The meaning of permaculture in Australia has almost no relationship to the movement in the United States. I wish we had more teachers and fewer grifters here, but... welcome to America, where the streets are paved with scams.
You're probably not wrong on this count - I grew up on the Pacific Coast of the US, which was settled mostly over a century after the Atlantic Coast, and things like hand looms and treadle or hand-crank sewing machines are vastly more common on the Atlantic coast - and I have it on good authority that hand-crank sewing machines and the like are even more common in Europe, which tracks the spectrum to the other extreme.
I've...heard that about the famous and published group in Montana. It's a shame, they could have a really great platform there but ego is gonna ego as I understand it.
Geoff Lawton and just about everyone else I can think of who's really elbow-deep in doing the actual thing is too busy to teach much. Anyone who's making their living teaching PDCs isn't making their living doing permaculture, and almost by definition isn't the person I'd want to be learning from. Especially at such prices, without any accredited institutions behind most of them.
I did notice it looked a lot...less impoverished than the last time I drove through that area. The space between Belfast and Augusta has not historically been an affluent one, and not a lot of poor folk be painting their houses black with Teslas out front.
We've seen the same sort of demographic shift where I am (on the coast, but north a ways enough that we weren't Camden until recently) and there are definitely some folks in town who don't seem to know where it is they've landed. Just insulting things & people left and right with no knowledge of the local history or reasons for things being the way they are. Not knowing the person they're complaining to is the half-brother and best friend of the one they're complaining about. I wasn't born here, but I didn't leave where I left because I liked it there better than here.
There's a video recording of one co-taught by Geoff Lawton and Bill Mollison out there on the internet that's been floating around for....well, it was old when I got the link from MySpace. But the information is there. Nowadays, unless you're going through the U of O course or another one that comes with a legit institution pinning its reputation to it, I'd be pretty skeptical. There are a lot of people grifting in the permaculture space, and many (if not most) PDCs primary product is new PDC instructors, with very little actually being done in the way of hands-in-dirt food-in-bellies sort of work.
15-30 minutes of yoga every morning, followed by 40 minutes of HIIT on the elliptical and then 20ish minutes of weight machines 3-5 days a week. Weekends, we hike.
Drove through Somerville on the way to the Maine Fiber Frolic today and saw a pack of lawn signs for Select Board along with some high-dollar custom print canvas banners all crowing about truth & transparency. Some of the lawn signs had been...modified after the fact...to various degrees.
Seems like there's some local politics tea there. Anyone got it?
Yes, he absolutely is.
If you bounced off Sunvault (it was a slog for me...) you'd probably enjoy Walkaway by Cory Doctorow or Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson more. Both are excellent, as are the Monk & Robot books by Becky Chambers which are solarpunk from the tip of the ox-bike solar panels to the bottom of the fab-shack parts bins.
On various occasions, I have moved with my Element:
We try not to put more than about 800 lbs in it on the regular, but between that and the dirt roads out here I'm on the 3rd suspension at barely 130k miles. Best not-a-truck I've ever had.
I can't recommend the book A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit highly enough. It's a very well-researched, data-based set of case studies of major disasters from the San Francisco earthquake/fire of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina, and is equal measures encouraging and terrifying.
If the Board aren't fundraising by putting this on every possible piece of swag then what are they even doing with their lives?
No problem! I had spent part of the day shelving a bunch of stuff in the 635's at the library so a bunch of the titles were on the tip of my brain already. Your local library probably has more - and possibly has a gardener's group, as ours does. Your local County Extension Office probably has the contact info of a few master gardeners who are immediately local to you as well, and they're a wealth of information.
My mom dressed me almost entirely in black as a kid because "it always matches" and we lived on a sailboat so there "wasn't room for being a clothes horse, don't get materialistic." To this day I feel a little weird if I own more than a few clothes, and tend to fall into wearing the same 2-3 outfits.
You'd better believe my frilly pink princess of a daughter dresses like a goddamned cartoon candy raver if she wants to, and we make room for her to have her clothes in our studio apartment.
Errrmmmm....the anthro degree I did 25 years ago? Most recently....I think it was mentioned in Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything?
Edit: if you're interested in the topic of childhood in prehistory as a subject, Sian Harcrow is a super interesting social media follow and is frequently posting the latest research in the field.
For 189,000 of the last 200,000 years, the average birth interval for hunter-gatherer type communities has been around 7 years. Short birth intervals are an artifact of agriculture/modernity, possibly due to the increased mortality from living sedentary, crowded lives, and are not what our bodies have evolved to do.
I don't know about Portland, but there's a sizable African immigrant population in Lewiston-Auburn and I've been served ads for box braiding services located there before, so maybe search there also?
A Maine Garden Almanac by Martha Fenn King
Deer-resistant native plants for the Northeast, Ruth Rogers Clausen, Gregory D. Tepper.
The Northeast native plant primer: 235 plants for an earth-friendly garden, Uli Lorimer.
The Maine garden journal: insider secrets from Maine people who love to put their hands in the dirt, Lisa Colburn.
The new organic grower: a master's manual of tools and techniques for the home and market gardener, Eliot Coleman ; illustrations by Molly Cook Field and Sheri Amsel
The grand masters of Maine gardening and some of their disciples, Jane Lamb.
Gardens Maine style / Gardens Maine Style Act II by Rebecca Sawyer-Fay ; photographs by Lynn Karlin.
Native plants for your Maine garden Maureen Heffernan ; photographs by William Cullina.
Can confirm for sewing machines. My newest one is the same 40 years old as I am, but my favorite ones to use just passed their 125th birthdays and only get sweeter every year. I'm a cheap bint, so I mostly pull my machines out of junk heaps and old barns covered in rust & dust. One of my favorites to use took a week just in the kerosene bath to get the parts moving at all, and a good month of chipping away with a Dremel wire wheel, steel wool, and machine oil to get all the rust off. Now it's so smooth and quiet to use that I roll it (it's a treadle machine in its own table) into my daughter's bedroom when she's having trouble sleeping and wants me to sit with her. Perfectly even, straight stitches with a thousand times as much control over speed as an electric machine. I've seen old sewing machines be the sole survivors of house fires (not unscathed, but repairable) and fixed up after being fished out of canals with magnets. They're truly incredible devices.
And it's really not very difficult. I made a wax canvas rain coat several years ago from a thrift store trench coat. It was cute and fit well, but a super light white canvas that was utterly useless for any practical application. I dyed it, then melted a mix of beeswax and paraffin in a pot on the stove, poured it into Dixie cups to cool, then peeled the cups off and rubbed the wax into the coat. Evened it out a bit with a warmish iron and some brown paper bags and I had an awesome light rain coat for years that cost me like $10. Most of which was the cost of the wax, which I overbought to the point where I still have several pucks of it around here somewhere.
My husband's Yeti and my Klean Kanteen have both held up perfectly well to several-times-weekly dishwashing for the last 3 years. He likes that the Yeti has a handle, I prefer the vertical carry loop on the Kanteen. I also like that I could get a coffee-type sipping lid and a cold drinks straw lid for the same cup with the Klean Kanteen TK Wide line - I can make hot coffee in the morning, then throw a mason jar of protein shake in my bag for later in the day. Both brands have lids that come All The Way apart so they can be thoroughly cleaned without a bunch of weird little brushes & shit, and both brands sell replacement parts separately so you can replace only a lost lid or gasket without having to buy a whole new cup. Probably 85% of the liquid we consume comes via those stainless mugs, to the point where we only really have cups in the kitchen for guests.
And if you don't have a Dave on staff, send Will out to take five. Because it's always, but always, either a Dave or a Will. Gods help you if you've got both.
Yeah, this is our approach too. I've got a couple of mom friends whose kids get along really well with mine, and also live close by. We support each other at need - my husband was in an accident at work and I was able to drop my daughter with her while I went to the hospital with him. A few weeks later she had to take her car to the mechanic a couple miles away, and asked if I could come hang with her kids while she did that and walked back so she didn't have to walk 3 young kids through an area of major road construction with no sidewalks. We're constantly "borrowing" each others daughters to come entertain each other so we can work on our own projects for a couple hours. It works because it's reciprocal and mutual.
I can't find the article I read - it was linked in r/news maybe? But here's this https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/rfk-jr-brain-worm-1235017026/
Not necessarily. It takes time, dedication, and being conscientious of waste management, but there are people who are controlling knotweed by carb-starving it. Which is a fancy way of saying cut it down, dry it/burn it/bin it where it will get burned, rinse and repeat for several seasons. eventually the rhizomes will die.
Neighbor asked me if I could come ID the plant taking over a vacant lot 💀
gardening