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Andrew Faust

Center for Bioregional Living - Summer 2022 Newsletter Updates




LATEST NEWS Permaculture Living Lands Trust

We are excited to announce that the Permaculture Living Lands Trust - Agroforestry Commons has now been awarded official federal 501(c)(3) status. We are now a federally recognized public charity and can receive donations to apply for grants for Permaculture


Our Vision: A food forest in every community.


Our Mission: Establish nonprofit Agroforestry Nurseries and Community Food Forests on land held in trust and permanently protected, to provide a long-term supply of perennial and annual foods accessible to all local residents in communities throughout eastern North America.


Our Strategy: Combine the strengths of the permaculture and conservation land trust movements to: secure land and funding; establish nonprofit Agroforestry Nurseries; propagate regionally-adapted tree crops; design, install, and steward Community Food Forests; and ensure protection of these sites as a permanent land base for perennial foods. Add to this the community prosperity focus of the cooperative business model and community economic development agencies to partner with employee-owned tree crop co-ops, tree crop nursery owner/operators, landowners, local governments and community organizations and funders on non-market-based solutions.


In our lifetimes, defusing the biosphere crises generated by our “developed” human societies requires that we begin resettling the land and redesigning our land use patterns and technologies to operate within the ecological commons. For Permaculture Living Land Trust, this resettling and redesign begins at the confluence of three of our most dire and interrelated crises: food and water; biodiversity; and climate.


We can, and we must, produce and distribute food as part of the ecological commons in ways that: cleans and replenishes precious fresh water with riparian forest buffers rather than degrades and wastes it; restores habitat for declining native species of vegetation and wildlife rather than destroys it; sequesters carbon in living soils and woody plants, rather than releases it through fossil fuel and chemical-based agriculture; and holds land in trust as a community inheritance rather than a private commodity for short term investor returns.


This means: more perennial polycultures and less annual monocultures; more local production and distribution and less shipping; a more secure, equitable community land base than privately owned or leased land can offer; and community supported cooperative business operations for tree and land stewardship, rather than private small and large businesses competing in the agroforestry marketplace.


The sense of urgency for implementing these strategies is very real, and not just for our converging biosphere crises, or because food forests take years to grow:


The loss of genetic stock and intergenerational knowledge about regional tree crop production is rapid and widespread. As fruit and nut grower hobbyists and nurserymen/women are aging out, the better-tasting and more prolific hybrid varieties of native edible species they developed over time are being lost, and their production sites are changing hands, unprotected.


Tree crop nurseries are generally small businesses run more for passion than profit, and face ongoing challenges of competing in a niche market. Larger tree crop nurseries aiming for mass production for corporate clients and national distribution rather than regional genetics and community food systems.


New generations nurserymen/women with a passion for tree crops often don’t feel incentivized to choose a career as owner-operators of a small operations or as employees of large ones.


Climate change is highlighting our food system overdependence on vulnerable growing regions of the Midwest and West, and our misallocation of farmland for commodity crops to feed hogs, cows and poultry.


The “plant millions of trees to offset our carbon footprint” mantra/mania is taking attention away from the vital work of restoring native ecosystems in harmony with regional food systems, and may not achieve the massive drawdown of greenhouse gasses needed in a short enough amount of time. Meanwhile, massive land grabs and forest clearing for industrial export agriculture are accelerating globally.


We believe that the path forward through these biosphere crises must include innovating food production with unique combinations of permaculture design, community land trust landholdings, cooperatively-owned agroforestry nursery businesses, and community-supported food forests. Rediscovering our ancient relationships of reciprocity with native ecosystems will allow this transformation to accelerate and expand, as we rediscover our ecological imperative as human beings: to love all children, of all species, for all time.



 


Online Permaculture Design Courses 2022 September 24 & 25, October 1 & 2, 8 & 9, 15 & 16,

22 & 23 - 10am-4pm EST - 11 Weekend sessions October 29th Graduation Presentations

All sessions recorded and available for missed attendance.

Adriana and I decided to keep our Online Permaculture Designers Certification Course for our next offering beginning September 24th. This way more people can study with us and as I write this we are still in a real situation with COVID that we do not want to underestimate.

In this online course we will provide you with our uniquely potent regional applications of Permaculture and a preview, possibly even a finished first edition of Andrew’s book: Earth Is Our Home-A New Model For Economic Development: Bioregional Permaculture.

We will have an amazing array of guest teachers; Larry Santoyo from out in L.A. Larry helped to film some of the original Bill Mollison films that we link in our course materials and was a friend of Bills and taught courses with him. Rhamis Kent will be with us. Rhamis grew up in the states, has a background in engineering, now lives in Cornwall England, works closely with Geoff Lawton and does a great deal of international permaculture consulting. Paula Hewitt Amram will come later in the course to give us our NYC design viewpoint. Paula has done extensive work in community organizing and applying Permaculture design to an extensive brownfield in Manhattan and works redesigning public schools and parks throughout the 5 boroughs.

This course has thousands of people like you who have entered into our Permaculture community through this course.

Endorsed by PINA - Permaculture Institute of North America

Sign up today to reserve your space!




 

Permaculture Consultation Services



What We Do:

  • Design & Build Homes, Cabins and Communities

  • Site Analysis

  • Create Master Plans

  • Ponds, Off Grid Energy & Water Systems

  • Organic and Biodynamic Gardening

  • Recent Projects Portfolio

Bringing the beauty and power of the earth to you with 20 years of experience in permaculture design. We help create financial and ecological security for our clients by capitalizing on nature and investing in the long term resilience of forests, farms and local economies.

We assess a property for it's potential to meet your vision and dreams for your life in an ecological manner. We will help you to become native to the place that you will call home. After you send us your Permaculture wish list for your vision we give you pointers of what to look for, we give you advice and insights to narrow down the selection process and fine tune it with our permaculture design intelligence filter.

LATEST UPDATES:

The Natural Building collective we have helped to train up Rondout Natural Builders with Jeff Gagnon as the lead designer and contractor a graduate of our program from 2011 when we offered it at The New York Open Center. Jeff studied with us since that time has built 3 straw bale houses with the methods and approach he learned apprenticing with Andrew. We found the clients and sited the houses for the first 2 homes, Jeff, Seth and Claudio are building and designing the first fully hempcrete home in the Hudson Valley.

Jeff and crew worked with Cameron McIntosh who brought his whole crew to the Stonykill hempcrete house to apply a blend of hemp hurd and lime with an ability to spray the mix into the wall cavity. Finishing a 2200 square foot house in 5 long days of work, saving Jeff and his crew at least an entire month of labor. All the technology to mix and spray was innovated by Damien from France who brought his whole family to the job as they happened to be vacationing nearby. Cameron modified it and is in the process of hammering out the details on some prototypes.







 



 




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