Permaculture Talk and Workshop in Boulder

Boulder Greens recommend Transition Colorado event:

Toby Hemenway: How Permaculture Can Save Humanity And The Earth, But Not Civilization

Pulitzer-prize winning author Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Founder of permaculture Bill Mollison says it can “destroy whole landscapes.” Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? No. They are talking about agriculture, which at its doorstep can also be laid our culture’s split between people and nature, disease and poor health, and the origins of class inequality and police states.

Those are big claims, and this lecture will explore them, showing that new fuels and high technology are not the way out of the dilemma that agriculture has gotten us into. However, there are ways to live sustainably on the Earth without going back to the Stone Age. This model of sustainability looks a lot like what today is known as permaculture, an ecological design approach based on knowledge gained from nature. Toby’s lecture will show us what makes agriculture, and the industrial society that relies on it, fundamentally unsustainable, and how permaculture offers us a better way.

Proceeds of the event benefit Transition Colorado and the Colorado Permaculture Guild.