Permaculture Convergence

Eight years ago I was here in Pirenopolis to teach an Ecovilla design course to architects, city planners, regional planners, and permaculture graduates, today I am arriving for the pc convergence and it is unbelievable the amount of change and work that has transpired in those eight years.

This is the site of Instituto Permacultura Ecovilas do Cerrado which has evolved into the most active permaculture training center for land based learning on the planet. Andre Soares and his wife Lucy are the driving inspiration and labor behind this incredible place.


We will be meeting in the Bill Mollison Amphitheater which is pictured above. The structure is made of bricks that were manufacuted here at IPEC with IPEC soil. The Amphitheater can handle several hundred participants and they have built many small rooms to accommodate their students and for the next four days, us.

Sustainable Corporations?

With the exception of Carlos Louge (an Argentinean Economist), Donna Morton (a Canadian Economist), Paul Stammets (an US Mycologist), Roberto Perez (a Cuban permaculturalist), Robin Francis (an Australian Permacuture Teacher), and Declan Kennedy (an Irish Permaculturist), all of the other presenters were representative of an emerging new corporate model “the sustainable corporation”.

I think that the non corporate presenters had much more to offer in the way of solutions and ethics. I think that all of us keep hoping that the corporate world has something to teach or offer us that will make us more effective and able to affect change on a much larger scale. After this conference I think that quite the opposite is true and that we should lay the myth of big is better or more effective to rest. Perhaps its time to dust off Shumacher's “Small is Beautiful” and have another look.

There is much more that I would like to write about but I feel that I need more time for my thoughts to gestate and that they could use a good marinating in talk with my peers during the convergence. I am still convinced that Permaculture is the best show in town!

Limits to Sustainability - some musings

The theme of the conference was invisible structures, particularly finance and sustainable corporations. We heard presentations from some of the top foundations and corporations in Brazil. Two very large banks presented their sustainability programs. Other groups spoke of their Corporate Social Responsibility Programs.
For the most part I was under-impressed but I did come away with some provocative and new thoughts.

If one applies pattern to invisible structures then one has to figure out what are human patterns and how do they work. What seems glaringly obvious is that there is an order of scale problem. Rivers and trees have a limit to the orders of branching, but human constructs seem to be able to ignore limits. This is true of economics which allows one percent of mankind to control 40% of the total resource base of the planet, and of agriculture which allows a corporation to farm tens of thousands of hectares. Both of these examples are examples of exploitive systems. You cannot operate on such large scales without being extremely exploitative both of the environment and of humans. If this is true then to talk in terms of the sustainability of City Bank is an oxymoron.

Sustainability was the key word of every corporate presenter but not once did any of them give a definition of sustainability or their understanding of it. Tony Anderson who is an old permaculture teacher and designer from Denmark was of the opinion that to be sustainable one had to be constrained to ones bioregion – or that was the appropriate order of scale. Once you start importing and exporting product and money in and out of the bioregion the bioregion inevitable suffers. I’m sure we will spend some time hashing this out during the convergence.

Sao Paolo, IPC8 - gathering of the alternative nation

I am a little overwhelmed right now with the delight of seeing and talking with all of my old pc buddies. Robin Francis, Rosemary Morrow (Australia), Tony Anderson (Denmark), Juao Rochet (Bage, Brazil), Africa, Asia, names I have forgotten all here sitting around the table talking about our projects, our dreams, and new strategies. Right now we are all walking to the conference center to view a large bamboo structure that is being constructed in honor of the conference.

Last night the African contingent got in and I showed around. They are delightful and so spontaneously in love with life. I could take some lessons. I am off to the first day of conference - more later.