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Comment by jefflombardjr | Hacker News Reader

Anyone fascinated by this article, I highly suggest reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I just recently picked it up after seeing it recommended on a couple of threads here and it did not disappoint. Humans have been affecting ecology for a long long time.

If you are like me, you're probably wondering what you can do to mitigate some of the effects, while legislation and societal action is important. I also recommend checking out permaculture. Portland state has a great free online course [0]. I like to think of permaculture as ecosystem building, which you can do on a micro level. Enough microecosystems change the larger surrounding ecosystem.

[0] https://open.oregonstate.edu/courses/permaculture/

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Instead of courses, I recommend to get a couple books on Permaculture and also look to see if any universities have extension courses for Permaculture or any topic related to it. Chances are, most of the teachers are now familiar with Permaculture and can speak to the “historical” methods and the “Permaculture” methods. Yes, a lot of people have been trying to make money of the cerificstion courses, which I think is a waste of money. I started with my backyard and have used Permaculture design to re-approach working with nature. My end goal is to have a diverse forest garden that has it’s own ecosystem. But, that’s at least 10 years of work to achieve, but well worth it. I’m almost two years into this and have zero regrets. If anyone is interested to know more, I can try to share what I’ve learned or answer any specific questions.

The referenced link is for a free online course

Awesome! I will add that to my list of things to check out.

What books do you recommend do a university student without much familiarity in the subject looking for practical design advice?

Not OP, but I can recommend these two books:

"Making Small Farms Work" by Richard Perkins

and

"Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers" by Mark Shepard

Then there are the books by Bill Mollison that arguably started it all: "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual", and "Introduction to Permaculture"

These are great! Thank you, for sharing.

hi, I am interested in permaculture, can you please recommend the books and contact info would be great!

george_kaplan provided some excellent references for books.

Apologies for the grammar and spelling issues, I wrote the original comment on my mobile phone and find that experience frustrating, and I usually miss things.

Thanks for this. I’ve been interested in permaculture since coming across it at festivals but I’ve been put off how everyone seems to be selling courses. This is the first free one I’ve found. It feels a bit like minimalism where everyone tried to practice it by selling ebooks about minimalism.

I took two courses. It is electrifying, and a great new way of looking at the world.

But of course, when I was done with the course, I looked at where I could make some money doing permaculture. There were, as far as I could see, two ways:

* teach

* do landscape design

The first is much much easier to get into and isn't as hard as the latter. I think that is why you see so many courses.

I have applied permaculture to my land and my life, even though I can't make money from it directly.

Check out Richard Perkins of Ridgedale Permaculture. While he also does offer courses and has written a book (which I can recommend), he also puts out a lot of information for free on Youtube.

A major emphasis of his work is to run his farm as a profitable business while using Permaculture design principles.

Is Regenerative Ag Profitable? Looking at Return on Investments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A0uNUN9UG0&ab_channel=Richa...

That’s really interesting, thanks. Can you share any more about how you’ve applied permaculture to your daily life?

Totally agree, with the minimalism analogy.

And the whole ebook thing is quite frankly off-putting. There is a ton of hive mind/group think in this field which I find very off putting as well... I was at a Native Plant nursery and asked if they had any apple trees. Now as a computer programmer, permaculture is a hobby to me, I don't have the time to study it full time. But if I'm interested in something, I do read as much as I can about the subject. I had just read "Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration" [0] which explores who defines native plants (pesticide industry) and why (to sell more pesticides).

So rather than having a friendly dialog, my request was met with a snarky and dismissive "Apple trees aren't native." I replied, "Define native." knowing this is actually a quite controversial subject.

But honestly permaculture is like any other field. There are some people who identify with their tightly held beliefs and don't question them. It bugs me but it doesn't take away from some of the great things are doing in this field. I've found that the best thing to do is to focus on people not topics.

For example, if someone asks me to learn Javascript. I tell them to focus on people like Eric Elliot, Douglass Crockford, Dan Abramov, etc. You will learn more doing guided learning from what they think is important than some random blog post on arrow functions. In the permaculture world, I recommend reading as much as you can from these people:

- Bill Mollison

- Elliot Coleman

- Mark Shepard

These people are great, and reading from them will produce more of a knowledge than any course. (Still recommend doing a course to meet other people interested in this stuff)... but some of the best recommended reading to me from permies wasn't about permaculture at all:

- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows - It is dry but well worth it. Permaculture in a way is systems thinking applied to environment. Understanding the underlying science is the difference between knowing Javascript programming and just knowing one Javascript Framework.

- Hard Rain by Tim Egan - Beautiful anthropological history of the PNW.

- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/against-sustainab...

- https://grist.org/article/doe-reprint/

- https://e360.yale.edu/features/environmental_failure_a_case_...

- https://monthlyreview.org/2002/09/01/capitalism-and-ecology/

I've found that people willing to dive into the science and areas that influence permaculture is the difference between someone who actually cares and someone who is an instagram farmer. And speaking of which, beware of biodynamics, it's a total pseudoscience [2] that people are starting to conflate that with permaculture. Biodynamic farmers will often tell you stuff like "oh it's like organic farming" or "You can do both permaculture and biodynamics". Maybe. But to me, new age mysticism isn't going to fix the environmental problems we have.

At the end of the day, the best way to learn permaculture is to get your hands dirty and start caring for plants. Even if you live in a city apartment with hardly any sun, treat it as a environment and find plants like peace lily's and devil's ivy that will grow just fine.

[0] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/beyond-the-war-on-invas...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture#Effecti...

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright is another good one that touches on this quite a bit.

https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/...

The author just released a new book called "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". It's in my TODO pile so no comment on the content of it yet, tought you might wanted to know.

Sapiens seemed very pseudo-scientific to me. It seemed like Hariri had one agenda and was trying to push that desperately.

What agenda did you think he was pushing?

I think you may be confusing "agenda" with "perspective". He was pushing one perspective: his own, as all authors do. But it's our job as readers to understand the author's perspective and recognize it as such.

Neither history nor anthropology permits storytelling without a perspective. There's always a perspective. Reading for learning means understanding that perspective and determining which aspects (if any) we'll choose to adopt ourselves.

>I think you may be confusing "agenda" with "perspective". He was pushing one perspective: his own, as all authors do.

If you're used to science, it can come as a surprise that a person can willfully ignore (not just focus away from, ignore), all but one option for an entire book, and it still be considered an intellectual effort as opposed to a sales pitch or campaign tool.

To be honest most of the times he lists the multiple concurrent theories and simply points out why he believes one of them to be closest to reality.

Of course, sometimes none of the theories can be proven or disproved. So unless you want to leave a black hole you simply choose the theory that fits best, with the risk of it being overturned in the future.

He is a historian, not a scientist. I don't think there is a good way to analyze the past scientifically, because you can't run experiments.

Any dig for old stuff or old bones is an experiment, which will strengthen or weaken, at a minimum, the hypothesis that stuff is at or near that spot.

A huge number of scientists analyze the past scientifically. Between dinosaurs dying, creatures evolving, continents shifting, planets forming, climates changing, and the universe beginning, we analyze a ton of the past scientifically.

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