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 ...
This post is part of a series on how to do permaculture design with free software and tools. The other parts of the series can be found here: Installing software, getting background imagery, contours part one, contours part two (google maps), contours part three (DIY surveying), making mosaics, drawing swales ...
This post is part of a series on how to do permaculture design with free software and tools. The other parts of the series can be found here: Installing software, getting background imagery, contours part one, contours part two (google maps), contours part three (DIY surveying), making mosaics, drawing swales ...
This post is part of a series of tutorials that explain how I do permaculture design using free software and readily available tools. The remainder of the series is here: Installing software, getting background imagery, contours part one, contours part two (google maps), contours part three (DIY surveying), making mosaics ...
This post is part of a series of tutorials about using open source software for permaculture design. Here are the links to the rest of the series: Getting the software, getting an aerial photo, making a contour map, google earth contours. DIY Contour Map
After a brief (or maybe not ...
This post is part of a series of tutorials about using open source software for permaculture design. Here are the links to the rest of the series: Getting the software, getting an aerial photo, making a contour map, google earth contours.
This challenge is the first one that will take ...
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.
How do nutrients and energy move in natural systems?
Stable natural systems have no waste. What would ...
This post is part of a tutorial series explaining how I do permaculture designs using free software. Here are links to the rest of the series: Part one, Part two, Part three.
Okay, now that you have drawn some contours, let's figure out another way to get the data ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
If you could redesign civilization, what would it look like?
That's a fun question to ponder, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it. We all have a few things we'd like to see changed, but what if you could actually do it? What do you ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
