Toby Hemenway Visits & Permaculture takes Residence in Traverse City

Earlier this month, we were kindly invited to attend a weekend of the modular Permaculture Design Course being organized by Little Artshram in Traverse City. On top of this, Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden, came in from Arizona to offer his insights to this awesome offering. Penny Krebiehl and Steve DeGoosh, the facilitators & designers of this course, have done an excellent job. They’ve designed the weekends into spurts of in-class lectures, Qigong, wilderness awareness, site walks, hands-on design work, and a very intriguing consultant/client arrangement for seven distinct design groups designated a certain sector of the Little Artshram property — and an “all-star” cast of guest teachers, to top it off.

For those unfamiliar with Permaculture Design Courses in general, it’s essentially a crash course into the world of integrative ecological design. Permaculture is a term that was coined in the late 1970′s by the Australian naturalist Bill Mollison, as conjecture for the words permanent (more fittingly, perennial) and agriculture. The concepts, science, and application were developed by Bill and his student & colleague David Holmgren — which they published as the book Permaculture One. I see permaculture design as the culmination of thousands of years of regenerative, human land use and cutting edge ecological design technologies and techniques, pulled together into a single language, or system. The guiding purpose of permaculture design is to create human habitats that provide not only for our needs — food, fuel, shelter, medicine, etc. — but also provide for the needs of the entire ecosystem or biosphere. Often times this is referred to as “whole systems design” for the sole fact that a truly sustainable design (or human existence) accounts for not only individual parts, but the whole. Since the 70′s many have taken on the study of permaculture design, attended & taught design courses, and put it use on farms and suburban & urban land alike.

The weekend covered topics such as:

• Zone & Sector Analysis
• Site Analysis & Mapping
• Food Production
• Pattern Language
• Greywater Systems
• Plant/Ecosystem Energy Transactions
• Forest Gardening and Guild Design

Toby explains Zones & Sectors.

Toby and course attendee, musical master, and sound wave generator, Rokko Jans, gave an outstanding talk and performance combination to the public on Saturday of the weekend — to a crowd of 80 or so! Toby presented his excellent and wittily titled presentation, How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization. Rokko graced us with permaculturally designed piano tunes that took us into the depths of the sound wave — elaborating on how the vibrations of sound, and particularly chords, are at the core of his compositional work. I can hardly explain his theories as best as Rokko himself, but head to his website and give some of his tunes a listen! www.alaricjans.com

It was an amazing, high energy weekend — packed with information, learning, fun, and very good company. Traverse City & NW Michigan are already agriculturally diverse locales with very promising low-carbon futures. With this crew of newly learned and practiced permaculturists entering the world, the  work of Penny Krebiehl ,  Little Artshram and the long list of other groups working in NW Michigan, we can foresee a land not only blessed with beautiful wilderness, abundant water, but a community who are laying the groundwork for things to come, and of course, the many things to be thankful for now. Thanks again y’all! To learn more about this course, follow this link.

To finish it off, we got to ask Toby the infamous question: What is Permaculture? Thanks again, Toby!

Course Related Resources

1. The Significance of Kinship Gardening to Permaculture by Alan Kapuler
2. Kinship Gardening Maps-the core of biodiversity conservation
3. Alan “Mushroom” Kapuler: Organic guru of mind, spirit and body; a Homegrown Interview!
4. Matt & Kriya’s HumaNature School
5. Traverse City Shiatsu & Qigong