Sustainability Blog

Interview with Christopher Galarza

Meet Chef Christopher Galarza of Forward Dining Solutions. He is developing a new initiative – an EcoChef certification for professional cooks and chefs seeking to align their healthy/organic/slow food/farm-to-table values with kitchen electrification and...

Interview with Zacharia Levine

Meet Zacharia Levine, a Director of People & Sustainability at The Synergy Company! The Synergy Company has a mission of nurturing the health & well-being of people, place, and planet.

Inaugural Lecture with Dr. Roslynn McCann

What is it, exactly, that makes us who we are? All of us have amassed countless threads – conversations, extreme weather events, development altering the structure of our hometowns, relationships - that braid together to weave a tapestry of our passion, o...

Interview with John Knight

Meet John Knight, the CEO of Balanced Rock Power! John has a strong passion for the renewable energy industry to ensure that he leaves the planet a better place.

Aggie Blue Bikes

This month we are featuring an interview from Avrey Cronyn! He works for Aggie Blue Bikes, a non-profit, community-oriented bike shop located at the USU Logan Campus.

Reclaimed Hope

On a cold December morning in 2018, our family departed for Maui, HI. High above the Pacific Ocean, I said to my husband, “if no one picks us up at the airport and the site is failing, I give up.” I was teetering on a loss of hope and enthusiasm for human...

Liberation Ecology

As our communities re-emerge into the sunlight from our lockdowns, put away the latex gloves, explore new greetings of elbow taps, and remove our masks to reveal our faces, what world will we walk into? More importantly, what future will we help create?

Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute

The Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute (CRMPI), one of the oldest continually operating permaculture teaching sites in the U.S., boasts quite the garden. I visited Jerome Ostentowski at CRMPI last fall, where we walked and talked among 200 vari...

TerraSophia

With my toddler secured in our bike trailer, we take off each weekday on our morning errands past the greywater-fed basins of our house. Those basins bear cherry, apricot, and nectarine trees, currants, lavender, and a range of pollinator attractors and n...

University of Massachusetts’ Permaculture Programming

Students at the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) can engage with a range of coursework and professional opportunities in permaculture thanks to people like Lisa DePiano. Lisa teaches UMASS’ permaculture programming, which is housed in the Stockbridge S...

Perennial Solutions

Does 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) weigh on you, as it weighs on me? A temperature increase above this threshold (that is, 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels) may sound minor, but it calls into question our earth’s livability....

Permaculture Institute Inc. & Real Earth Design

Take a moment to reflect on your childhood. Think about the people and environment that led you to who you are – to seeking solutions for internal and external healing. My childhood was free and happy despite a mother’s early death, a father’s lost heartb...

Oregon State University Permaculture

As increasing numbers of people across the globe are realizing there must be something more, something solutions-based they can do to positively shift their relationship with others and the natural environment, permaculture is growing in reach – not just ...

Occidental Arts & Ecology Center

“Egosystem restoryation.” For Brock Dolman, Co-Founder and Program Director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), that is the hopeful outcome in our exposure to permaculture. Learning about watersheds, gardens, landscape design, composting toile...

Permaculture Skills Center

The terminator seed, formally known as Genetic Use Restriction technology, would render seed saving impossible due to a sterile second generation. News of this development in genetic modification germinated Erik Ohlsen’s path into environmental activism a...

Quail Springs Permaculture

When I worked as an environmental educator in rural Georgia for less than $10 an hour, freshly graduated from 22 straight years of education, something happened that forever changed me. We were hosting a group of 8th graders from Atlanta, many boasting ga...

The Permaculture Academy

The Permaculture Academy, although established in its current form only five years ago, has existed in one permutation or another since 1989. It began as the Great Northwest Permaculture Institute, one of the first permaculture nonprofits established in t...

The Ecology Center

What drives you? Whether your passion manifests in increasing local food access, preserving farmland from development, providing straw bale housing for low-income families, or reducing the waste stream, it started somewhere. Perhaps you had a serious heal...

Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land

Imagine an integrated system where edible annuals and perennials are interwoven with solar energy production. Now, imagine that this food and renewable energy producing system could improve the soil microbiome and harvest all water needs from rainwater of...

Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute

The high winds blow sand across AZ-264 as we travel through the Hopi reservation and land at Kykotsmovi Village, site of the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute. Lilian Hill and Jacobo Marcus-Carranza founded the institute in 2004, and since then have bee...

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond

With an interest in punk music and a knack for questioning the systems we operate within from a young age, Brad Lancaster suites his role of enacting large-scale environmental change and helping shift our way of seeing the world. I visited with Brad for a...

Pattern Mind

Why is something so obvious so difficult to see?  What else are we missing? How does this impact our effectiveness? How do we learn to see patterns not things?” – Joel Glanzberg, Pattern Mind, 2019.

Ha’iku Aina Permaculture Initiative

To initiate something new is an endeavor admirable in any human’s life, especially with the intention of integrating natural system principles into human systems. We need to be thinking along these lines to heal our relationship with nature. My national p...

The Permaculture Jouney

With my toddler secured in our bike trailer, we take off each weekday on our morning errands past the greywater-fed basins of our house. Those basins bear cherry, apricot, and nectarine trees, currants, lavender, and a range of pollinator attractors and n...