An email from a friend. Taking the thinking of the last post to the test. Good on ya, Seidro.

Greetings All,

Some of you know this but some of you do not. As I write this i am in Australia doing a 3 month internship Studying Permaculture Design.

What the heck is that you may ask.

Well basically its designing sustainable human settlements that leave a positive impact on the earth as opposed to a negative one. It is a design system incorporating everything a person needs to live and live well in modern society. Food and energy production, waste management, and legal and financial structures.

Here is a serious definition.

Anyway when i found out about it last year it sounded perfect, and I ended up taking a two week course in it in northern california. Well one of my teachers was this guy Geoff Lawton from Australia who has been doing it since 1983. He runs a school/research center in Australia. Well after the two week course I was convinced that this is something I needed to pursue and wanted to get some real on the ground experience doing it. After a few emails with Geoff i decided to do a 3 month internship at his school. He is basically the top guy in the world doing this type of work. He has done projects all over the world and is in the process of doing a plan for the entire country of Qatar. So I knew I’d learn a lot and have his name and connections to continue on with trying to turn this into a new career.

Here are some links if you want to learn more about it.

This is a video of a project Geoff did in Jordan, called “Greening the Desert”. After seeing this I was hooked.

This is a set of 4 30 minute videos showcasing permaculture in different climates around the world. It stars Bill Mollison a co-creator of Permaculture

video 1 the tropics

video 2 dry lands

video 3 cool climates

video 4 urban

I’ve also decided to keep an online journal of my internship. My goal is to have weekly updates

Here is the link to that.

I will send out an email reminder when new posts are up. Feel free to forward this on to anyone you think might be interested. And if you have questions feel free to ask. Also if you don’t want to receive any further updates please let me know.

Thank you for your time.

cheers

eric.