Using biological resources to fullfill the needs of people and of natural systems is one of permaculture’s design principles. Bill Mollison, one of the originators of the design system, described doing this as working with, not against, nature. Everything gardens, Bill wrote, in saying that living things—people, animals and plants—alter…

I TOOK THE ADVICE of someone on the Evidence-Based Permaculture facebook and tuned into the The Prole Models Ministries podcast on permaculture. The Ministries is a left-leaning podcast which plans a series around permaculture. This is the blurb introducing the podcast: The first episode of our new miniseries entitled “The…

Plants in permaculture design Using biological resources to fullfill the needs of both people and natural systems is one of permaculture’s design principles. Bill Mollison, one of the originators of the design system, described this as working with, not against, nature. …

Waterfall Bay is an easy, short walk on Tasmania’s Tasman Peninsula. The peninsula offers a number of walks spanning easy to longer to overnight. — WHY we decided to drive here on a day of low cloud was to pick up a couple friends from the mainland who were coming off the four-day, Three Capes walk. We’ve had other friends do the walk and they all say how spectacular it is. For we who live…

The search for lightweight, compact trail foods leads us to the Patagonia store. — I turn the package over to look for the ingredients, expecting the usual unmemorable, numeric and sometimes suspicious sounding ingredients. All I find is toasted buckwheat, cracked barley, rolled oats, freeze dried banana, nonfat dried milk, flax seeds, vanilla powder, ground rice hulls, sunflower oil (all of these organic) plus…

“Our best activists joined army forces, territorial defence or help as volunteers, and with every day of this war we lose more and more of…

Social collapse, civilisational collapse. Rumours of its imminence come and go over the years. Now, the Defence Department and other institutions are starting to warn of the possibility. It is not ecological collapse, not the effects of global heating that is the immediate risk. It is oil. Not the peak oil that became the focus and the fear well over a decade ago, more the sudden cutting-off of Australia’s oil supply due to events in the region. The possibility is dire.

ON THE RECOMMENDATION of people in the Evidence-Based Permaculture facebook group I read through Anthony Kelly’s Dealing with Far-Right Interventions in Left-Wing and Progressive Movements. It is not a long read. I read his paper to see if it could shed any light on recent allegations of such interventions in…

WITH THE DEPARTURE of winter’s rains our soils start to dry and it comes time to think of garden construction. Soils around here reach field capacity in winter. Now, our first bed is built and the seedlings we planted are feeding us. Making the garden To make the beds we reused the wooden…