iPermie! How to Permaculture Your Urban Lifestyle - Bob Waldrop - 2012

Excerpts

Section 0 Basics - 42 chapters: How to hack a plan for your life with permaculture so that you can experience more beauty, health, happiness, freedom, cooperation, and security – with less work, consumption, conflict, injustice, waste, and danger. A discussion of the basics of permaculture design. Introduces the ethics, principles, strategies, techniques, and tools of permaculture design.

Section 1 Invisible Structures -- 19 chapters: How to make a world where it is easier to care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future. The application of permaculture design to organizations, politics, economic systems, civil society.

Section 2 Food -- 46 chapters: Food first! It's the easiest and tastiest place to start and does a huge amount of good for you, your planet, and your future.

Section 3 Energy -- 26 chapters: Energy is fundamental. Debunks the present wave of optimistic energy propaganda. Surveys your options and alternatives.

Section 4 Shelter -- 10 chapters: How to organize your living situation to create comfort, security, and hospitality -- no matter what the future throws at you.

Section 5 Water – 10 chaptersWater will be as big an issue in: the future as oil, perhaps more so. In many areas, that future is already[…]” “The importance of organizing the locations and destinations of your life in light of ecological reality.

Section 7 Community -- 8 chapters: No woman or man is an island. Community makes or breaks our ecological futures. More on growing a world where it is easier to make good decisions.

Section 8 Economics -- 19 chaptersMoving beyond the economics of: scarcity to embrace abundance. Practical economics as if people, the planet, and the future matter.

Section 9 Constancy, Persistence, Resilience -- 27 chaptersProtecting yourself, all you love,: and the communities where you live from the increasingly risky futures that are the consequences of the bad decisions made by billions of people over long periods of time.

Section 10 Health -- 12 chaptersYour personal health is your most: important area of design.

Section 11 Education -- 6 chapters: There is a difference between "going to school" and "getting an education."

Section 12 Family -- 5 chaptersFamilies are fundamental, uniting: us across generations to care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future.

*Section 13 Putting this together -- 9 chapters: Making your plans into realities. Finding a critical mass for positive change.”

Foreword, by Vinay Gupta

David Graeber's Debt gave Occupy an analysis. iPermie gives Occupy a plan.

iPermie reminds me of Synergetics, Bucky Fuller's magnum opus.

the difference being that a person of modest means and due discipline can actually implement iPermie

If society is ready to hear what Bob has to say, there will be real changes

I think there is strong evidence that the tide has turned, and the time is now. Let me talk about two examples

Detroit hit the end of the road as Motor City, as the great car-export capital of the world. While urban blight ravaged some areas, graceful reinvention took hold in others, as farms and collectives and communitarians came back

there is hope from the Green Ideal in an environment where - literally - all else has failed.

Then there is the grave matter of Sandy where we saw, in no uncertain terms, how quickly seven million urbanites in the world's premier city could be left shuddering cold apes in lightless caves

It is not that civilization is finished, but the boom of the 20th century, where military victory and cheap oil hoist America shoulder-high above a still-starving planet, is over. We must all rejoin the real world, and that means knowing who grows our food personally, not relying on a faceless machine to connect us to them

The book is huge: a thousand page door-stopper

I recommend reading the first few chapters, the framing, the overview, the vision and then letting your interest and the table of contents guide you

Implement small steps - start with bread, if you don't bake already, or perhaps the ever-present garden. Do a little, read more, do a little more

I don't know how long we have before the sweeping changes which are engulfing our civilization will bite hard enough to bring tears

What Bob is teaching you to do is to be a free citizen of a fair world, where we live by the sweat of our own brow, rather than through the oppression and exploitation of other nations, other people, and other species

Vinay Gupta, UK; 20 November 2012

iPermie: The Introduction

iPermie: the Introduction

It simply isn't possible for everyone to make the best decisions all the time.

That shouldn't stop us from making better decisions

This is the permaculture principle of succession at work. We start small, or we don't start at all.

This book is about empowerment

Like anything else, it may take some praxis. That's not a misspelled word, it's a concept so important it has to be mentioned in this introduction. Praxis is action coupled with reflection

This book is best approached in the context of the community and for many of its modern readers, that will be the biggest challenge of all. But the plain truth of the matter is that we are not going to make it into the future that is coming at us in our little independent households of one to three point two people. No one was able to survive that way in the past and it won't be true in the future either. Community will make or break our response to these challenging times.

This book's point of reference is the City

Cities offer many opportunities for sustainable and frugal living, a claim which will become more understandable as this book progresses.

If you live in a high rise apartment building, you won't be able to raise all your own food. So structures such as local food cooperatives and farmers markets are basic building blocks of living sustainably in a city.

I have a particular concern for people of low to moderate incomes.

Permaculture, as a design system, works every bit as well for people in cities as it does for those in rural areas

Section 0: The Basics of Permaculture

Section List of Chapters

00011 Permaculture in 37 words

Short and most succinct commentary.

00021 Hacking permaculture in 350 words

The 378,000 words of this book are commentary on this chapter

00011 Permaculture in 37 words.

As you learn to design your life using permaculture principles,
and live according to permaculture ethics,
you will experience more beauty, health, happiness, freedom,
security, and cooperation, with less work, consumption, injustice,
conflict, stress, danger, and waste.

00021 Hacking Permaculture in 350 words

Commit! Accept personal responsibility to live your life

See all you can see

Refuse! Stop hurting yourself, other people

Design or be designed!

Six critical design principles.

• Everything connects to everything!
• Everything serves multiple purposes!
• Every important need comes from multiple functions!
• Prefer natural methods and solutions. Embrace the small and slow.
• Focus on the journey, not the destination. Find the seeds of the future in the present.
• Use less stuff! Live as if what you do matters, because it does

Solidarity – Participation – Cooperation!

Resist!

Walk your talk

Regenerate! Renew! Reproduce!

00031 Warnings

If cooperation, beauty, happiness, freedom, and health do not interest you, stop reading now.

00041 More necessary In-The-Permaculture-Beginning info.

Implementing a permaculture design is not permaculture. Such work involves carpentry, community organizing, cooking, gardening, etc. The word “permaculture” relates to the design, not the implementation activities

iPermie is about permaculture design

Document numbering system

Each chapter or document of iPermie has a 5-digit number. The first two digits refer to the section – 0 through 13:

JARGON of iPermie

Usual Disclaimers

00051 The Invitation of Permaculture

What we know and don’t know.

00061 About iPermie

Getting Started

1. Read the Basics section first.
2. Read the Invisible Structures section second.
3. If you are in college, read the Education section third.
4. Read the final section (13), which ties everything together.
5. After that, the sections can be read in any order, although it is best to read the chapters in their numeric order within the section.

Don't forget to get involved with an existing permaculture learning community or start one with your own friends, family, or people you find on Craig's List

Design Challenges

One way to learn design is to actually do design. The purpose of the Design Challenges document in each of the sections is to give you practice doing design

Your first challenge is to design your personal permaculture learning experience. Your second challenge is to design a permaculture learning community. You can find more information about these challenges in documents 00071 and 00081.

00071 Design your personal permaculture learning experience.

The Process of Design

The permaculture design process has five steps –

• Observation
• Study and Evaluation
• Design
• Implementation iPermie uses the acronym OSEDI to help us remember this process. (OODA)

Observation

Begin with goals. What are your goals in studying permaculture?

Set short, medium, and long term goals

Set some more longer term, more challenging goals, such as “end my dependence on the international food system within five years.”

What functions are necessary for these purposes?

A function is something that is necessary for this goal to be achieved.

For each goal and function, identify the activities and elements necessary to realize that goal.

Make a written record of your observations. You might as well go ahead and start a journal. You’ll need it later

reflection

One observation technique that’s useful and fun is to pretend that you are already there, wherever it is you think you want to go! Boldly tell yourself – and others! – the most amazing stories that have yet to be realized about future changes in your life

Study and Evaluation

As you study and evaluate, continue to drill down for each of the goals and functions, with their associated activities and elements. Refine your observations and increase the level of detail.

Examine your list of the expected barriers to your success and problems you may encounter

Make a list of the resources you need. Start with “A learning community.”

The Benefits of a Learning Community

Design

Permaculture designs are always written documents. There is too much detail in designs to carry the information around in your head. Make specific decisions that lead to actual outcomes consistent with your goals and list of functions.

Don’t plan grand agendas. A common response to disempowerment is grandiosity

your first step is not into that grand vision of the future. Your first step is into something you can achieve in the here and now

Implement

After you complete your design, Just Do It

The Author’s Suggestion for Reading iPermie

Enjoy!

Always make time for celebration as your learning progresses

Transformation and Permaculture

00081 Design a learning community