Making Permaculture Stronger

For some years I've been itching to get permaculture designer, teacher and author Looby Macnamara on the show and that dream has finally come true. Not only that, we had such a lovely chat we've already booked in a second conversation, where Looby will take us through what she calls her permaculture design web. Find out more about Looby's books and other work at her personal website here. Looby - image source Find out about Looby's colleague in cultural emergence, Jon Young, at his website here. And here is an image of Looby's permaculture design web that I am excited to explore in our next chat. Here's vid of Looby introducing Cultural Emergence https://youtu.be/bAAFfL4gQaE Enjoy the episode, leave a comment, and catch you in episode 60!

I recently enjoyed the first of what I hope will be many lovely conversations with Takota Coen about permaculture's potential. Takota is co-author of the new design process book Building Your Permaculture Property. In Takota's words, we "talk about how a lack of a living, adaptive process is holding permaculture back from reaching its fullest potential, and what we can all do about it." Here's the youtube version, here's Takota's podcast where this chat was originally shared, and you can learn more about what I'm calling Living Design Process here. Enjoy and please do leave a comment sharing what you make of the stuff we explore! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIJvfkdsxQA Dan and Takota mid-chat

Greetings all. In this episode I get to ask my friend and colleague Michael Wardle from Savour Soil Permaculture all kinds of questions about the history and current state of his work as a professional permaculture designer and educator. Lots of great perspectives and hard-earned learnings in this one - I look forward to seeing what you make of it in the comments! Michael with one of his teachers :-). You can check out Michael's facebook page here and his website here, including his design consultancy offerings and a section with a bunch of edible gardening tips here. Michael also has a youtube channel with videos such as this one dropping thick and fast: https://youtu.be/gtGLoHXqRwQ

Hey all. So I had the urge to surf along a little in the wake of the last episode, and reflect further on Carol Sanford's Seven First Principles of Regeneration. Thus, in this episode I reflect on, unpack and further explore what Carol shared about the seven first principles and how they are enriching my own development. My intention for the episode was: I am continuing to explore Carol Sanford's Seven First Principles of Regeneration...in a way that supports listeners (and myself!) to better grasp and go experiment with them...so that we realising together, any value they can bring to our lives, projects and the Making Permaculture Stronger journey. Hope you enjoy and I look forward to hearing what you make of all this in the comments :-). Further Reading, Watching, and Listening on Carol Sanford's Seven First Principles of Regeneration If, like me, you're itching to dive deeper, I found this most helpful series of blog posts (and a separate series of short videos) where Carol clarifies: The history and practice of regeneration (or see this video introducing first principles)Identifying and working with wholes not parts (or see video here)Essence (or singularity) (or see video here)Potential (not problems) (or see video here)Development (video only)Nestedness (or see video here)Nodal intervention (or see video here)Fields (video only) Here's a quote I really liked from the essence post: Looking to existence, writing down our observations or collecting facts, will not reveal singularity. In order to sniff out essence, we must become trackers and look for it in the same way that native peoples follow the traces of animals who have passed by. Essence becomes apparent in the patterns that are specific to a person, those that reveal how they engage with the world, their purpose in life, the unique value they create as the result of their endeavors. The same is true for the essence of any natural system, community, or organization.Carol Sanford Finally, Here's a 20m video (with poor quality audio but worth it) of Carol talking about what regeneration is. She gets into the Seven First Principles about 10 minutes in.

Carol Sanford, a pioneering regenerative thinker and author of The Regenerative Life, discusses her innovative framework, The Seven First Principles of Regeneration. She emphasizes the need for a holistic, systems-thinking approach to regeneration, challenging the conventional mechanistic views. Carol encourages listeners to embrace their unique essence and shift from problem-centric thinking to potential-focused perspectives. She also explores how play and personal development can transform learning, ultimately fostering deeper ecological connections and understanding.

Welcome back to Part Two of a conversation with permaculture co-originator David Holmgren. In which David continues sharing significant milestones from his many decades as a practicing permaculture designer. Thanks to this project's wonderful patrons, I was once again able to have the audio professionally transcribed. The text below then received significant edits for clarity from patron Jon Buttery (thanks Jon!), myself, and most importantly David. Thanks also to David for kindly sharing relevant photos that help bring the text to life. Don't miss Part One if you haven't yet heard/read it, and given the quality of thinking David shares in this continuation, I hope you'll leave a comment. I anticipate a follow up conversation with David exploring questions and reflections from your comments, so please make the most of the opportunity. Finally, given this conversation again touches on the core skill of reading landscape, please check out and consider supporting the documentary film David, myself, and videographer Dave Meagher are currently endeavouring to bring into the world. Starting Holmgren Design Services Dan Palmer: All right. Well, here I am for the continuation of the discussion we started earlier. After a bit of a break, must have been, I don’t know, six weeks or something.    David Holmgren: Yeah. It’s been a busy time.  Dan Palmer: I’ll say! - a busy and very interesting time. It turned out the first recording was about an hour, and we got to the point where you'd started Holmgren Design Services, so that seems like a great place to start. You’d told us a lot about the project at your mother’s place in New South Wales and the learning you’d been doing from Hakai Tane about strategic planning, and then shrinking that down to apply to a site level. It’d be awesome to hear about the experience of moving into the space of permaculture design consultancy.    David Holmgren:  In 1983 I started a business and registered a business name. There were lot of things that were going on in my life, which I can also correlate with things that were happening in the wider world: that led me to getting serious earning a living, personal relationships, and also living in the city. The consultancy work I did, was primarily advising and designing for people who were moving onto rural properties; what these days people call a ‘tree-change’.   Consulting on a Central Victorian property in 2020 (as part of the Reading Landscape film project) That work fell into sort of two broad types. One-day verbal onsite advisory, walking around the property and suggesting things with clients. Then there was a more limited number of clients where I was providing reports and plans that gave me the opportunity to reflect. There were a lot of constraints on how to make a viable business in that, especially if your work wasn’t focused on affluent people, but instead empowering people who were going to get out and do these things themselves, often starting from scratch, and often making big mistakes. My advice and design drew on a combination of my own experience as well as observing how others had tackled the back to land process over the previous decade. By then I also had a very strong commitment to Victoria and South Eastern Australia of landscapes and ecologies and design issues that I was familiar with in that territory.   Dan Palmer: Was that where all or the majority of your professional work happened?    David Holmgren: Yeah, it was. There was occasional work further-afield - certainly into the dry Mediterranean country in South Australia and into New South Wales, Sydney region, but most of it was in Victoria.  Dan Palmer: Permaculture was a new thing so in a sense you were defining the industry or making it up as you went along.   David Holmgren: Yeah. It was also a time of very strong backlash against alternative ideas. When I set up the business, I had mixed feelings about whether I would descri...

I'm thrilled in this episode to share the first part of a two-part interview in which David Holmgren shares his journey with permaculture design process over the decades. Scroll down to access the full transcript of this conversation, with huge thanks to David for sharing the historical photographs which really bring the story to life. Note that in collaboration with David I had also previously created a downloadable PDF showing the timeline of David's design process journey that might provide a helpful supporting reference. Finally, be sure to check out the brand new Reading Landscape with David Holmgren documentary project website which is so closely related to this episode. The Full Interview Transcript (Edited for flow and readability) Dan Palmer (DP):Welcome to the next episode of the Making Permaculture Stronger podcast. I'm super excited today. I've travelled about half an hour up the road and I'm sitting at a permaculture demonstration property and home called Melliodora. Sitting next to me is David Holmgren. David Holmgren (DH): Good to welcome you here. DP: I'm very excited to be here with this microphone between us and to have this opportunity to have you share the story of your journey with permaculture design process over the decades. David and Dan co-teaching in 2018 DH: Yeah, and that's something we've worked on together in courses: our personal journeys with that. Certainly through those courses, working together has elicited and uncovered different aspects of me understanding my own journey. Childhood DH: Thinking about design process through the lens of childhood experiences, I was always a constructor/builder, making cubbies, constructing things and yet never had any family role models for that. My father wasn't particularly practical with tools, and yet I was always in whatever workshop there was in our suburban home as a young child. So making things, imagining things which don't exist, and then bringing them to life was definitely part of my childhood experience. I don't know, particularly, why in my last years of high school I had some vague notion that I might enrol in West Australian University in architecture. But I left to travel around Australia instead because I was hitchhiking mad in 1973. And in that process, I came across a lot of different ideas to do with the counter culture and alternative ways of living. Studying Environmental Design in Tasmania Most significantly, I came across a course in Tasmania in Hobart called Environmental Design and I met some of the enrolled students. I'd realised by that stage that I was not cut out to do any sort of conventional university course. I was too radical and free in my thinking and wasn't wanting to be constrained within any discipline or accounting for things through exam processes. DP: What age were you? DH: I was 18 at that time, and this course in Environmental Design really attracted me. Undergraduate students, who were doing the generalist degree in environmental design, were sometimes working on projects with postgraduate students who were specialising in architecture, landscape architecture or urban planning at the post graduate level. Mt Nelson campus where Environmental Design School was part of the Tas College of Advanced Education 1970-80 There was no fixed curriculum. There was no fixed timetable. Half the staff budget was for visiting lecturers and outside professionals. There was a self assessment process at the end of each semester, which then led to a major study at the end of the three year generalist degree. There was the same self assessment process for the postgraduate level. So you got up to the finishing line, and then had to show your results, and that was to a panel that included outside professionals that you had a say in choosing. DP: Suitably radical. DH: I believe it was the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia's history.

Such a deep honour to have my dear friend and very first ever podcast guest Rosemary ('Rowe') Morrow from the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute back on the show (after being my very first ever guest!) sharing her permaculture journey over four decades this week. Some of the topics you'll hear in this truly wonderful chat are Rowe's: new in-progress bookthoughts on the adequacies and inadequacies of permaculture issue with most permaculture being taught to middle class westernerswork in refugee camps and other largely invisible margins which are rapidly growingthoughts on designing yourself into your place vs designing yourself out of overseas places you workchapter on a permaculture approach to the oceansthoughts on decolonisation and re-indigenisingthoughts on the essence of permaculture Please note after our chat Rowe asked if I would please share this link about supporting a permaculture project addressing the Humanitarian Crisis after the burning of the Moria Camp on the island of Lesbos. Image source Rowe also mentioned Milkwood's Permaculture Living Skills course which you can check out here. Photo from a project in Lesvos Rowe was part of

Continuing our recent focus, this episode shares a lively chat with my friend and fellow decision-making innovator Javan Bernakevitch. For several years we've been catching up regularly to talk shop and explore what's alive for us with respect to our shared interest in values-based or holistic decision making. This time we hit record to explore the difference between procedures with steps and processes with principles. How clear are you on the difference? Take a listen to find out! Find more episodes on Holistic Decision Making hereLearn more about Javan's excellent work here and watch his Facing Fire film hereFind out more about my online courses in Holistic Decision Making hereCheck this link in a week or so to learn more about the David Holmgren Reading Landscape Documentary projectCheck out the site of April-Sampson Kelly (whose voice makes an all-too-brief appearance) hereBecome a patron of Making Permaculture Stronger here to access powerful permaculture design resources and enable the creation of more content like this I hope you enjoy our holistic decision making shop talk, bless all you fathers out there (it is father's day in my part of the world), and catch you in the next episode.

This episode is the continuation and completion of the last episode where I started an interactive rolling review of a holistic context for a permaculture design business. Here we follow through and finish the first pass of Porvenir Design's Holistic Context with owner-directors Scott Gallant and Sam Kenworthy. To tie in with our current focus, by the way, I have created an online course on Holistic Decision Making starting September 4th, 2020. This course will educate and resource participants to develop their own holistic contexts and start making decisions aligned with that context. There is also the opportunity to attend a PDC with Porvenir Design in either 2020 or 2021. If you are interested in this topic you might also want to listen to my introduction to Holistic Decision Making in episode 40 and my recent interview with Allan Savory. You can also catch up on my prior conversation with Scott on the practical and professional realities of a more living design process in episode 41 and episode 42. Some quotes from this episode Whether you grow the business or shrink the business, that’s a decision, not a quality of life statement. - Dan The entire job (of enabling actions) is to make the quality of life statements true. You know, what do we need to be doing or producing to make them true. One point I’ll make is whenever I do this I’ll make it very clear which enabling actions are attached to which quality of life statements. Even though sometimes one enabling action will serve more than one quality of life statement. I find that really helpful particularly later on when you’re auditing and you’re realising, oh right now this quality of life statement is the least true, so what are we going to do about it? That’s our focus for the next six weeks is to make that more true and then move on to the one that now is least true. Let’s go straight to the enabling actions in service of that and find out what’s wrong there, what’s happening there, what we can change. - Dan When I first got into this I dove really deep into it and really read Savory’s book very closely, workshops and all that. And where I got to with the ‘resource base’ is that he construes it in terms of how things need to be 10, 20, 100, 200 years into the future, socially, on the land. As I tried to work with that, what I found that it directly connected to enabling actions. That’s their job for me. So you’ve got your purpose - where you’re heading, you’ve got the quality of life statements - the core things you need to feel are true along the way if you are getting quality out of being involved and want to stay involved, and then you’ve got the enabling actions - things you need to be doing day by day, week by week, in order to keep those quality of life statements true, which if they’re true, that enables you to actually deliver on your statement of purpose. The future resource base does look into the future, and it’s says, what are the resources that you need to be in place in order to do these enabling actions. What are the enabling actions, what resources are they dependant on, and how do those need to…I think of them as variables. If the key future resource base variable diminishes over time, a classic one in any business is the goodwill of your customers, if that’s going downhill over time at some point you don’t have a business anymore. So it’s one of the core resources you depend on into the future to continue operating. - Dan This is where we put relationships with suppliers. They are in a certain state. And if the quality of our relationship with the people who supply the timber we make our veg beds out of or even the screws and bolts that we bolt them together with or whatever, if those relationships are going down hill, at some point they will say screw you, and give the timber to someone else instead. These are core resources that we depend on to do what we do and we want to bring our conscious attention to them so ...