Permaculture for Renters :: regenerative design for the landless many || SEO.....

(This is post 1 of 7 in a series, to see the post about the series, click here.)
Before we even get into all of the wonderful ways that you can apply permaculture thinking to the place you live, I want to share some ideas about how to apply it to choosing where you live:

Carefully selecting where you live has an enormous effect your ability to reduce your ecological footprint while building self-reliance and community resilience. Whether you’re actively looking for a new abode, or are thinking about moving in the near future, you might consider utilizing the permaculture princples of Relative Location and Stacking Functions in your search:

• Relative Location

The time and energy it takes to get from your home to every place you need to go should be factored into a holistic calculation of both the financial and environmental cost of a house, room, or apartment. The place with the cheapest rent might not actually be the cheapest when you factor in the extra mile to and from work every weekday.

If serious attention is given to the relative location between your home and all of the places you need to, enormous amounts of time, money, and energy can be saved. Walk-ability and bike-ability (the number of necessary trips that you can make by foot/bike) are key.

(To get a sense of a neighborhood’s walkability, check out walkscore.com)

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This is one of the most fun mobile container gardens I’ve seen yet.  Major points for sun-maximizing solar orientation on the trellis (south is to the left in this photo), as well as for the My Little Pony sticking out of it in two places and the handle from a baby stroller.

This kind of thing would be great for folks to cart around to street fairs and other high visibility events, and it’d be so cool to see whole fleet trailer’d on bikes.

Enough trying to get people to a gardening workshop, bring the gardening workshop to the people!

There’s a long list of techniques that can be used to redesign urban home sites with permaculture principles in mind.  Here are just a few:

• Harvesting rainwater
• Growing food, medicine, and other useful plants
• Insulating to increase energy efficiency
• Retrofitting for passive solar heating
• Installing photovoltaic panels
• Recycling greywater
• Reducing impervious surfaces (de-paving)

…and that’s just scratching the surface.

But how many of these can we renters generally pull off? And who wants to put the kind of money and work some of these require into someone else’s property?

Without being able to utilize many of the strategies available to homeowners, what can renters (comprising over half of world population) contribute to the development of regenerative human settlements?

Plenty!

I see the many proactive solutions we can use as falling into just a few categories. Here’s my working list of seven:

1. Choose your living situation wisely.
2. Changing behaviors.
3. Work with your landlord.
4. Work around your landlord.
5. Find public or private land to steward.
6. Creating symbiotic relationships with others who are working land.
7. Get land!

Over the next several months, I’ll be writing about each of these categories, discussing what they can mean, and how you can use them. Stay tuned…