The following message is from Erin Axelrod, Outreach Director for the Permaculture Skills Center in Sebastapol, CA: I hope your hearts are healing from the loss of our beloved Toby. We here in Sonoma County at the Permaculture Skills Center are missing Toby, yet we are trying to move forward and heal as we strive to […]
Update on Toby’s Battle With Cancer
Update: December 20th, 2016: A message from Toby’s wife, Kiel: “It’s with the deepest grief that I tell you that Toby passed away early this morning, Tuesday, Dec. 20. We were both so very moved by the outpouring of love and support from all of you. Before we settled down for the night, Toby was […]
Who Does What in the Soil
Part 3 of The Cosmos, the Earth, and Your Health – The Story of Soil In the first two episodes of this series on how soil is formed, we’ve been operating at the cosmic level, talking about the how the elements of life were molded during the Big Bang, inside stars, and in explosive supernovae. […]
A Big Bang for Big Soil
Part 2 of The Cosmos, the Earth, and Your Health – The Story of Soil [This is the second in a series of articles about how soil is formed and its link to health and nutrition.] Where does soil come from? In keeping with the big-picture perspective of this series, let’s tackle that question from the […]
The Cosmos, the Earth, and Your Health: The Story of Soil
“Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” With these words, the ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes taught us the power of leverage points. It’s a key concept in permaculture design, too. When we deeply understand the system we’re working with—be it a garden, a business, a […]
A Permaculture Guide to Choosing Cover Crops
One of my constant refrains is “Permaculture is a decision making tool for arriving at regenerative solutions.” Here I’m going to show how permaculture can help create strategies for deciding what cover crops to use. In permaculture, we’re always looking for potent leverage points, and soil-building is a big one. If we create fertile, water-absorbing, […]
Mats and Nets – Patterns from the Dunes
“I reckon you know what you got into,” Hank says. . . . “A devil’s stovepipe, I guess.” “Yeah. . . . You see, bub, this here was a pine forest a long, long time ago. These dunes didn’t useta be here, just trees. But the winds kept bankin’ the sand higher and higher and […]
Becoming Pattern Literate
(Author’s note: The following is an excerpt from a draft of book in progress, called Pattern Literacy, which is my effort to describe how pattern understanding can help us solve problems and appreciate and grasp nature’s workings more deeply. I wrote roughly 5 chapters of this book and set it aside to write The Permaculture […]
Flowing Toward Abundance
Over the last year or so, a neighbor has stocked up eight or ten piles of firewood in his yard, probably fifteen or twenty cords. What’s he going to do with it all? The house has a wood stove, but the family mostly uses the furnace, and burns wood only occasionally to get that cozy, […]
Join me for The Search for Sustainability
I was recently interviewed for a new documentary series that also features 48 other uplifting voices speaking on the crises we face and their possible solutions. The series will broadcast Nov 1-12. I encourage you to visit this web page for the details: https://su208.isrefer.com/go/sustainabilityhome/a789 Topics covered include: • Taking back control of our food, health, water, and […]
Finding the Land that’s Right for You
At some point almost every permaculturist thinks about getting onto a piece of land. And we all have to live someplace, except for the hardcore nomads among us. How do you choose land to live on from a permaculture perspective? Whether it’s big acreage or a town lot, intelligently evaluating the fit between you and […]
Checking all the boxes at Singing Frogs Farm
“Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.” These words from permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison rang in my ears recently as I toured Singing Frogs Farm near my home in Sebastopol, California. Owners Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser may have found solutions for some of the planet’s most urgent and […]
Permaculture: The Design Arm of a Paradigm Shift
Here’s how it happened to me: Back in 1990 I was playing hooky from my unsatisfying biotech job in Seattle by browsing the homesteading shelves in the public library. I pulled down a thick black book I hadn’t seen before called Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. As I perused the pages, suddenly my previously fragmented life […]
Zone 00: Right Intentions, Wrong Term
Toby Hemenway – July 6, 2014 One of my pet projects is to clean up the ambiguities and logical inconsistencies that weaken permaculture terminology. Today I take aim at the term Zone 00, used to mean either the designer or user of a permaculture design, or their inner state. It’s a concept spawned by good […]
Trojan Horses, Recipes, and Permaculture
The Transition movement seemed to catch fire right from the beginning, and I confess that its success made me, as a permaculturist, a bit envious. Here was a program for converting to a post-oil society, created by a permaculture teacher using permaculture principles, and it seemed to be becoming better known and more highly regarded […]
The Last Nomads and the Culture of Fear
My wife and I went semi-nomadic in 2010, traveling the mountain West for almost two years. Not having a settled home was eye-opening, and taught me a lot about one of my perennial themes: how much humans lost when we became domesticated by agriculture. For a committed permaculturist to give up a home and yard […]
What Permaculture Isn’t—and Is
Permaculture is notoriously hard to define. A recent survey shows that people simultaneously believe it is a design approach, a philosophy, a movement, and a set of practices. This broad and contradiction-laden brush doesn’t just make permaculture hard to describe. It can be off-putting, too. Let’s say you first encounter permaculture as a potent method […]
Saving Native Wildlife with "Invasive" Plants
There’s been a lively discussion on permaculturists’ occasional planting of introduced species known to naturalize (or, in loaded terms, invasive species) at this blog. Some there have disputed that exotics can play critical roles in habitat, and I posted the words below to show that removal of exotics can be very damaging to native wildlife: Here […]
Redistributing Wealth—Upwards
Whenever I feel like raising my blood pressure a few points, I read The Wall Street Journal editorial page. And the June 2-3, 2012 issue didn’t disappoint me. In an article called “Robin Hoods Don’t Smash Windows,” John Agresto, the former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, makes the familiar arguments against the redistribution of […]
Fear and the Three-Day Food Supply
One of the scary factoids in circulation these days is the revelation that grocery stores hold only a three- or four-day supply of food. People wield this statistic to argue that our food system is appallingly insecure and in grave danger of failure. We’re only a few days from starvation, goes the frightening story, and […]
Ecological Patterns, Land Use, and Right Livelihood
I have a kind of paralysis. I think many of us do. It comes when my ancient kitchen faucet leaks constantly—even with new washers—and I’m forced to replace it. It comes when a section of stovepipe rusts through. It comes, especially, when I can’t put off restoring our side porch any longer, and I look […]
Is Food the Last Thing to Worry About?
Our food system is woefully dependent on petroleum, as writers such as Richard Heinberg (1) and Michael Pollan (2) have eloquently pointed out. Soaring food costs have brought on riots in some countries, and in unstable nations, famine continues to be a regular visitor. Fears of empty grocery shelves have made food security the centerpiece […]
The Myth of Self Reliance
A mass emailing went out a while back from a prominent permaculturist looking for “projects where people are fully self sufficient in providing for their own food, clothing, shelter, energy and community needs. . .” There it was, the myth of “fully self sufficient,” coming from one of the best-known permaculturists in the world. In […]
Native Plants: Restoring to an Idea
Let me tell you about the invasive plant that scares me more than all the others. It’s one that has infested over 80 million acres in the US, usually in virtual monocultures. It is a heavy feeder, depleting soil of nutrients. Everywhere it grows, the soil is badly eroded. The plant offers almost no wildlife […]
Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?
Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture […]