The Permaculture Student

A resilient, abundant future starts with permaculture education.

Our Permaculture Legacy is Bound to the Rising Generation via PermacultureVelocity

Matt PowersComment

Via Permaculture Velocity where I was guest blogging:

"What’s fastest way to spread permaculture?

What’s the longest lasting way to spread permaculture?

Education seems to be the agreed ‘fastest way’ in our community though by example is cropping up now, but we focus primarily on adults and sometimes large groups like governments. I worry that it might not be a lasting change if we simply change the adults, even if we change all adults. As a high school teacher, I know that most kids don’t even have a section of psyche to house permaculture in yet; they’re mostly too caught up in drama, grades or entertainment. If these are the new voters in 2 or 3 years, how are we going to compete against their apathy & ignorance? They’ll just bulldoze over our food forests when we dieor make them illegal and then do that while we live, or any number of things. We need to have the rising generations join us in this ecosystemic and cultural rebirth.

…but how would that work?"

continued:

http://107garden.com/blog/2015/6/1-permaculturelegacy

Our Permaculture Story

Matt PowersComment

I found permaculture a long way down the road of fighting my wife's cancers (thyroid & melanoma). It allowed me to test my food and soil to prove their safety and quality. I was able to see how I could achieve my vision of living off the land for food and medicine (though we'll never be able to produce our own thyroid replacement hormones). Perhaps if we'd been able to know these things earlier we would have been able to save her thyroid and be free of perpetual testing of her T3 & T4 levels, but we missed that window. We hope our experiences can help others avoid our painful experiences. I could spend a book on this depressing topic, but suffice to say, permaculture gave me hope and a clear set of actions that I could take to change the situation we were in, so we don't have to dwell on the hardships of the past, only the solutions today.

Using Geoff Lawton's online permaculture design course which is endorsed by Permaculture cofounder Bill Mollison, my soils became rich and loamy within only a few months. Generational farmers began paying me to show them how I did what I did. Water retention continued through August despite the drought turning the garden's soil hydrophobic last August. For the first time gardening here I began to get a yield without fences. Permaculture was the missing piece I was looking for all along. Beyond that I also saw that permaculture design applied to the way we organize a business, do a presentation, manage a relationship or design a farm. As a connective design science, it effortlessly explores the overlap between disparate ideas, techniques & technologies to create new solutions to our ever increasing set of new problems. We have a toolkit here to help us weather climate change and invest in a stable future, but we have to take action. We cannot hope for the few thousand dedicated & effective permaculturists to do it all alone; we must all join in the effort and put our shoulders to the wheel. This is the great work of our time as John D. Liu puts it, and we have a chance to take part. Let us start now and never hesitate.

Let us plant trees that we may never eat the fruit thereof everywhere we can.

MP