DAY 2: Permaculture Design Certificate Course 2010 with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton

The highlight of today was definitely Geoff Lawton’s lecture and knowledge sharing. The day was packed with information and you could literally feel the intellectual activity in the air. 85 minds thinking collectively about how to be better humans. That’s gotta have the ability to move mountains!

This the classroom where the course takes places. It’s actually very comfortable (and most importantly warm!), and we get breaks for morning and afternoon tea. The day goes by really fast. I guess it’s true what the proverb says, “time flies by when you are having fun.”

Thoughts & Ideas

Live. Laugh. Love a lot. That’s the way of Permaculture.

The aim of an effective leader (or teacher) is to make her/himself redundant.

Permaculture is more about connections between systems, than systems themselves.

How much land to buy? Depends on how much energy we have to develop it. The bigger the scale, the smaller we get. One person is a king in a small garden, an ant on 100 acres, a flee on 1,000 acres and a mere microbe on 10,000 acres. To succeed, we need to partner up with other organisms.

We cannot escape the fact that we are carbon-based beings. And all that it implies.

Cars are breeding faster than people.

Don’t spend time knocking on doors that won’t open. Mulch the garden instead, it’s a better use of the energy. But the best is to walk with people who are moving (or seeking to move) in our direction.

Current economic systems run on the model of profitability. If we make a certain activity unprofitable, it will stop. Did I say tax?

Eliminate reductionist thinking. Think multidimensional instead.

Is headache a deficiency in aspirin? Or a symptom of a problem.

Industrial world suffers from time poverty.

Weeds are like hard-working low-paid immigrants.

Giving away of surplus makes us happy. Money makes us happy only when we give it away.