When Chris was out for our event with Robb Wolf in northern California last month, we paid a visit to Singing Frogs Farm along with a group of Peak Prosperity members. Adding to the outing's embarrassment of riches, permaculture expert Toby Hemenway joined in.
We saw much that day that inspired us about the regenerative and productive impact humans can have on their farmland when using wise soil management techniques and leveraging natural systems.
Now, of course, not everyone has an 8-acre farm in the country to apply these practices to. Does that mean that permaculture is only relevant to rural farmers?
Not all all, says Hemenway. He has just released a new book, The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience which explains how individuals, as well as society as a whole, can apply the same principles underlying permaculture to improve most if not all of the systems our way of life depends on:
There have been advances on several fronts, and one is that we are starting to get good data now. There were a lot of claims made in permaculture that were based on more theory in the early days, 20, 25 years ago. We thought this should work it is a great idea and people would sometimes talk as if it had worked when we really didn’t have good data. Now we know a lot more about what does work. We have toned down some of the rhetoric and are trying to be more fact based.
But another one of the huge developments is the big understanding that what we have learned in the garden: When you design ecologically sound systems for food you learn the same principals and the same guidelines for designing pretty much anything else using 'all systems' thinking. We have learned that we can design energy systems, water systems and even social systems and communities and even perhaps economic systems using permaculture design based on how whole systems work. It is based on natural systems design. So that has been one of the biggest changes and bits of growth in permaculture: moving out of the garden and into the rest of the human world where lie all of the things that we need to be working on.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Toby Hemenway (41m:28s)
by kelvinator