Toby Hemenway

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Redistributing Wealth—Upwards

June 24, 2012 By pladmin Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Articles

Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?

June 1, 2011 By pladmin 26 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Sustainable Agriculture

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

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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