Welcome to the Advanced Permaculture Design Course. Wayne and I are excited to present this material and expand many of the basic Permaculture concepts into new thinking. We talked many times about the basic physical laws that keep repeating in our designs in order to maintain ecological efficiency. So many of the principles in Permaculture can be applied to any situation, that we are always looking for the basic concepts involved, the overriding physical principle in as few words as possible.
During the week as we go through the design process, we will be focusing our attention on ecological services that nature provides and the climactic and geological forces that we must consider when creating or retrofitting our sustainable lifestyle. Many of the dynamics involved while cooking our food are also involved while cooling and heating our living space. The vocabulary used, and the definitions that we must verify, make a huge impact and how we think about our lifestyle and living systems. Southwoods will be our working lab for much of the discussion, it has much to offer as an example (good and bad) of ecological design and the built environment.
We will also discuss at length cultural influences, economic and marketing pressures, and how we must focus our energies on developing enhanced ecological services using ecological solutions and keeping technology and consumerism to a minimum. Our entire design process will be based on the scale of permanence. We will go into detail concerning the scale of permanence as we devise our solutions from patterns to details, from patches to niches, and from functional spaces to the actual plant species that will perform those functions.
Wayne and I would like to begin this discussion early. We would like to use this blog as a place for us to begin understanding these expanded concepts so we can discuss them further in class and go deeper in the conversation.
We will be sending out this week a survey so you can help us tailor the breadth and depth of the topics to your context. We want to make sure that you get what you need from your point of view as well as what we feel is important. Please fill out the survey at your earliest convenience and let's begin the conversation.
We look forward to directly working with you beginning the 29th of July, but for now let us introduce ourselves and discuss our current situations and concerns.
Thanks,
Daniel Halsey
