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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Over the years, I’ve often wondered at the unique and sometimes confusing situation of the urban-renter-beginner-permaculturist: trying to figure out how to utilize the ethics and principles of a framework originally conceived to develop areas thousands of acres in size, while often finding oneself without access to an area even hundreds of square feet in size.

While most permaculture teachers will tell you that the ethics and principles of permaculture are not limited to rural broadacre applications, the vast majority of literature on the subject (not to mention course curriculum) displays no uncertain preference for rolling food forested hills, cascading ponds, and just beyond, the beckoning vastness of Zone 5.

(My point of entry into this wonderful world, Permaculture Two, mostly referred to properties that were comparable in acreage to the more notable state parks in the area!  Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to reconcile a desire to grow massive amounts of food with reality that I couldn’t dig up the lawn.)

The Goal

The overarching goal of Permaculture for Renters, both the workshops and this blog, is to dispel the myth that you need to own, or have access to, large amounts of property to integrate the principles of Permaculture in your life.  It’s an antidote to “I wish I had the space to insert-homesteading-activity-here,” and a little dose of empowerment for the landless many.