It was about this time, that we heard Bill Mollison speak on Permaculture, with zones, to encourage a design plan that integrates the environment, plants and people with a vision of possibilities.

Vegetable and herb gardens were started and fruit trees were planted. Poultry, dairy goats, pigs and milking cows were added. Derrick being very gifted with skills of building fences, sheds, and as ‘a fix-it man’ was able to do many and varied tasks on the farm. Derrick, being a butcher by trade, was also able to turn the animals into cuts of meat for the freezer, mince into sausages, meat into smoked hams.

A nursery area was started to provide our own plants for the farm. Soon, people started asking us for various herbs and edible plants and the nursery grew like ‘topsy’.

I found plants so fascinating and loved to read about them and learn as much as I could. Collecting edibles was fun and resourceful for the farm and the nursery. Today our large range of culinary and medicinal herbs, spices, fruits, rare edibles, and seed varieties are sought by people from near and far. Postal orders placed by people for plants and seeds, keeps the family very busy. Derrick, now retired, is still the handy-man. Angela and her husband David, assisted by their daughter Aleisha, now run the farm.

For many years the Farm held regular, free guided farm tours, when I’d would show people around explaining the many useful plants that people could grow in their gardens. These Farm Walks were very popular and large groups of people would assemble to learn.

At the end of one afternoon farm walk, an elderly man was most enthused by the many edible plants, but said, he would never be able to remember all the information. He suggested that I write a book. Many other people over the years echoed the same suggestion.

But, where to find the time, to write a book? However, the concept was often in my thoughts, and I made notes and collected information, and recorded my own and other people’s experiences of benefits to their health with herbs. Herbs can play such a valuable role in health and this is what I wanted to enthuse people to see, and to use their herbs regularly.

Then in 2001 I started to write, and in June 2003 the book was born: “How can I use herbs in my daily life?” which covers over 500 herbs (see this DVD also). The response to the Herb Book from all over the world has been overwhelming, with readers saying they use their herbs more and report wonderful benefits to health. People have told me that they use the Herb Book as a constant reference, and also share the information with others and this is what herbal folklore is all about – passing it on.

Good health is precious. Every person needs to work at maintaining health, therefore, we need to learn all we can about how the body functions, nutrients required, digestion and assimilation, the many benefits of herbs, and the value of food with living enzymes.

As I became more aware of the value of enzymes and living food, I started to see that little things like ‘sprouts’ could have a big impact on health, as they provide a high degree of vitality and rejuvenation to the body. People who were reading the Herb Book were interested in knowing more about wheat grass and sprouts, which I had mentioned in the book. I showed them how I grew sprouts, particularly fenugreek, which is my favourite sprout. It was from that interest, the book “How can I grow and use sprouts as living food?” came to be written (see this DVD also).

Sprouts have so many valuable attributes: high protein and nutrient content, fibre and essential fatty acids, and they are rich in antioxidants and living enzymes. Sprouts are ‘super foods’ and are something every person can grow right in their kitchen at very minimal cost.

Many readers of the sprout book have said that this book should be in every home. The book is easy to read, and it is easy to put the simple steps into practice. I encourage every home to grow sprouts regularly, and get the many benefits of sprouts as living food.

In 2007 I was led to write once more, resulting in "How can I be prepared with Self-sufficiency and Survival Foods?" Many people have said that this book is very timely with the present financial situation.

Just why did I come to write a book centered on this topic? For many years I taught herb courses, covering many edible plants, and included a segment on the importance of self-sufficiency and survival for possible hard times.

During one class, when I asked, “If shops closed tomorrow, how much food do you have to feed your family?”

One woman replied, “Maybe enough for one week.” This made me think how dependent the majority of people are on farmers, trucking companies and shops to provide their daily food. People often expressed that I should put information on self-sufficiency into a book. Then, in 2007, my son Ricky rang from Adelaide, while doing a course on alternative energies.

Ricky said, “Mum, when are you going to write that book on self-sufficiency and survival? There will be a big demand for it.”

His words gave me the nudge to get writing! During 2008 I sensed a real urgency to put this information together. This is not only my perception of what is happening in Australia and world-wide, but everyone is feeling and experiencing the pressure, as everything they purchase has risen in price, dramatically.

The AIM of this book is to share with people the importance of being as self-sufficient as one is able, with the likelihood of very difficult times ahead. We all need to rethink our current wasteful habits and consider the best use of our natural resources and renewable energies. It is time for us all to take action to: reduce, recycle, repair and reuse items, over again.

This book is written for people who have relied upon shops for everything and so that people who already grow some food in their backyard will be spurred on to be even more self-reliant.

In 1981, Bill Mollison gave a Permaculture Design course for which Dan Hemenway produced lecture notes. While these originally were made available as a set of pamphlets for a small copying fee, they have been available on the web for quite some time, in PDF form, like here (6mb PDF), for example.

While the social and cultural context has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years, and this material hence does not reflect that change, these pamphlets still provide quite a useful free resource that explains permaculture in detail. While the Permaculture Designers’ Manual certainly presents many ideas in a more accessible way than these transcripts of Bill Mollison’s lectures, they nevertheless are an often quite useful complementary resource. This holds in particular for a few issues which are presented in a slightly cryptic way in the Permaculture Designers’ Manual and benefit from an alternative explanation.

A re-edited version of this material, both in the form of HTML web pages as well as a PDF (using LaTeX-based typesetting which, hopefully, should be more homogeneous and easier to read than the original) is now available here: http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/mollison

This also provides a number of explanatory footnotes that should help to both provide more background on some ideas, and put them into more recent context.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. – Chinese Proverb

Worldwide, mainstream aid projects tend to deal with the symptoms of problems, rather than the problems themselves. In fact, often aid projects actually exacerbate the root issue, by supply free food and clothing that undermines the ability of people on the ground to make a living. In other words, we put them out of their low carbon business, forcing them off the land into cities where they must become part of the consumer treadmill, or perish.

But, sometimes, people with clear heads and unselfish hearts manage to help in much more substantial ways. The links to follow are to individual chapters of a Farmers’ Handbook created by Chris Evans (UK) and Jakob Jespersen (Denmark), who have spent considerable time in Nepal, helping to develop locally appropriate methods and technologies that can help the people of Nepal live better lives, and sustainably so.

Although the information is specifically tailored for Himalayan conditions, almost everyone will find some useful ideas and information in this comprehensive work. The whole handbook is 50 chapters in 5 volumes – a total of 792 pages, including 170 pages of colour photos and illustrations.

Aside from gleaning valuable ideas for your own region, I post this work, with permission, in the hope it will inspire others to do likewise for their own region and climate zone. This is the kind of information sharing that will move humanity onto a sustainable platform of peace and low carbon prosperity.

Please note: These files are free for personal use and circulation (please just link to this page), but can not be used for commercial purposes. They are copyright of Chris Evans and Jakob Jespersen. The Farmers’ Handbook is also still in a draft form and any suggestions of improvement are welcomed. Chris has the original editable version – if people are interested to translate this production into another language, or offer other suggestions, please contact Chris on: cevans (at) gn.apc.org

All files to follow are PDFs.

The title says it all. Sit back and enjoy the latest work from the Transition Towns movement. You can watch in parts via YouTube below, or if you prefer, catch the whole thing in one hit on Vimeo.

‘In Transition’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. The Transition movement is about communities around the world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity, imagination and humour, and setting about rebuilding their local economies and communities. It is positive, solutions focused, viral and fun. – TransitionCulture.org

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Further Reading: Get the transition handbook.

We’re currently running a special on the following selected DVDs:

• Introduction to Permaculture Design DVD
• Food Forest DVD
• Water Harvesting DVD

Regardless of the mix of the above three DVDs, orders of 10-19 DVDs attract a 10% discount. Orders of 20 or more attract a 20% discount.

Discounts are applied automatically within the ordering system.

Head to our online store to find out more about the DVDs and to order.

Sorry, this video has moved. Please go here instead.

We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray–not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil–the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.

Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

Reviews:

This book saved my life. Not only does The Vegetarian Myth make clear how we should be eating, but also how the dominant food system is killing the planet. This necessary book challenges many of the destructive myths we live by and offers us a way back into our bodies, and back into the fight to save the planet. – Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame and A Language Older than Words

Everyone who eats should read this book. Everyone who eats vegetarian should memorize it… This is the single most important book I’ve ever read on diet, agriculture, and ecology. – Aric McBay, author of What We Leave Behind and Peak Oil Survival

About the Author:

Lierre Keith is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels and is currently co-writing a book with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay about strategy for the environmental movement. She splits her time between Northampton, MA and Humboldt, CA.

We spoke with Frank Gapinski, the producer – who recorded and spent countless hours fine tuning and preparing this release – to find out a little more about this important DVD:

When we first approached Geoff Lawton about the possibility of presenting a condensed version of the big 72-hour Permaculture Design Certificate Course, which normally takes two weeks of intense study, suggesting we somehow squeeze it down to an 80-minute introduction course, Geoff said nothing for a moment, then thought about it some more, and then quietly said, "Yep. I think I can do that."

That was a bit of an understatement. I don’t think we knew what we were getting ourselves in for, especially if you want to leave the classroom environment and yet still make the video visually compelling and present it in a fresh and interesting way.

It proved to be a bigger challenge and probably the hardest DVD title we had to make so far because the Permaculture Course is very complex for anyone really to understand in an hour and bit.

Obviously we couldn’t show the whole course in 80 minutes. It would be impossible to achieve. We didn’t do that. We had to be selective and reveal the main themes of the Permaculture Design Manual, stay faithful to Bill Mollison’s original vision, but illustrate the broad themes and concepts with tangible examples so people would say “Oh, I understand what he’s saying now. I can see how it all fits together.” It’s those little aspects that make it interesting and unique.

I did a PDC course a few years ago, but it wasn’t until we began editing this title that many things began to make sense. They began to click for me. It was like being introduced to the PDC for the first time. I wish someone had made this DVD many years ago as Geoff is a terrific teacher.

Geoff explains the theory and then he shows us an example to support the claim. Permaculture Design is about activating the mechanism in the viewer’s mind to look at the world differently. The way a Permaculture Designer would look at it. The world needs such people today. Geoff doesn’t work to a script. He knows the material so well that if you ask him to do a different take for the camera you will get a different interpretation which is just fine – because it all interconnects.

Geoff screened an early cut of the DVD to students for feedback. The response was terrific. We listened to their comments and added extra graphics and changed a few things around to make it more accessible but not simplistic. This DVD will reward you if you look at it a few times. You will suddenly see new aspects to things you didn’t notice before.

Thank you Frank for all your work!! I’ve seen a little of the early edits myself, and so am looking forward to getting my own copy in the next few days too.

The good news is that Permaculture has reached mainstream media as the world grapples with climate change and a myriad converging problems, and begins looking for people who have solid solutions. For example, last week American CNN Television flew to Zaytuna Farm to interview Geoff Lawton for a new documentary series they are producing called ‘Eco Pioneers’, to be screened later in the year. (Look out for it.) People are hungry for answers – people are really beginning to see what’s coming, and they’re searching for a way out of this mess. Material like this DVD, which takes critical knowledge and concepts and boils it down into viral sound bites for a multimedia-oriented world, can only but help fill the void.

We put the Introduction to Permaculture Design out there, trusting it will help jumpstart the urgently needed transition into a post-carbon world.

The narrator, Geoff Lawton, one of Bill Mollison’s earliest students, is one of the most respected and experienced Permaculturists today – having worked and taught in dozens of countries over the last twenty five years – and yet fully understands how to engage audiences and transmit information to people at all levels. This, combined with Frank’s expert visual wizardy, will leave viewers wanting to start their own Permaculture journey, pronto.

We had initially pre-announced this DVD several months ago, under the title ‘Permaculture for Beginners’, but after working it through the title ‘Introduction to Permaculture Design’ seemed more apt. We anticipate this will become a highly contagious tool to help spread the Permaculture message. Watch the trailer below, and keep an eye on this site for its not-too-distant release (due September).

Introduction to Permaculture Design – The Trailer

We’ll – we’re making that book.

The Permaculture Research Institute is getting behind a project that would see the creation of a large format book that profiles, with creative writing and quality photographs, some of the many successful Permaculture projects underway around the world. The purpose of this page is to solicit your help with the same.

The final version is unlikely to look like this, but it gives you an idea….

The purpose of the book is to create a resource tool to help drive Permaculture thinking into the mainstream, by spotlighting in the most aesthetic and readable way the potential of Permaculture to solve all of the world’s current problems, by means of inspirational examples of practical, working solutions. We’re documenting a sustainable revolution that spans every corner of the globe – painting an accessible, exciting picture of the positive future that’s already here.

We are donating the time of our writer/photographer Craig Mackintosh, who is teaming up with Louis and Juliana Fox (from Free Range Studios in California). Louis and Juliana will be covering projects in the Americas, while Craig (who currently resides in Europe) will be covering Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Blogging as We Go

Craig will be blogging as he covers these projects, so if you enjoyed his ‘Letters from Vietnam’ posts and photographs (see here, here and here), then you’re sure to enjoy looking over his shoulder as he checks out these varied projects in diverse locations.

Frequent Flyer Miles

The biggest expense with this project is travel – airfares, train fares, etc. (we anticipate most project leaders will support their own promotion by donating food and accommodation during research visits).

Although we just received a generous $10,000 grant from the 11th Hour Project for our research, this is a very travel-intensive endeavour (global scope) and we are still only about half funded. But we recently realized that we don’t really need much money to finish the project, what we need is frequent flyer miles to visit to some of the most inspiring sites on the planet, from ecovillages to indigenous communities to urban community gardens.

So, I’m asking to see if you or anyone you know can spare some miles and make a contribution to the cause. It’s a little tricky to just donate miles (as each airline has their own program) so what we’re probably really looking for are pledges to sponsor an individual trip on our itinerary.

Airline Contacts

Additionally, there may be one or two of you that have influence within the airline industry, and could even swing some donated tickets for this worthy cause directly from the airlines themselves.

Ready to Help?

If you can help with either direct support from an airline, or with frequent flyer miles, please contact Juliana on julianapeartree (at) gmail.com with the details.

Or, if you just want to donate funds directly, please click on the donate button below. All support gratefully received. If we end up with more resources than the book project needs, the extra funds will go towards a video documentary covering the same topic.

Note: All funding for the Sustainable (R)evolution book goes through our PRI USA site, as it is the fiscal sponsor for this project (and has tax deductible status for U.S. residents). Please ensure you put "For Sustainable (R)evolution book project" in Paypal’s "Add special instructions to the seller" field.

Other Payment Options: If you’d rather pay by check, see our other payment options. Please ensure that the purpose of the donation is made clear (i.e. Sustainable (R)evolution book).

The book will map some of the most noteworthy Permaculture projects worldwide