Energy Roundup 2009 Keynote - Toby Hemenway (1 of 6)

A guide to Home-Scale Permaculture - Toby Hemenway, author of Gaias Garden

A guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Tobys book (for the past 6 years) has been the worlds best-selling book on permaculture, a design approach based on ecology for creating sustainable landscapes, homes, communities, and workplaces. He is also an adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Education at Portland State University, Scholar in Residence at Pacific University, and a biologist consultant for the Biomimicry Guild. Toby teaches, consults, and lectures on permaculture and ecological design throughout the US and other countries. His writing has appeared in magazines such as: Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is developing sites and resources for urban sustainability. Make plans to purchase your copy of Gaias Garden at the Roundup.

Toby Hemenway will be our Friday keynote speaker. Tobys talk is titled, How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but not Civilization and will explain what permaculture is and how it can help us to live sustainably.

Pulitzer-prize winning author Jared Diamond calls it the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Founder of permaculture Bill Mollison says it can destroy whole landscapes. Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture.Its not just that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid our cultures split between people and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of class inequality and police states.

Those are big claims, and this lecture will explore them, showing that new fuels and high technology are not the way out of the dilemma that agriculture has gotten us into. However, there are ways to live sustainably on the Earth without going back to the Stone Age. Many societies have lived in harmony with other species and yet have developed art, music, philosophy, medicine, and the other hallmarks of a rich culture. What many of them have in common looks a lot like what today is known as permaculture, an ecological design approach based on knowledge gained from nature. Tobys lecture will show us what makes agriculture, and the industrial society that relies on it, fundamentally unsustainable, and how permaculture offers us a better way. To learn more about Toby, Visit his website at: http://patternliteracy.com.

http://theroundup.org/?page_id=54

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Category:

Education

Tags:

• Energy
• Roundup
• green
• permaculture
• agriculture
• sustainable
• sustainability
• farm
• garden
• organic
• Fredericksburg

[RevNTheogen]

I like the explaination of the build-break-build oratory technique, passively let's you know you're being manipulated emotionally.

Having said that this is the most benign use of the technique I have ever seen as well.

Thanks for the post.

[bluenijin]

Nice history from human beginning to what may be our future using permaculture.