Martha Dominguez shares her indigenous wisdom with the recent Ecovillage Design Education World View Course at the University of New Mexico.
See how Permaculture Designer Geoff Lawton worked with Jordanians to salvage heavily salted deserts and transform into green oasis!!
Greening the Desert
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Radio Interview On KPFA Tierra Verde
Resources: eco recycle - save energy & mitigate global hunger
The
Problem is the solution. Follow the bread crumbs backward. When
asked to visualize a sustainable living environment, many of us
envision a rural farm-like setting with lots of land and plenty
of natural resources around that can support our needs. The reality,
though, is that most North American's live in cities.
So
we are faced with the difficult question. "How can permaculture
address life in a city?"When
applying Permaculture to an urban environment, it is especially
important to understand the principle, "the problem is the
solution." We all know that it is very easy to identify problems
in most cities, but this can work to our advantage if we are intent
on creating solutions rather than merely drawing attention to the
problems. First,
we might think of a city's characteristics in terms of an ecosystem
such as a forest. A mature forest has a forest canopy, which in
a city is the top of tall buildings. Mid-sized buildings can be
anagolous to the forest understory. Small buildings and other human
and natural structures are parallel to a forest's shrubs and ground
cover. Finally, the city equivelant to a forest's soil could be
streets, sidewalks and yards. Once we look at the city's elements
as opportunities to create beauty through design, we begin to fiind
solutions, including:
- Building greenhouses and planting gardens in vacant lots.
Turning our grass lawns into gardens that produce food and are aesthetically beautiful.
Creating
community by combining backyards with our neighbors, tearing down
fences to create bigger parcels of usable land.
Using the presence of buildings to cultivate plants that need partial shade or vertical climbing space.
Designing
a water catchment system on the roofs of our houses that can provide
all the water needs for the garden.
- Building
bridges between biological, cultural, social and economic sustainability.
Remember,
it is a conscious choice for us to see "impediments" to
rebuilding sustainabale cities and "resources" and "opportunites."
Urban areas have lots of energetic people who, when putting their
minds and hearts together, can create beautiful, healthy, liivng
environments in the midst of supposed chaos.
excerpted
from an EarthLight
magazine article by Jeff Brown
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