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Permaculture: Beyond Sustainability

Reconnect - Rethink - Reduce - Reuse - Recycle


The answers to the world’s woes - waning energy supplies, depleted and contaminated soils and water, 
reduced biodiversity, the dismantling of communities, etc. - are all there. 
Restoring natural abundance where before there was only desolation.

Financial Permaculture  -- "Our team contains local, national and international members of organizations 
working together to design and implement new economic models."

Newly expanded introduction to permaculture for the home gardener, now with a new chapter on urban permaculture, 
designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space.

earthcare peoplecare fairshare

Permaculture Videos on Permaculture Activist 

The Terrible Time of Day by Bill Mollison
A wide ranging informal overview of permaculture principles and their application in evaluating useful and harmful human choices.
If you do something right, it will do a lot more right by itself. "There is an enormous difference between the way we make a design in
permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it. Really, what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way."

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change -- by David Holmgren, co-developer of permaculture.
Applying scenario planning to issues facing a world confronted with peak oil and a warming climate.


Permaculture Training




The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia
Very rich, comprehensive site, with examples from all over the world. They've been at it for three decades.
"Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components 
in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms."

Yestermorrow Design/Build School


The Fukuoka Farming Website -- Exploring Masanobu Fukuoka's revolutionary method of sustainable agriculture.
On this website the terms agriculture, farming, and gardening are considered to be synonymous and interchangeable,
differentiated only by the size of implementation.
 

Resources for Permaculture

Tripplebrook Farm -- Plants for permaculture plantings

 Out of Poverty -- by Paul Polak
 International Development Enterprises (IDE) develops affordable appropriate technology solutions for poor farmers

Agricultural charcoal -- "Biochar"
FIRST EARTH is a documentary about the movement towards a massive paradigm shift for shelter 
-- building healthy houses in the old ways, out of the very earth itself, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages.
 
Videos of the movie
First Earth videos on YouTube -- 
can be viewed full-screen


I love Cob -- Photos


Revolutionary sustainable fish farming method in Spain

Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish

"Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain."

The Web site for Veta la Palma is http://www.vetalapalma.es/ .

Q&A with Chef Dan Barber: Can organic farming feed the world?
http://blog.ted.com/2010/03/qa_with_chef_da.php


Why you should listen to him:

Dan Barber is the chef at New York's Blue Hill restaurant, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester, where he practices a kind of close-to-the-land cooking married to agriculture and stewardship of the earth. As described on Chez Pim: "Stone Barns is only 45 minutes from Manhattan, but it might as well be a whole different universe. A model of self-sufficiency and environmental responsibility, Stone Barns is a working farm, ranch, and a three-Michelin-star-worthy restaurant." It's a vision of a new kind of food chain.

Barber's philosophy of food focuses on pleasure and thoughtful conservation -- on knowing where the food on your plate comes from and the unseen forces that drive what we eat. He's written on US agricultural policies, asking for a new vision that does not throw the food chain out of balance by subsidizing certain crops at the expense of more appropriate ones.

In 2009, Barber received the James Beard award for America's Outstanding Chef, and was named one of the world's most influential people in Time’s annual "Time 100" list.

"Dan Barber is increasingly becoming known as a chef-thinker, popularizing simple ideas that upend the way people think about the food we eat."
Gothamist.com