Permaculture Class, part 1

I began my first permaculture class today. Here are the highlights:

The ethics of permaculture:

Care of earth
Care of people (consider others)
Fair share

The Camphor Laurel tree, for example, shares its root system with other plants and trees. So if you poison it, you also may kill every other tree in a 100 meter radius!

1. Observe [nature] and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield [eg food or enjoyment]

This class is free. We meet every other week over 10 weeks. I ran into two people with whom I'd previously volunteered in bush regeneration and community gardens.

I believe growing food [well] is a largely lost skill among Westerners. Perhaps if I become better at it, I can pass on the gift of permaculture gardening to others.

Here's a neat quote from Bill Mollison when asked to define "Permaculture":

It's hard to get your mind around it - I can't. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.

You see, if you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

Read more here, here, or here.