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 … […]

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 … […]

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 … […]

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 … […]

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 … […]

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 … […]