. Site surveying – theory and practical.
6. The drawing sheet and title block; lettering and titling; the concept plan.
7. The zoning and functional placement of areas.
8. Major permaculture design project #1.
9. Design principles and design development.
10. Solving site problems; function and safety.
11. Surveying ground levels – theory and practical.
12. Drawing elevations, cross-sections and working drawings.
13. Major permaculture design project #2.
14. Planting design; color theory, shape and texture.
15. Designing; how to choose the right plants; the planting plan.
16. Water, natural pools and ponds, swales & dams.
17. Hard landscaping materials; site contouring and leveling.
18. Retaining walls; paving and other horizontal surfacing.
19. Introduction to timber construction; steps and ramps; walls; fences and screens.
20. Decorative structures; using trees, shrubs, hedges, vines.
21. Major permaculture design project #3.
22. Natural habitat; maintenance of design; eco-friendly design.
23. Small urban gardens; functional planting; irrigation, estimating installation costs for budgetary purposes.
24. Business procedures; documents and contracts; the client-designer-contractor relationship; specification writing; the bidding process; project facilitation; costing your design services; getting started; promoting your business: final design project – an exploration of design creativity.

Expressions of interest for this course in your area can be directed to Nick Huggins at hugginsn (at) bigpond.net.au

In partnership with Sust`aina ble Molokai and the Ho`ala Hou Program, the Permaculture Research Institute USA is proud to announce an upcoming series of key Permaculture courses on the Island of Molokai, Hawaii.

We are offering the following four foundational courses between October and December this year:

• Permaculture Design Certificate Course with Andrew Jones and Shenaqua Sookhoo-Jones, Oct 10-22
• Practicum: Incorporating Traditional Hawaiian Plants, Foods and Fuels into a Permaculture Design with Andrew Jones and Hunter Heaivilin, Oct 25-29
• PDC Teacher Training Course with Andrew Jones and Shenaqua Sookhoo-Jones, Nov 1-6
• Earthworks with Geoff and Nadia Lawton, Dec 6-10

These courses will be held in conjunction with the Ho`ala Hou Program, a substance abuse and prevention program that works with youth and families to set up up community garden plots. Courses will take place on Ho`ala Hou’s 20-acre site.

This series is also part of an island-wide initiative with local nonprofit Sust`aina ble Molokai to work toward the goals of the Molokai Sustainability Plan, a plan created by the people of Molokai that honors Hawaiian traditional and cultural pathways alongside modern strategies for a sustainable future.

For more information and to register for these courses, please visit the Permaculture Research USA website at www.permacultureusa.org.

Aloha and A hui hou!

This video can be downloaded in high resolution from Vimeo (see ‘About this video’ section on lower right side’).

I hope you’ll enjoy this clip. More, I hope it encourages you to dare to be different, and dare to have your work noticed. The garden we profile in the video above, as you’ll discover after watching it, has just won a national competition held by the Jordanian Department of Education – for schools who incorporate environmental projects into their curriculum. This means that thousands of schools, in what is arguably the most water-stressed country on the planet, now have the possibility to learn from this humble example of permaculture in action – and get inspired to do similar.

Special thanks to Lesley Byrne for her enthusiastic support, and to Nadia Lawton for her vision and determination to help her own people – and in so doing setting such an excellent example for us all.

Our international PDCs use the schools’ project in its learning exercises;
Participants act as judges for our schools’ competitions. This both helps to
motivate the schools (prizes for best school, best parent, best child and best
teacher are awarded bi-annually) and is a learning exercise for the
international participants.

Tichafa, our facilitator/consultant, trainer for ReSCOPE – 15 years experience around southern Africa

In much of Africa, environmental problems and rural depravation are closely tied together. The rural poor lack access to education which means they have no chance to earn better incomes. Stuck in a poverty trap, they often resort to practices which degrade the very environment that supports them; clearing indigenous woodland to make charcoal, overstocking animals, or planting harmful species which give fast cash rewards such as Eucalyptus and so on. Population growth, of course, worsens all this. As a result land is wrecked and won’t produce enough food to feed them.

In the case of Ethiopia we are all familiar with the dust bowl image and the starving kids. Geldof’s Live-Aid was supposed to put an end to all that in the 80’s, but 30 years on many communities there are still reliant on handouts. In fact it’s the same in much of Africa. Why? It’s not that the land does not have the capacity to produce the food. There are many places on earth which are less productive but people manage to grow what they need. It’s not that the people are lazy either. Women especially, live a life of constant toil and drudgery in many areas of the continent.

Rainwater is harvested from all roof tops on our service buildings
–photo shows gutters from restaurant and kitchen taking water into a 1000 litre
plastic tank which is situated at the top corner of our zone 1 vegetable gardens.

So, how can communities sustainably manage their land, producing from it while respecting the function of the ecological processes which allow that production? Permaculture is the answer. But in Africa there are a different set of challenges to overcome in getting communities to implement PC on the ground than are faced in the rest of the world.

Firstly there is the lack of education. If people cannot understand you, how do you get concepts across to them? Uneducated people often lack the ability to challenge their own assumptions. If you ask them why they use a particular practice, you will often get the reply “we do it this way here”. To some extent that may be a sign that it works – if their grandfathers did it, it must work. The problem is that there is generally a far greater population than there was two generations ago – and what may have been both productive and sustainable then, may not be now, when there are 10 times as many people. To add to this, a certain scepticism of the “new fangled” has crept into many communities, as they have time and again been duped with new "wonder" products from bio-tech companies seeking to rip them off, and quite rightly too.

The drip irrigation which is fed by the same tank (it is also filled from
the mains when there is no rain).

Other challenges are the lack of technology, infrastructure and communications. It is often said that PC is information intensive. If there is no internet access, even no books available, how do we access information to learn more about the elements of our system? Similarly without the high tech equipment we have in the west, how do we develop the systems that are implemented in the west?

Another challenge is the lack of capital. When most people are on the bread line how are they going to get in a load of new equipment to start implementing new systems of production? There certainly are funds out there. Many organisations are pouring millions of dollars into Africa each year. But funders have motives of their own and conditions that go with them, as Andy Homer from a project in Morocco recently noted. It will soon become clear to anybody who goes deeper into the aid game that developing community independence is not really what it’s all about. Much of the time the charitable foundations are set up by businesses, who donate their profits to avoid tax. However the foundation will then give the aid with a view to supporting the sales of the same business’ own products – which may be hybrid seeds, fertilisers, agricultural equipment, or even surplus grain that was not consumed in the west! If these NGOs got the Africans producing their own food, it would actually take a big chunk out of their own funder’s market. A lot bureaucrats would lose cushy jobs in big glass buildings with chauffeur driven 4WDs and weekly 5-star conventions all around the world. In fact, for them, supporting Permaculture would be downright stupid!

The same drip irrigation system in close-up. The system has been devised using
locally available materials – hose pipe, iron reinforcing bar, plastic water
bottles (cut into sleeves to increase infiltration/prevent run off and hold the
hose above the ground so holes are not blocked by mud) and
acacia thorns (to regulate the drip holes).

So, where do you begin to tackle such monumental challenges? Well, we use Permaculture principles of course! Start small and scale up. And who are the smallest people? The kids! And where do you (or should you) find kids? In school.

And the most successful PC projects in Africa to date have been in schools. There are lots of good reasons for this. Children in rural Africa tend to be better educated than their parents, most of who probably didn’t go to school. Missionaries, NGOs and governments have all built huge numbers of schools in the past 50 years, all over the continent. So those kids are learning to communicate in international languages (mostly English), which allows them to access more information than their parents ever could. Being kids they also have an open mind. They are learning new things anyway!

A local PDC for school teachers from local villages, design exercises
use their own schools as examples.

One of the teachers presents her after map for her school design.

Participants on one of our international PDCs present their design. This pair are the administrators of a newly established indigenous pastoralists association who are based around the Awash river in the Great Rift Valley

That is why we began working on Permaculture with schools in southern Ethiopia. ‘We’ means myself, the founder and director of the first Permaculture demonstration site and training centre in the country, Strawberry Fields Eco Lodge, and Tichafa Makovere, one of the first indigenous Africans to become a PDC facilitator back in the mid ’90s in Zimbabwe. Tichafa and his colleagues lead development of the Permaculture in Schools movement across Southern Africa over the last 15 years. Today Permaculture is recognised at the national level and is fully integrated into the government’s educational policy in Malawi and Zimbabwe, and is moving in that direction in five other countries in the region, from Kenya to Zambia.

We have now begun movement in the horn of Africa, starting down south, in the drought-ridden swath of lowlands that stretches from Southern Ethiopia, through Northern Kenya and into Somalia. The whole area has again been on the brink of starvation for the past two years. We work in Konso, a quaint little land of rustic charm, peopled by a peaceful race of sedentary farmers who construct dry stone terraces across the rugged slopes of a basalt outcrop 300km north of the Kenya border, on the rim of the Great Rift Valley. Their main fare is sorghum, which they intercrop with various beans, sunflowers, cassava, coffee, Moringa stenopetala and various local hardwood trees. They are known as the best farmers in the area. However the crops have failed for all four seasons of the last two years, and, but for the UN grain convoys that have been rolling in, there may have been a famine on.

Grey water used to irrigate the same banana trees. Deep compost filled pits
allow and water supply allows effective establishment for banana plants
on the bare ridge-tops where the clay remains dry beneath 10cm even
through the rainy season.

The typical school compound in Konso is a half-hectare dirt yard with 10 or so classrooms, a few trees and some ceremonial flag-poles. Our aim is to turn that into an interactive learning and demonstration site for community empowerment and food security. We begin this with the teachers – they get a full PDC and produce designs for their own schools in the process. The community is brought in to implement and there will be a follow up program – competitions, open days, refresher courses, exchange visits and PC will be included on the school syllabus. The kids learn how they can make use of waste materials to build soil and establish trees, and waste water to yield food, even in drought time – after all, hands, bodies, plates and clothes are always being washed.

As for lack of technology, there is no such thing. Those technologies we use in the west, fancy drip irrigation equipment, excavating machinery, etc. are just not appropriate in Africa, because people don’t have the means to acquire them or maintain them. We look for locally produced appropriate design technologies, which can be built from local resources and are compatible with cultural and economic constraints. This includes things like wood-saving cook-stoves, solar cookers and drip irrigation systems using simple accessible materials – like cheap hosepipe hole-punched with acacia thorns. This can work very nicely if the holes are held off the ground by sections of chopped up plastic bottle which both stop soil from clogging them and prevent water from running over the soil and eroding the bed when it gets saturated. Another successful design technology are the composting toilets which we have developed at SFEL – a simple, affordable and effective solution to the problem of community sanitation, which requires no manufactured or imported materials, just wood to build it, ash and grass to operate it and the odd banana seedling to plant on top of the manure from time to time.

Our composting toilet design is simple, easy to replicate, easy to operate and
effective. A mobile housing sits above a 2m deep pit. Hay and ash are added as
it is used. Once 50cm from the surface the humanure is covered with top soil,
a new pit dug and the housing moved. A banana tree will be planted
on top of the covered humanure.

User’s instructions in English and Amharic.

As for lack of capital, we have to start small and get it right. All we need is a little capital to begin with. As communities see the results and begin to embrace the development the movement begins to gather its own momentum. New partners will be drawn in. It’s clear that there has to be some inflow of resources from the outside to get the movement going, but there are enough interested parties about to allow that. A UK based charity has even agreed to support the initiative; The Ethiopia Permaculture Foundation (EPF). Of sixty three schools in Konso we have run a pilot in three, working with Save the Children, Finland. A second NGO, Mercy Corps, now looks set to bring another two schools into the project. Meanwhile the EPF has agreed to add another ten schools over the next three years. The sixty two schools are organised into thirteen geographical clusters around the Konso Woreda. Our aim is to implement in one school in each cluster before we go on to add more schools. That will mean that in each area there is a local example of a PC school which can act as a demonstration site for its neighbouring schools.

A wood saving stove design which addresses some major social and
ecological problems in Konso – women’s labour burden and
respiratory health and deforestation.

A typical school-yard in Konso. This is in the village of Brokara, one of the
3 schools we have implemented in during the PKSP pilot phase.

Implementation in Fuchucha school (August 2009).

Community mobilisation brought both students and parents into the school
to implement the designs the teachers had produced during their PDC
(August 2009)

Brokara school in January 2010 – Zone 1 vegetable gardens already giving a
yield. Moringa and fruit trees beginning to come through. We have empowered
a community to provide for its needs and generate income.

One of our teacher course-graduates shows us around his schools’ design
implementation at Debena village in June 2010.

‘Confessions of a Permaculture Aid Worker’ is a weekly podcast show from PRI Australia aimed at documenting the experiences of people out in the field and making more information available about what’s happening in the Permaculture world.

This week I’m speaking with Andy of Tribal Networks about his project in Morocco and the Irish NGO he’s set up which supports and networks connections to remote areas of the world.

Click play to hear the interview (and read further below for more details):

Subscribe to Confessions of a Permaculture Aid Worker.

Site Details

Tribal Networks has purchased a block of land and recently started working on a Permaculture Design for the site with David Spicer incorporating the set-up of a school. This is in a remote Berber Village between Casablanca and Marrakech.

This project came about when Andy realised that building a school and installing internet into this area was pointless until one of the main problems of the area was addressed – an extreme lack of water. During the dry summer months, when the wells go dry, the women must walk up to 10 kilometres to bring water from other sites.

I asked Geoff Lawton about how PRI got involved and his experience at the site:

Andy realised that the site might make a good demonstration site for the PRI Master Plan and invited Nadia and I in to have a look. We were fortunately traveling in the region for a consultancy in Iran. We agreed to travel from Iran to Morocco to review the site and also to document a 2000 year old food forest for the Food Forest DVD.

In Casablanca we were met by one of the villagers who took us to Marrakech and then on to a small town on the road toward Casablanca. In the dry season the next leg of the trip could be made in a 4 wheel drive, but we hired a donkey to carry Nadia, who was quite ill, and made the trek though pouring rain up into the mountains and the remote Berber village.

We were hosted in a traditional farm house.

The site is quite exciting. It sits on a high plateau and the traditional land area includes the water catchment which feeds the most famous and often visited waterfall in Morocco. With some modern machinery and hand labor we will be able to set up water harvesting earthworks that could potentially recharge the wells in the area and revitalise the traditional farming and grazing culture that has been damaged by lack of water and the exodus of its people to the city.

So it’s an interesting remote site. There is a lot of traditional cropping and traditional fruit trees. The people are still very much in their traditional mode of operation, but their population has increased and depleted to the city. The farms are mainly grazing stocks of sheep and some almond trees. That could be greatly diversified. They have some cropping systems that could also be greatly diversified, more intense permaculture production, home gardens, main crops and fruit trees. The main initiative is water harvesting.

I think this is a really exciting project.

If you would like to donate to the Morocco project, head here. Please specify ‘Morocco’ to ensure correct routing. PRI will pass 100% of such donations to the Morocco project.

Further Reading:

• How to Repair the World
• The Development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration

Being a trained observer of natural patterns, it’s pretty difficult not to notice an obvious dearth in awareness around the subject of Permaculture. Furthermore, I feel that it goes without saying that there’s an urgent need for permaculture education that is a direct conduit to action. Once one knows and deeply understands our global state of affairs and environmental situation through the educational lens of a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC), it is difficult not to have a sense of urgency about permanent cultural repair. To me, it appears that this type of urgency isn’t often shared by those who don’t see the issues and the solutions through the lens of Permaculture and whole systems thinking.

While many of us are well-intentioned and passionate about change, we’re often at a loss to know how to tackle such large problems. As though many of us seem to be caught in the rapid current of a positive feedback loop, a lot of us have learned helplessness thus driving the problems deeper into the proverbial carpet. And as these problems become deeper and embedded so does our sense of frustration, confusion and ultimately apathy. Now the need for an interruption in this feedback pattern is ever more timely as an eponymous oil disaster in the American Gulf of Mexico sounds the environmental alarm. As each moment passes, the adoption of scaled design solutions, not only for disaster relief and aid work but for community organization and skills trading, become needed with increasing urgency. Though, despite this, It would appear that a lot of us are eager, yet unprepared to make even the small changes that might set forth a pattern of positive change fueled by real solutions. And still, for so many Americans, it is easier to spend $20-$30 on an afternoon at the movie theaters than it is to spend hard-earned dollars on personal development. For instance, rentrack.com reports “Twilight: The Eclipse” generated nearly 70 million USD over the 4th of July weekend alone.

“Well…” I asked myself “…how does one prepare for battle?” “How do you get from couch potato to a sprightly spud?” “You go to Boot Camp… Permaculture Boot Camp!” Actually, to be completely transparent, the design process didn’t exactly fall into place with such cinematic drama. In fact, the Permaculture Boot Camp at Hayes Valley Farm (HVF) in San Francisco, CA is an ongoing design project between myself and Chris Burley that aims to teach Permaculture to the masses in three short hours.

The design for this class developed out of a design project for our Permaculture Design Certificate in 2009. Leaving the PDC we felt strongly that the needs of our community were expressed in its interest in positive change, but with an apparent lack of direction and cohesiveness to see results. Our desires to teach the lessons that were so powerful to us in our PDC experienced several evolutions before an opportunity aligned with our intent. Now with the Hayes Valley site, an experimental urban farm getting deep community and media attention, we’ve found that it is the perfect platform for mass education. As the design continues to evolve, we’re getting indicators of success, in the form of full classes.

The real success has been in the timing. When Chris originally proposed the course as a one hour lecture, I almost thought he was mad. “Teach Permaculture in one hour? We’ll be lucky if we finish introductions in an hour!” Though after a few emails back and forth, we settled on the current format of two energetic 90 minute sessions. Feeling that it would be disingenuous to call in an “Introduction to Permaculture” we settled on Boot Camp. “Put ‘em through the ringer!” we thought.

With the three-hour Boot Camp, Chris and I offer a rapid-fire introduction to the basics of Permaculture. We begin with an active lecture on evidence followed by a Permaculture ethics and principles site tour where we demonstrate how HVF fulfills and acts on each of Holmgren’s principles and Mollison’s ethical framework. Teaching the course on site invites the students to activate their new-found perspective immediately. Our aim goes beyond the theory of Permaculture to introduce and actively forge a community through sharing and understanding the skills and resources of the people sitting next to one another. With interactive classroom exercises the students are encouraged to form quick bonds to leave empowered and active.

One of the biggest issues students mentioned as being problematic in their worlds is a feeling that their community has been lost. Our answer is part of the course design. The class is typically offered on Sundays twice per month just before the weekly public volunteer workday at HVF. By the time the class ends at 1:30pm the urban farm is buzzing with bodies from all over San Francisco digging, raking, sheet-mulching and planting. The Boot Camp appears to be a perfect entrée to direct action; incentivizing community collaboration over more commercial forms of entertainment. As the students get to know their class and their classroom we remind them “Your lack of community ends here!” Moreover, because the Hayes Valley site has been almost entirely built with volunteer labor and community support, it is quickly becoming the community. It’s drawn hundreds of volunteers and visitors on weekends since January 2010 when the gates opened, and continues to need helping hands to make it truly demonstrate the capacity of Permaculture design solutions. The design of the Boot Camp allows for people-energy to be delivered to the site and ensures continued support for it, not to mention a little revenue. What’s more, with three Boot Camps having been offered since May, we’ve taught nearly 60 students, seven of which have gone on to take the Urban PDC with Kevin Bayuk and David Cody, and many more of which are now regular volunteers at Hayes Valley Farm.

The course costs anywhere between $60-$75 dollars with scholarships available for eligible applicants. What’s really encouraging is that there are a great number of people willing to spend that money on weekend learning to help save their community. In a city known for its love of hedonistic options for ways one can spend a dime, it is nice to know that there is a growing number of hedonists-turned-activists. The next Boot Camp is being offered at Hayes Valley Farm in San Francisco on Sunday, July 11th. For more information or to spread the word about what’s happening in urban permaculture visit hayesvalleyfarm.com.