Making Permaculture Stronger

The creation of this episode was an incredible experience. Carol is shockingly sharp, disruptive beyond belief, and an absolute thrill to be in a conversation with. This episode is dripping with rich insights into regenerative and living systems thinking and how we can apply it to permaculture. I know you're going to love it. Here's the conversation as a video: https://youtu.be/ENzPrjNrZV8 Here is Carol's personal website. Here is an article Carol wrote about potential that has informed the future direction of Making Permaculture Stronger. Here is a link to a page with info about Carol's books. Her latest book is called The Regenerative Human and will be released March 2020. She asked me to mention that she is still looking for people to be involved in the action-learning project she discussed in our chat. See the details of being involved in this here. Here's is Carol's podcast Business Second Opinion. This episode goes through Seven Principles of Regeneration and is is well worth a listen. Here are the Deep Pacific online workshops. Carol asked me to "Let your listeners know they are welcome. All recorded. No beginning or end. You begin when you Step on the Mat, like I learned in Aikido, and practice with all levels of experience." I (Dan) am signing up so maybe I'll see you there. Here is Regenesis Group that was mentioned. For the interest of folk in the vicinity of Victoria, Australia, Regenesis member Joel Glanzberg will be running a one-day workshop on Regenerative Design in Melbourne July 2019. Was this post useful? Become a Patron to support the creation of more pieces like this and to access support in applying living systems thinking and much else to grow your permaculture design capacities.

It is my great honour to share this opening conversation with Jason Gerhardt who directs both the Permaculture Institute and Regenerative Design company Real Earth Design. Jason recently contributed this guest post to Making Permaculture Stronger, this post shared a snippet from our conversation in the comments of the current inquiry and this one included a diagram sharing the history of Jason's permaculture design process signature. In the closing comments to this episode I mention an experiment I'm currently conducting where I want to find out if the universe in general, and perhaps even you in particular, feel moved to give this project a tiny drip of financial support to unleash unimaginably exciting new levels of blog, podcast, video and book action. Only if you'd like, you can read more about this here.

Darren J. Doherty in a misty paddock with some cows In this episode you get to be a fly on the wall during a farm consultancy conducted by renowned farm planner and Regrarian Darren J. Doherty. I'm sure I don't need to spell out the resonance between Darren's comments about why he no longer does master plans and the current Making Permaculture Stronger inquiry (where I refer to master planning as fabricating). Thanks to Darren for his support on jobs like this as well as his kind permission to share his words here.

So this episode is a talk I gave on a beautiful farm called Mossy Willow Farm last weekend. The event and the talk were organised by Dumbo Feather and I thank them so much for the opportunity - I had myself a lovely time and the talk led to some awesome conversations afterward. During the talk I paraphrase this quote from Peter Senge: It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how can a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources need to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial : a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.Peter Senge, C. Scharmer (2011). “Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society”, p.10, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

Dan Palmer, Anne-Chloé Destremau, and Clinton Callahan at an Expand the Box Training in Wellington, NZ, February 2019 This conversation dives into the synergies between Permaculture and something called Possibility Management. It was my honour to be able to explore these synergies directly with Clinton Callahan. Clinton is the originator of Possibility Management, which has now been around about as long as permaculture. For 40 years possibility management has been an evolving portal into radical responsibility, initiated adulthood, whole-person space and feeling navigation, consciously co-creating fresh possibilities out of nothing, and so much else.82 It exists as a system of piercingly clear distinctions discovered (and hence there to be noticed) inside lived experience. In trainings, books and so forth people are supported to discover and play with the power and possibility explosions resulting from experiencing these distinctions for themselves. https://youtu.be/HzdYM0l_T3w This episode as a video... For me, this episode has a kind of magic to it. As I explain in the episode, discovering and experimenting with Possibility Management has been a significant development in my life, and something I am deeply grateful for. To think it all started in May 2018 when I spotted a random book lying on David Holmgren and Su Dennet's coffee table! Where this all started... I hope you enjoy this opening dialogue, and here are some online places you can learn more about Clinton's work: Possibility ManagementInner PermacultureClinton's personal website Here are some links to upcoming Possibility Management Expand the Box trainings in this part of the world: Possibility Management in AustraliaPossibility Management in New Zealand As I say during the episode, if anyone out there has or finds themselves messing about in the places where possibility management and permaculture overlap, please get in touch immediately! I end with my thanks once again to Ben Mallinson for creating the new intro and outro music - what do you think? Returning Clinton's book to David March 13, 2019, ten months after I nicked off with it... Endnote

Meg McGowan In this episode I inquire into Australian permaculturalist Meg McGowan's design process. It is a rich chat in which Meg shares many brilliant insights after working as a permaculture design process facilitator / coach for many years. Meg out there taking it to the people... I met Meg at the 14th Australiasian Permaculture Convergence in April 2018 and was struck by her passion and clarity. While I didn't manage to get a selfie with Meg at the event this character did... David Holmgren and Meg McGowan Meg's (active!) blog is here, her and her partner's Permacoaching facebook page is here, and among so many other things she happens to be a permaculture design cartoonist! Check these out and there are a bunch more here. One Permaculture Design Process Planet Permaculture HUGE gratitude to the wonderful Ben Mallinson for creating the new intro and outro music - a massive improvement (no offence to my mate Nath who created the old one on his phone in about three minutes). Ben has been volunteering his time to help out with several of my projects as we explore ways of getting him involved in my professional consultancy work - and I have very much appreciated his assistance. Now I should confess that Meg and I recorded this chat way back in September 2018. It took this long to get the thing edited and released. I guess that's a good sign in that this project is a hobby and when push comes to shove, and non-hobby parts of life call, it waits a while :-). Still, I sense that things will be warming up from here and I envisage releasing at least one podcast episode per month for a while (and the next one will come out in about two weeks). Thanks again Meg and I'm delighted to have you as a friend and colleague and look forward to our next yarn :-). Let's wrap up with Meg's take on a condensed set of permaculture principles:

In this episode I speak with Morag Gamble from Our Permaculture Life, the Permaculture Education Institute, and her very active youtube channel. I'm still getting to know Morag after meeting her recently at the fourteenth Australasian Permaculture Convergence. Morag attended sessions I lead on both Making Permaculture Stronger and Living Design Process and afterward we had the best conversation about it all. But I didn't realise how on the same page we were, and how much longer Morag had been on that page, and just how much I have to learn from her about it, until we recorded this chat. Enjoy, and huge gratitude to Morag for taking the time, and being who she is, and doing all the incredible stuff she's doing toward lifting up and growing and sharing what is great about permaculture. Here are the people, books, links etc Morag refers to in this episode. Fritjof Capra The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman Victor Papenek Helena Norberg-Hodge Vandana Shiva Christopher Day (Author of Places of the Soul) Schumacher College Patrick Whitefield Jan Gehl Nick Rose Sustain book Developing Citizen Designers (book) Our Permaculture Life Oh yes, and here's a happy snap of Morag and I taken just last week at Food Connect in Brisbane: ...and I finish with a lovely youtube masterclass where Morag shares five steps to getting started with permaculture design: 

In this episode I speak with permaculture elder Joel Glanzberg from Pattern Mind, Regenesis Group and the Tracking Project. Early in the conversation, Joel refers to his 30 Years Greening the Desert project which you can learn about in this clip:  We also refer to Joel's Open Letter and Plea to the Permaculture Movement. Here is a more recent article in which Joel writes beautifully about the necessary transformation toward life at a world-view level. Here's a poignant excerpt: Holding my baby son one night as he slept, I thought about how I would make his body. Having built things all my life, this seemed simple. I would begin by framing him up, joining his bones together using his muscles, tendons and ligaments. Then I’d run his arteries and veins, his nervous system, install all of his organs, sheath him in skin, fill him with blood, a bit of food and water and start him up, maybe with a spark from jumper cables. Of course he was made nothing like this, but this Frankensteinian thought experiment revealed my own mind’s mechanicalness and the difference between how we think about and make things and how the living world creates. Everything we make is conceived and constructed before it begins to carry out the processes for which it was designed. Our cars, homes, businesses, schools, programs are all structured before they run. Like my son’s body—all of our bodies for that matter—all living structures are built by doing what they have been created to do. His body was made by metabolizing nutrients, water and oxygen and moving around, just as it is today. The river was not dug and then filled with water. The river running made the river. The branching scaffold of the tree was not built before it carried water and nutrients up into the sky and sugars back down into the roots. The tree built its body by adding layer after layer of carbon taken from the sky through photosynthesizing, from the moment it put out leaves into the air and roots into the earth. Finally, and with particular relevance to some of the places Making Permaculture Stronger will soon be heading as a project, I recommend watching this too, where Joel speaks alongside several of his colleagues at Regenesis Group: 

This episode is a recording of a session during a four-day workshop that was run last week by David Holmgren from Holmgren Design and Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger. The workshop was entitled Advanced Permaculture Planning and Design Process, and this episode shares the story of Dan's personal journey with permaculture design process, to which David responds with something of his own story. Here is a photo of Dan sharing his story... ...and David responding... Huge thanks to Keri Chiveralls for coming and for taking and sharing all three photos, Bec Lowe and Brenna Quinlan for supporting David and Dan during the course (and for Brenna's amazing illustrations), Su Dennet for feeding everyone, and the other participants for coming along and making it all possible and for integrating their beautiful energies into the mix of this emerging conversation whose time has come around (once again): Andrew, Anitra, Annaliese, Anne, Ben, Daryl, Delldint, Delvin, Franky, Gavin, Jazmyn, Jenny, Ken, Kim, Ko, Linnet, Lukas, Michae,l Michelle, Pierre, Sean, Stacey, Ugo, Venetia, Wayne & Willow Brenna Quinlan's brilliant pictorial summary of Dan's talk (which was then condensed into this summary of the whole day): The course group: Finally, for anyone who might be interested, there is a detailed six-post report of the 2017 version of this workshop here, and future iterations of this course will be listed here.

In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger speaks with Jascha Rohr from the Institute for Participatory Design which is based in Oldenburg, Germany. With his partner Sonja Hörster, Jascha has created a fascinating and powerful way of framing design process they call the Field Process Model. The Field Process Model brings together inspiration from Bill Mollison's core model and Christopher Alexander's generative process against the philosophical backdrop of field theory (rather than the systems thinking backdrop permaculture usually stems from). Here it is sketched at a high level in two dimensions (get your head around this first, where reading this article is highly recommended)... ...here in more detail in three dimensions (or of course four if you include the movement or dance through time): Here are field process model originators Jascha and Sonja during the recording, which happened on February 20, 2018. The red squiggle indicates a certain four-volume set of books, the second volume of which just happened to also be sitting just behind Dan...