Hey permies! I'm a permaculturist and PhD student. I got tired of the deafening silence about permaculture in the scientific community, so I'm doing my dissertation about permaculture itself. I'm just beginning the research phase of this project now. It starts with a web survey, which is designed to help answer some serious and simple questions about the permaculture movement. So far, response from the permaculture community has been awesome, for which I'm really grateful. I'll paste a flyer for the survey in below. Below that, I'll say a little about my history in permaculture, to help anyone who is interested get a sense for where I'm coming from. I'm also slowly assembling a list of every permaculture-identified farming operation in the continental US (and some in Canada). In the coming year, I'll be visiting 50-70 of these sites for field agroecosystem research! So if you know of folks doing farm-scale permaculture, get in touch at Liberation Ecology Agroecosystem Research. --link to web survey-- A couple notes about my life in permaculture and related stuff, for anyone who is interested: 2003 - PDC with Peter Bane and Gustavo Ramirez at Gaia Ecovillage in Argentina. Apprenticed with Peter Bane at Earthaven Ecovillage for 4 months right after. 2005 - Started developing the Liberation Ecology workshop curriculum to bridge some of the concepts in permaculture with social justice thinking. 2007 - Student/guest taught with Geoff Lawton and Ethan Roland at Green Phoenix PDC in High Falls. Started developing the Mycoscaping workshop curriculum to better integrate mushroom production with permaculture. 2008 - Begin a graduate program in Agroecology and Ecological Design with John Todd (among others) at University of Vermont. 2009 - Started teaching an annual PDC with Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute. Design work (collab with Ethan Roland) appears in Lee Reich's Landscaping With Fruit as the example of permaculture design. 2010 - Design the integrated mushroom production enterprise for Growing Power in Milwaukee. Train new staff - to be trainers and to continue to refine and develop the system further - and a few hundred workshop participants along the way. Finish my MS in Agroecology. Start a PhD in the Multifunctional Landscape Analysis and Design Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under Sarah Lovell. 2011 - Getting tired of the deafening silence about permaculture from the scientific community, develop a dissertation project on permaculture itself. 2012 - Begin research. While I still consult and teach permaculture professionally, I spend most of my time these days studying permaculture as an agroecologist and doctoral student. Fortunately, I still teach a PDC each summer with Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute. Highlight of my summer!
G'day Rafter Welcome to the PRI Forum. Great work you are doing! I completed the SurveyMonkey earlier today. I don't have a lot of time to spare these days. Having said that, if you need a hand with anything academic from an Australian perspective, please let me know (contact via my blog link) and I'll see what I can do. Cheerio, Markos
Thanks, Finchj and Markos! You might be interested to check out a short post I wrote about the geographic breakdown of the first week of responses. Featuring pretty graphs! Check it out when you have a moment: https://liberationecology.org Best, Rafter