Toby Hemenway

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The Watershed Wisdom of the Beaver

December 2, 2010 By Toby Hemenway 5 Comments

You know what a stream looks like. It has a pair of steep banks that have been scoured by shifting currents, exposing streaks and lenses of rock and old sediment. At the bottom of this gully—ten to fifty feet down—the water rushes past, and you can hear the click of tumbling rocks as they are […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Animals in Permaculture, Design, Ecology, Keystone Species, Water Catchment, Watersheds

A Zone of One’s Own

December 2, 2010 By Toby Hemenway 1 Comment

How many times have you seen a vegetable garden tucked away in the back of a yard, choked with weeds and lurking with unharvested zucchini the size of baseball bats? Instead of being outside the kitchen window where those weeds and past-due vegetables would alert someone washing dishes, the garden has been hidden. And since […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Zones

The Origins of Peak Oil Doomerism

December 2, 2010 By Toby Hemenway 5 Comments

Many people in the Peak Oil community chafe at the label of doomer, but a lot of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Peak Oil

Seeing the Garden in the Jungle

December 2, 2010 By Toby Hemenway 4 Comments

Lately I’ve been lucky enough to teach permaculture courses on the Big Island of Hawai’i at La’akea Gardens. And at each course an odd thing happens. First, let me point out that La’akea generates all its own solar electricity, collects its water from rooftop catchment, uses composting toilets, recycles greywater, sheet mulches copiously, and has […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Food Forests, Guilds

Finding a Sense of Surplus

December 2, 2010 By Toby Hemenway 3 Comments

It’s easy to grasp the wisdom in the first two of permaculture’s three ethical principles. The benefits of “care for the earth” and “care for people,” are obvious, and it’s not a difficult step to put those principles into practice. But then comes that third, more challenging principle, “share the surplus.” That’s where some of […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Economics, Permaculture Ethics, Scarcity, Share the Surplus

Apocalypse, Not

December 2, 2010 By Toby Hemenway 1 Comment

The phrase “the end of the world as we know it” has been uttered so often in the last decade that some Peak Oil advocates simply use its acronym, TEOTWAWKI. This awkward shorthand was once employed by Y2k catastrophists, and that heritage alone—the most unnecessary “sky is falling” panic in my lifetime—is enough to make […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Peak Oil

Another Kind of Genocide

January 1, 2005 By pladmin 4 Comments

Review of Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, a book by David Theodoropoulos Avvar Books, Blythe CA. 2003. 237+xiv pp. Paper. $14.50 One of my favorite ways of setting off small explosions is to tell a group of gardeners that I don’t dislike invasive plants. Since the polarization over the natives-versus-exotics issue is fierce, the discussion […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Diversity, Invasion Biology, Invasive Species, Native Plants

Cities, Peak Oil, and Sustainability

January 1, 2005 By pladmin 1 Comment

In mid-August I drove to a party in the country outside of Portland, Oregon. Twenty miles of freeway took me to a two-lane road that wound ten miles up steep forested hills and down through remote valleys. As the roads grew narrower and less traveled, I began to wonder how, if gas hits $5 or […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Cities, Collapse, Community, Energy Descent, Peak Oil, Rural Sustainability, Urban Sustainability

Peak Oil and Urban Sustainability

January 1, 2005 By pladmin Leave a Comment

In 1994, my wife and I left Seattle and moved to rural southern Oregon. One of our many reasons for leaving the city was to finally pursue the dream of self-reliance: to create a permaculture homestead that would trim our resource use and let us tap in more fully to nature’s abundance. And in the […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Urban Sustainability

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About Toby Hemenway

Toby Hemenway is the author of The Permaculture City and Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture.
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The Permaculture City

The Permaculture City, available now.

The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we’re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways.

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