Does the permaculture movement have a political agenda? In this episode of the Permaculture Lifestyle podcast, I explore a wide range of opinions and perspectives on the question of whether practicing permaculture is an inherently political act. Is it a leftist extension of the environmental movement? Is it perhaps libertarian, anarchist, or anarcho-capitalist in nature? Is capitalism a valid tool in the toolkit of the social permaculture designer? One of the most appealing things about permaculture, for me, is that it appeals to a wide range of people from all across the political spectrum. B ..read more

Listen to Microphones in 2020 by The Microphones (Phil Elverum ..read more

What are you doing with your life? What are you trying to accomplish? Where is this all going? Do you even have a goal? Do you have a retirement plan? Do you have a savings account? What happens when you get sick? What are you going to do when your truck breaks down on the side of the road? When are you going to become a productive member of society ..read more

Luke McLaughlin doesn’t want to teach you wilderness survival skills. He wants to guide you through the process of remembering your ancestral human nature. Make no mistake — though he’ll tell you that the technology typically amounts to little more than “playing with bones and stones,” these rhythms and motions that our ancestors honed across countless millennia can show us what it really means to be a human animal — an integral participant in the ecological unfolding of a place. The beauty of this practice lies in its immediacy, and its universal applicability: whether your local jungle is co ..read more

The acorn is one of the most common and ubiquitous nuts you’re likely to encounter almost anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere in autumn. Somehow, tragically, the vast majority of people on Earth today think of acorns as little more than “squirrel food,” despite the fact that they are easily rendered edible for humans after some basic processing. In fact, if we lived in anything approaching a sane, rational culture, acorns would be a staple in our daily diets around the world, as ordinary as white bread. Thankfully, there’s no massive cultural paradigm shift required in order to reclaim this de ..read more

Whether the status quo is prepared to admit it or not, climate change is not some mysterious future event looming on the horizon — it is already happening, here, now. So: how will you choose to respond? In this episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I revisit last week’s topic of climate change grief, and whether we ought to let go of the hope of salvation in favor of taking direct action to brace ourselves for what we know we can reasonably expect from a severely disrupted global climate. One crucial part of the process of preparing ourselves, I believe, is to reckon with our emotional rea ..read more

We’ve analyzed the data. We’ve seen the models and the projections. The facts are grim, and the reality on the ground (for some, not all — yet) is even grimmer still: Global anthropogenic climate disruption is leading to social and political unrest as it causes ecological instability and begins to render regions of the planet inhospitable to humans. Worse yet, recent history tells us that scientists knew essentially everything we needed to know about the catastrophic severity of climate change by 1988, when corporate interests in the United States successfully waged a campaign to suppress th ..read more

Picture, in your mind’s eye, a map of the United States of America. What do you see? If you’re like most of us, you’re probably picturing an outline of the contiguous United States, the so-called “lower 48.” You might also be picturing Alaska up there in the top left corner, and Hawai’i somewhere out there in the Pacific. Now let me ask you: Why were you taught that this is an accurate representation of the United States? As the historian Daniel Immerwahr points out in his book How to Hide an Empire, this “logo map” really only accurately depicted the United States for a brief period of a few ..read more

I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will. "I Dream of a Quiet Man" by Wendell Berry, from Given ..read more

Rob Avis is a petroleum engineer-turned-permaculture designer with many years of boots-on-the-ground experience in developing regenerative living systems. He runs the Canadian design company Verge Permaculture, as well as the consulting firm Adaptive Habitat. For this installment of the show, Rob joins me to talk about Essential Rainwater Harvesting, the book that he co-authored with his wife Michelle, released earlier this year. If you're curious about getting started with rainwater harvesting, whether for irrigation, washing, drinking, or all of the above, I think this conversation will serv ..read more