[Scpg] Permaculture -How farmers are going to save civilization-July 3, 2009 by Jenn Hardy Article- This Magazine

[Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

How farmers are going to save civilization

July 3, 2009 by Jenn Hardy
Filed under 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/economics/>Economics, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/energy/>Energy, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/environment/>Environment, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/health/>Health, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/issues/july-august-2009/>July-August 
2009, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/labour/>Labour, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/travel/>Travel, 
<http://this.org/magazine/category/food/>food

http://this.org/magazine/2009/07/03/permaculture-farming-local-agriculture/

Radio Interview with Jenn Hardy Author of Article
http://this.org/blog/2009/07/21/permaculture-this-magazine-radio/



Advocates for ‘permaculture’ say it can improve 
our diets, heal our environment, and improve our 
lives. Meet a new generation of farmers with some 
radical ideas for untangling our food chain (and 
saving the world in the process)

Permaculture means taking more responsibility for knowing how y





Permaculture means taking more responsibility for 
knowing how your food got to your plate. Photo by 
Zorani/iStockPhoto; photo illustration by Dave Donald.

Trent Rhode looks great in a suit. The 
27-year-old resident of Peterborough, Ont., seems 
perfectly comfortable standing before a long 
table of elected officials twice his age, 
lecturing them on the importance of environmental 
sustainability. His message is simple but 
powerful: he tells his audience they are not 
separate from the environment­they are the 
environment. Natural resources are dwindling, he 
says, and now is the time to act.

Rhode sits on the steering committee of 
<http://www.transitiontownpeterborough.net/>Transition 
Town Peterborough, a non-profit organization that 
is working toward building a self-sufficient 
community less dependent on fossil fuels; at this 
particular meeting he is outlining some of the 
group’s ideas for Peterborough’s municipal 
officials and bureaucrats. His power suit says he 
belongs in this boardroom­but it’s not actually where he prefers to be.

When his business there is done, Rhode slips into 
a comfortable pair of trousers and an old blue 
t-shirt and digs his hands deep into the soil. In 
his job as a natural gardener, Rhode works the 
land at several properties in Ontario. He spends 
his time not only designing, but also 
implementing edible “forest gardens” at an 
eco-education centre in Colborne, a farm in 
Cobourg, and a residential property near 
Belleville. His hometown, which he obviously 
holds dear to his heart, has hired him to maintain gardens in Peterborough.

As a five-year-old horsing around on his 
grandfather’s Belleville farm, Rhode couldn’t be 
bothered with the ins and outs of growing 
vegetables­he was much more interested in chasing 
the pigs and geese. But 12 years later, while 
researching agriculture for his journalism 
program at Loyalist College, he stumbled across a 
concept that would become the foundation of his 
future career and virtually every aspect of his 
life. The idea was permaculture.

“I became aware of how fragile agriculture is, 
and how it’s dependent on so many things,” he 
says. “I began to see how fragile the economy is 
for the same reasons. I became interested in what 
seemed to be a necessity. The future is 
uncertain­but what is certain is we need to eat.”

Rhode has applied to a 
<http://www.gaiauniversity.org/english/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemid=71>master 
of science in integrative ecosocial design at 
<http://www.gaiauniversity.org/>Gaia University, 
a program that specializes in teaching people 
already involved in the “regeneration and world 
change fields.” Rhode is helping to organize an 
Ontario-wide permaculture convention to take 
place in Toronto in the fall, and evangelizes the 
principles of permaculture to just about anyone who will listen.

“The grocery store is the big box we go into and 
we buy our food,” he says. “There is no 
connection between the farm and our refrigerator. 
In this culture we take food for granted; it 
isn’t seen as the necessity it is. The way we 
think is fragmented and everything is 
disconnected, but permaculture seeks to integrate­it has a more holistic view.”

In other words, Rhode believes that putting these 
ideas into practice on the farm and in the garden 
can fix our ailing food supply; moreover, he 
believes permaculture can transform every aspect 
of our lives for the better. And he’s not alone.

So what exactly is permaculture? The term was 
coined in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and 
co-originated with another Australian academic, 
<http://www.holmgren.com.au/>David Holmgren. 
Originally it stood for “permanent agriculture”: 
at a time when the burgeoning environmental 
movement was rediscovering ancient concepts like 
pesticide-free agriculture, Mollison and Holmgren 
bundled together these ideas into a complete 
design system for environmentally friendly food production.

Decades later, that design system has spread to 
many other fields, including architecture, 
economics, education, and spirituality, so that 
permaculture now really stands for permanent 
culture­a design philosophy for making every 
aspect of our lives truly sustainable. It 
advocates a dozen key principles, which include 
caring for the earth, caring for people, using 
and valuing renewable resources, integration 
rather than segregation, and using small and slow solutions.
Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren likens the system to a flow


Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren likens the 
system to a flower, with individual disciplines, 
the "petals," connected at the centre by a 
unified philosophy of sustainable design. Diagram 
design by David Holmgren; illustration by Dave Donald.

And if there’s one thing a permaculture advocate 
can’t stand, it’s waste. The throwaway, wasteful 
society we live in now, they say, can’t last: 
idling in the drive-thru to get a coffee from 
Starbucks, driving in our gas guzzlers the few 
blocks from home to the grocery store, all to 
purchase onions from Egypt, apples from Chile, 
and broccoli from Spain. Then, when we get home, 
it all goes in a power-sucking refrigerator to keep it from going bad.

“People often think, ‘The first thing I need to 
do is to change the way I move around in a 
vehicle or how I heat my house,’” says David 
Holmgren from his home in Victoria, Australia. 
“And those things are important. But we eat every 
day, and our decisions in what we eat, and how we 
eat, and how we get that food, are enormously 
powerful. Permaculture aims to redesign the whole food-production chain.”

That means more household self-reliance, such as 
growing some of our own food and doing some of 
the chores our grandparents did­food growing, 
canning, clothes mending, and DIY of all sorts­in 
order to reduce our environmental footprint and 
cut back on the wastefulness that has brought us 
to the brink of dangerous and irreversible 
environmental decline. Permaculture means 
changing more than just the contents of your 
fridge: it means altering some fundamental 
aspects of the way you live your life.

Which all seems like a bit of an undertaking, to 
say the least. But not to worry: permaculture is 
based on slow-and-steady change, starting, literally, in your own backyard.

The modern farm is an industrial marvel, a 
factory for growing as much food as possible in 
the smallest space at the lowest cost. But it 
can’t last: plants and animals aren’t cogs in a 
machine, and industrial farming is beginning to 
run up against some fundamental limits of nature. 
Drive around in the country, and you’ll pass rows 
and rows of monoculture crops planted 
horizontally. Behind the scenes, huge amounts of 
chemically manufactured nitrogen and phosphorous 
are pumped into the soil to prevent it from 
becoming infertile­ these chemicals then leak 
into the groundwater and, inevitably, into the 
ocean. Modern farming requires about 10 calories 
of energy for every calorie of food produced, 
which means growing food isn’t actually 
production at all, it’s just another type of consumption.

If you wander into your nearest grocery story 
right now, the answer to this problem appears to 
be to label everything “organic.” See that 
well-heeled yuppie in the checkout line buying 
$10 organic oatmeal? Her great-grandmother would 
probably scoff at the label (and the cost) 
because the term would have been meaningless: 
organic was all she ever knew, and it didn’t need 
a fancy name. Her apples had spots on them 
because the chemicals and hormones that now bathe 
modern fruits and vegetables just didn’t exist. 
The “organic” label is a modern invention, a 
backlash against industrial farming. As a 
marketing tool, the word has been very successful.

But saying something is organic doesn’t 
automatically mean it’s sustainable. Permaculture 
and organic agriculture share some obvious 
traits, but it is possible to have one without 
the other. For example, those carrots at the 
supermarket might be labelled “organic,” but if 
they’re packed in a plastic bag and shipped from 
South America, they’re hardly environmentally 
friendly. You’d be better off buying non-organic 
produce from your local farmers’ market, because 
the food you buy there has less packaging and 
burned less gas to get to you. Similarly, you’d 
be better off buying the pork chop of a local 
free-roaming pig that got a few injections than 
you would that of a pig that has all the 
paperwork required to label it “organic,” but 
that lived in a barn eating processed feed pellets.

What this means, say permaculture activists, is 
that it’s simply not enough to throw some organic 
instant waffles in your shopping cart and get on 
with your life: it’s our responsibility to truly 
know what we’re eating and how it got to our 
plate. Individually, culturally, economically, 
spiritually, we really are what we eat.

The reason these questions are so important right 
now is that it is becoming increasingly obvious 
that the world as we know it is in big trouble.

The chief scientific adviser of the U.K., 
professor John Beddington, recently said we are 
facing a “perfect storm,” where shortages of 
water, food, and energy sources will take a 
devastating toll on the world. He reckons we have about 20 years.

Holmgren, however, says the storm is already upon 
us. “We are in a continuous economic, energetic 
climate crisis,” he says. “The way that unfolds 
will be difficult to predict, but I think most of 
these statements that are being made by even 
well-meaning people at higher levels are enormously underplaying things.”

Steve Jones, an ecologist and permaculture 
teacher in Wales, agrees that the crisis is 
already here. He has a scary name for this 
historical period we’re entering: “descent 
culture”­a perilous time of scarce resources, 
declining standards of living, and social 
breakdown. What goes up, he says, must come down.

“It is a basic law of physics and therefore 
inescapable,” he says. “It will change 
everything. It will change the way we think. The 
next generation will look back at us thinking we 
were crazy or naïve. At best we will be leaving 
them a world scarred by fossil fuel use and 
dependent on cheap energy that is no longer 
there. It is going to be very tough over the next 
few decades whilst we figure out how to respond.”

Jones emphasizes that oil is at the root of the 
problem. He says no other energy source can rival 
petroleum in terms of energy density, ease of access, and sheer usefulness.

But it is not sustainable. He doesn’t believe 
we’ll run out of oil entirely, he says, but “we 
have probably used half the available supply that 
is in the ground, the easy half to get hold of. 
So at some point, possibly quite soon, the world 
supply will peak, and the rate at which it can be 
extracted from the ground will go into a decline 
that cannot and will not be reversed.” 
Permaculture advocates say we’d be better off 
modifying our way of life now than waiting for 
nature to do it for us. Holmgren, for instance, 
doesn’t see much point in trying to build an 
environmentally friendly car when the sanest 
choice would be to, well, just drive less. The 
point isn’t to build a better rat race­it’s to 
get out of it altogether. We might as well accept 
these changes with a positive outlook, Holmgren 
says, because “whatever we do in the future, 
we’re going to have a lot more success by 
figuring out how to not do things than 
desperately trying to create ways to maintain 
current patterns of living that just aren’t going to work.”
The view at Yves Zehnder's Sacred Sueños farm in Vilcabama


The view at Yves Zehnder's Sacred Sueños farm in 
Vilcabama, Ecuador. Photo by Jenn Hardy.

Two-and-a-half hours walk up a mountain in 
Vilcabamba, Ecuador, lives a 34-year-old 
red-headed farmer named Yves Zehnder. He is a 
farmer in every sense of the word: this is no 
side project, and he has no additional day job. 
He works hard every day from sunrise to sunset 
(and sometimes beyond) managing the 10 hectares of land he lives on.

Fearing that his frustration with our society 
might turn him into an eco-terrorist, Zehnder 
left his home in northern Ontario 14 years ago, 
and five years ago decided to live sustainably in 
the south of Ecuador. A mere $1,400 in his bank 
account gave him residency and home became a tent 
on top of an Andean mountain. He lived in the 
tent for six months while he single-handedly 
built the adobe brick communal facilities the farm labourers now use.

At first, life at the farm, called 
<http://www.sacredsuenos.com/>Sacred Sueños, was 
hard. When he arrived at his mountainside 
property nothing would grow except bracken fern. 
The soil, because of the unsustainable 
slash-and-burn farming in the area, was basically 
infertile. In retrospect, would he have chosen 
land with better soil? “No,” he says. “It taught 
me patience and perseverance. It was an ethical 
decision to change poor soil into something 
fertile. I didn’t want to be a frivolous white 
boy who buys good land and has it all. This way I 
have been able to find solutions to big problems and share that knowledge.”

Slowly, but surely, he put permaculture’s 
techniques to work on the farm. For example, he 
uses a composting toilet. One of the permaculture 
principles is that in nature, there is no such 
thing as waste. So Zehnder has a “humanure” 
system, turning every bit of human feces back 
into soil. Once a guest uses the lovely 
mountainside-view toilet (a glorified bucket 
under a seat) he or she scoops up a coconut shell 
of sawdust (happily donated to Zehnder by a 
sawmill down the hill) and covers the mess. The 
last to fill the bucket empties it in the appropriate pile.

He also uses a “chicken tractor.” His five hens 
don’t have to do much heavy lifting, but they are 
penned in a large area, and their natural 
scratching and digging for grubs turns the soil 
under their feet. Chicken poop is also an 
excellent fertilizer that prepares the ground for 
plants when the “tractor” is relocated a week later.

Zehnder strategically plants trees to help him 
create shade during the four-month dry season and 
others that prevent erosion during the rainy season.

He and his partner, Jennifer Martin, keep 
chickens for eggs, donkeys, a horse, and goats 
for milk and cheese. They grow delicious native 
fruit like naranjillas, which often come from 
“volunteers” as he calls them­seeds that blossom 
out of the “humanure.” (He has also had the help 
of human volunteers who come to work on the farm.)
Yves Zehnder with Sacred Sueños' two donkeys, Bonne and Po


Yves Zehnder with Sacred Sueños' two donkeys, 
Bonne and Posito. Photo by Jenn Hardy.

The homemade shower is heated by a black tube 
coiled to attract the sun, and it has the same 
beautiful valley view as the toilet­which leaves 
everyone fighting over the opportunity to be naked outside.

Natural building is a part of the permaculture 
design system that often uses a material called 
“cob,” traditionally made of clay, sand, straw, 
water and earth, an easy combination to find when 
building a straw-bale house somewhere like Canada 
or the U.K. Finding straw up top a mountain in 
Ecuador, however, is more of a challenge. True to 
the system he follows, Zehnder has gone one step 
further with cob. He sees the use of an organic 
material such as straw as a waste and instead 
uses shredded plastic bags to bind the material together.

Though he now has much better soil, his work is 
far from finished. A friend has recently 
purchased the 40 hectares of neighbouring land, 
and Zehnder will make use of it for rotating 
pastures and reforestation. Aside from the daily 
chores that come with running such a large piece 
of land, Zehnder is building an educational 
centre at Sacred Sueños, where he will teach 
permaculture not only to rich Westerners who can 
make their way down there, but also to locals who 
can take the course with scholarships.

It’s easy to see that permaculture puts an 
emphasis on human manual labour. This is why 
critics often call it uneconomical or impractical 
when it comes to large-scale farming. But the 
manual labour is exactly what permaculture 
adherents like about it. For them it’s about 
taking your life into your own hands.

Grégoire Lamoureux is another farmer who is 
putting permaculture into practice. On 
<http://www3.telus.net/permaculture/SpiralFarm>Spiral 
Farm in Winlaw, B.C., where he has lived for 
almost two decades, Lamoureux says permaculture 
is “looking at design issues and implementing 
them in human habitat­where people live and 
taking into account places for every living being 
as well. It doesn’t exclude other living creatures.”

Growing up on a dairy farm in southern Quebec, 
Lamoureux quickly learned what he didn’t want to 
do when he grew up. He didn’t want to be involved 
with large monoculture farming. He first learned 
about permaculture in the ’80s, and now on his 
farm, on the western bank of the Slocan River, he 
grows a diversity of plants, fruits, nuts, useful 
trees, and vegetables, mostly for his own use. He 
dries and cans food to keep himself going all 
year round. Lamoureux teaches other people at 
Spiral Farm, but also takes his knowledge on the 
road and teaches courses across the country.

The movement has spread through such courses 
taught by people like Lamoureux. They are now 
available all over the world, adapted to 
different climates and skill levels. Some 
introductory courses are taught in a day, 
although there are also 
<http://www3.telus.net/permaculture/Schedule2009.html#winlaw>two-week 
intensive design courses that grant certificates and qualifications to teach.

A typical permaculture design course covers the 
essential principles and elements, as well as 
some hands-on experience. In the two-week course, 
you learn about the ethics of sustainability, 
building soil fertility, natural building design, 
waste recycling and treatment, and water harvesting, among others.

And it’s not all about back-to-the-land living of 
the type Yves Zehnder is doing; some courses are 
designed for curious urbanites. Lamoureux, for 
instance, teaches one for people who want to 
start a container garden on their balcony. “Some 
people feel the negative sides of living in a 
city,” he says. “The course can empower you to 
feel more comfortable where you live. People can 
take information home and apply the ideas.”

For Sandra Storr, who runs 
<http://romanyrest.net/default.aspx>Romany Rest, 
a 120-year-old farmhouse bed and breakfast, using 
permaculture principles in P.E.I., it made the 
most sense to get her certification online. She 
says online study was not only economical, but it 
meant she didn’t have to fly across the world to 
do it. (Anyone who is serious about the 
environment, she says, avoids flying as much as 
possible.) Storr isn’t only concerned about 
reducing her carbon emissions, but 
reducing­period. That was her first aim when she 
and her husband, Fred, immigrated to Canada from Wales in 2006.

The bed and breakfast uses solar power for 
showers and the swimming pool. While a solar 
electricity system is a bit out of range at the 
moment, they have looked to low-tech permaculture 
solutions such as passive solar­renovating their 
farmhouse to include big windows that face the 
sun, and, in true DIY fashion, they made 
reflectors out of plywood and aluminum emergency 
blankets, which double or triple the amount of 
sunlight, and therefore heat, that enters the 
building. The property features 26 micro wind turbines.

Storr says her solutions are “cheap and 
cheerful”: she’s covered some of the 
non-essential windows in bubble wrap to keep heat in.

The couple rarely visit the grocery store, even 
to keep the B&B operating. They keep a few 
chickens running around and some sheep. Like 
Lamoureux, Storr teaches on-site and does her own 
bottling, canning, and dehydrating. She is most 
interested in beans, cooked grains, wheat, and 
seeds, and she keeps a root cellar. And thanks to 
the provincial government’s forest regeneration 
scheme, the property now has a hectare of new native trees in its backyard.

“I had heard of permaculture years ago, but 
thought of it as simply another form of 
gardening,” says Storr. “We already had an 
organic garden in Wales and I couldn’t see what 
all the fuss was about. It wasn’t until five 
years ago that I realized it was about so much 
more­a whole system designed to mimic natural 
systems and function efficiently.” She explains 
that it was studying permaculture more intensely 
that taught her to bring everything together.

“When we first got here we didn’t think five 
acres was big enough. But, because permaculture 
is such an efficient system, now I think, what do 
we do with all this space?” In a permaculture 
garden, you don’t see row upon row of the same 
crop. The system discourages monocultures and 
promotes the use of vertical space. That means 
that permaculture gardens often end up like a 
chaotic mess, with plants tangled in amongst each 
other­the way they are in nature.

“Instead of transforming the environment to fit 
your needs,” Lamoureux says, “you have to use the 
existing environment and adapt your needs to it.”

What a lovely idea this permaculture is. Lovely 
perhaps, but maybe not too practical. We don’t 
all have the time or money to leave our lives 
behind and start a full-scale farm. Even if we 
could afford it, not everyone has a burning 
desire to be a farmer and live off the land. 
Similarly, many people living in an apartment or 
a house with a small garden just don’t have time 
to grow tomatoes. We like eating grapefruit, 
mangoes, and bananas year-round. We like to 
listen to our iPods and drink Starbucks from 
disposable cups. Plenty of us like our Land 
Rovers! This is normal life for most of us, and 
the general feeling is no one has the right to take that away.

And no one is taking it away­just yet. But no 
matter how you slice it, big changes in energy 
and economics are coming soon. If we clue in to 
the idea that capitalism, and all the wonderful 
things that come with it, are not sustainable as 
they now exist, we may be able to make small 
changes in our individual lives that could mitigate the crises still to come.

It may require some effort, but there are many 
ways to implement permaculture into your life 
now. Changes can be made slowly and relatively 
painlessly. Don’t want to grow your own food? 
Then why not participate in Community Supported 
Agriculture and buy a weekly food basket from a 
local farmer? Or challenge yourself at the 
grocery store to search for food that was 
produced in your own country. If it ain’t broke, 
don’t buy a new one. If it is broke, fix it. For 
too long we have lived as if we were characters 
in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, happily 
reciting, “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.”

To the chagrin of Greenpeace activists 
everywhere, not everyone actually cares about the 
environment. Not everyone believes the earth has 
a soul and we should worship her in all her 
glory. What most people do care about, however, 
is their wallets, and the truth is, virtually 
everything about permaculture is about saving 
cash. (Saving trees, seeds, and the world might come next on the list.)

Permaculture devotees generally come in two 
camps: the ones who see it as a kind of spiritual 
devotion and the ones who see it as a scientifically rigorous system.

23-year-old Sara Bresee is definitely in the 
first category. She learned about permaculture 
while going on a spiritual retreat in Spain. On 
top of a mountain, she lived in a teepee, sat in 
sweat lodges, and danced barefoot with her hippie 
self. While building a mandala in the garden, she 
met a man who introduced her to a few 
permaculture techniques. “I thought, ‘That’s the 
smartest thing in the world,’” she says. And it 
was something she could take back with her to her 
urban life in Montreal, where she is studying to 
be a nutritionist and a yoga teacher, and works at a raw vegan restaurant.

Bresee and her three roommates share a community 
garden a five-minute walk from home, where they 
grow their own vegetables. They also support 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture>Community 
Supported Agriculture, a world-wide network which 
gives urbanites the opportunity to support local 
food growers. The roommates opt for a 
family-sized vegetable basket, which provides 
them with local organic food year-round. Bresee 
says it is the perfect way to create community 
links between the city and the country.

It is this spiritual connection that interests 
Bresee most: “Permaculture, as a way of life, has 
acknowledged that no man or woman can do 
everything on their own, and thus community is 
undeniably important. This holistic view, to me, 
is what makes permaculture sustainable, what 
makes everything come together in the end.”

As a basis for spirituality, Bresee says 
permaculture’s spiritual message is “let’s care 
for ourselves, care for each other, and care for 
the earth. It’s simple, beautiful, and true.” 
Across the Atlantic, 27-year-old Faye Tomson 
falls into the science camp. Tomson, who is 
completing her masters in environmental 
engineering at the University of Leeds, is 
specializing in renewable energy and low-energy 
housing “in a bid to try and restore the balance,” she says.

“Working in such a field is twofold,” she says. 
“Not only is it useful­and necessary in the 
transition to a low-carbon economy­it’s also 
lucrative. My family has no money and is unlikely 
to in the near future. My dream is to earn enough 
to move us all away to some far-flung place away 
from the masses when it all goes tits up­which I 
don’t think is going to be very long from now.”

She jokes that she’s anticipating some 
Armageddon-style scenario­but she’s only half 
kidding. “When the shelves are empty,” she says, 
“people are going to fight and riot and steal and 
hurt each other. I want to be far away by then. 
With my family.” For Tomson, it isn’t only new 
technologies that will be important in the 
future, but long-lost crafts and trades like 
horsemanship, woodwork, knitting, sewing, and leather tanning.

“People of like minds really need to get 
together­leave egos at the door, and start 
building arks,” she says. There is urgency in her 
tone. “Save seeds that haven’t been messed up by 
companies like Monsanto, and learn as many skills 
as possible. Learn how to keep bees and preserve 
and store food for winter months. This is 
serious. Agriculture is dying, and the old ways 
have gone. We must relearn them­and fast.”

Trent Rhode can’t argue with Tomson’s desire for 
immediate change, although he doesn’t share her 
survivalist viewpoint. But while Tomson and Yves 
Zehnder may choose to build lives outside the 
city limits, right now Rhode is comfortable working in an urban setting.

“How can you be a hermit and live by yourself in 
the forest, when your air and water quality is 
affected by people on the other side of the 
world?” he asks. “We are not independent in that 
sense. We drink the same water and breathe the 
same air.” Rhode believes it would be possible 
for people to grow almost all of their own food 
within city limits, if all the available land were put into productive use.

“If cities were actually consciously designed to 
take into account all human needs through time, 
the possibilities would be endless,” he says. 
“There’s this idea that somehow human 
civilization is diametrically opposed to a 
healthy environment and that somehow we are separate from the natural world.”

His goal is to help urbanites realize that our 
cities are as much a part of the natural world as 
a beaver dam or beehive: “It’s the very 
perception that we are somehow separate from the 
environment around us, and that our actions 
toward the environment have no consequences to 
us, that leads to the creation of such destructive human habitats.”

Rhode would like to own a farm one day. But he 
hopes to own it collectively, with the thought 
that you can learn so much from other people and 
their experiences. Like a natural ecosystem, he 
says, living in a community makes everything stronger and more resilient.

“It’s exciting and energizing to be with people 
who understand what’s going on in the world and 
understand what we need to do to live in harmony 
and to live, period,” he says. “The most 
important thing is to give people hope.”


Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
    an educational non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie at sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in 
new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous

First Annual Southern California Permaculture Convergence August 2008
http://socalifornia.permacultureconvergence.org
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