I’ve been through the first week of course work for the Online Permaculture Design Course taught by Geoff Lawton. I found it was a good thing that I’ve been studying permaculture on my own for so long. My previous permaculture studies helped me understand a lot of the more abstract theory that the course starts out with.
Since this is a pretty big investment for myself and my family, financially speaking, I decided to make the most of it and study Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual along with the course. Also, I decided to take it up a notch and also listen to Bill Mollison’s original 1983 permaculture design course on MP3 while driving to and from the day job.
(Photo by Nicolas Boullosa – http://www.flickr.com/photos/faircompanies/2196171642/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18933888)
For those that aren’t familiar with Permaculture, Bill Mollison is one of the two founding designers of the movement. I wouldn’t say that they’re ideas are unique, but having all their knowledge gathered into one movement to improve the planet down to the garden level is unique and brilliantly put together.
As I mentioned above, this permaculture course is being taught by Geoff Lawton who famously said, “All the World’s Problems Can Be Solved in a Garden.” Geoff Lawton is one of Bill Mollison’s more widely followed students. There are some other famous-in-permaculture-circles students, but Geoff is probably the most widely followed.
I tend to see Geoff as taking Bill’s efforts to spreading permaculture design to the next level. Geoff has refined and expanded on Bill’s concepts. He has taught, designed, consulted, and practiced permaculture for 30 years. His most famous video is Greening the Desert, but any of his course work if far more detailed and helpful than that short video.
So my thoughts after the first week?
I’m going to focus on that two acres of floodplain that I have up at Dove Ranch. I really feel this course is going to flush out concepts and knowledge that I used to think I understood. I’m really learning that I’ve only scraped the surface of permaculture with my past studies. I’m kind of humbled by starting to learn what I didn’t know that I didn’t know.