Human 2.0 Project

Permanence * Adventure * Culture

Articles by Erik Lee

  1. The Permaculture Orchard - a review

    orchards

    I just watched my copy of The Permaculture Orchard, and I was extremely impressed. This is a very well put-together film about how to make a commercial scale orchard (or smaller if you want, the same ideas apply) using permaculture design principles. The presentation was great, and it clearly comes ...

  2. Questions for Concepts and Themes of Design

    Back, by popular request - more study questions! This set is for chapter two - concepts and themes in design. Once again I have two kinds of questions - short answer and discussion.

    Short answer questions

    1. How do nutrients and energy move in natural systems?

    2. Stable natural systems have no waste. What would ...

  3. Adding Contours, part 1

    Here we are (finally) at the next part of our software tutorial. Contours - the one thing that caused the most trouble and anxiety for the last class. The good news is that it's pretty easy for most of us! There's a lot of free data out there for ...

  4. The Plan

    We have what seems like an impossible task ahead of us: How are we going to move the mountain of culture? I want my kids to live in a world where people spend more time with friends than devices, where everyone has the chance to really master something, and where ...

  5. Design mini-challenge 02 - mapping

    Okay, we're off to a good start. If you followed the challenge from last week, you should now have a good set of software tools to work with. Now it's time to give a couple of them a workout. Here's what we're going to do: 1 ...

  6. Challenge 1: The install

    Okay, here we are at the first week of the course. Last year, many students were very stressed out by the final project, and in particular about how to get the software working while at the same time trying to do a design and get it put up on the ...

  7. PDC challenge problems - introduction

    Review Questions

    These are some quick questions to bring back some of the important concepts from the videos, and to get you warmed up for the discussion questions that follow. I tried to pick the stuff that will be most important for later in the course, to help solidify the ...

  8. Geoff Lawton's Online PDC is starting soon

    I took Geoff Lawton's first online PDC and was deeply impressed by the content and the effort he put into creating it. I think he's probably doing more than any other human being on Earth to make the world better for the future, so it was with great ...

  9. Transformation Two: How it looks.

    What the world will look like in 100 years

    I wish I knew... This article is about what I think it could look like, if we play our cards right. I talked in the last article about what's new in the world that will give us the power to ...

  10. Permaculture case study, part 1 - bird's-eye view

    Permaculture is a big part of civilization's future. It's also a very complex topic, and could easily consume lifetimes of study. Permaculture design touches ecology, physics, biology, complex adaptive systems, and a dozen other fields. Fortunately, it obeys the Pareto principle, so you can do a pretty good ...

  11. Permaculture - the art of ecosystem hacking

    Ecology is a complex and fascinating science. There is a lifetime of stuff to learn about even a simple functional ecosystem. Even if there's only one way for a pair of elements in a system to interact with each other, the number of interactions grows as the square of ...

  12. Human Metamorphosis

    We are constantly surrounded by a sea of influence. All six of Cialdini's weapons of influence [1] are at work, shaping our behavior, all the time. This is a natural and vital part of being in a society with other people, even if it seems like some kind of ...

  13. Hacking Civilization

    At first glance, things aren't going too well around here. Depending on who you ask, our civilization will end soon from either climate change, energy shortages, fresh water shortages, drug-resistant microbes, electromagnetic pulses, or any of a host of other apocalyptic visions. They may be right, I don't ...

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