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About this Episode
Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway
Permaculture City by Toby Hemenway
Toby Hemenway born April 23, 1952
In grade school, he loved reading and writing, would entertain his fellow students with a series of short stories about the adventures of a boy genius, according to his sister, Ann
“He studied a lot and read on his own,” she said of his early days growing up in the Detroit and Chicago areas where his father was in marketing and sales for General Electric and auto companies.
“He was a busy kid, a brilliant, busy child, always doing science experiments. Things were blowing up in the basement a lot,” she said.
After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife, Kiel, spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was the editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004, and spent six years developing urban sustainability resources there.
He served as an adjunct professor at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and field director at the Permaculture Institute (USA).
In 2009, he published his first book “Gaia's Garden: a guide to home scale permaculture” still the best selling book on ecological gardening
From Permies.com,
Paul reviews the third [permaculture] ethic with Toby Hemengway [return of surplus]. Toby finds it ironic that people are quick to tell him he should be giving away his book as surplus. Toby goes through some history on how he got his first workshop paid for. When people come to Toby looking for a break on a price he gets upset when people are able bodied and intelligent. Asking for a subsidy should be a last resort.
Paul explains that some people are taking advantage of the third ethic and surplus. People do not have the right to come in and tell you what you have in surplus and how you should give things away. Paul and Toby discuss the difference between a gift economy and a theft economy. Toby explains how an ethic works and how it is meant to serve the community. Ethics are not meant to serve a person.
An interview by Chelsea Green, publisher of Toby Hemenway’s new book The Permaculture City, published in 2015, provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns.
CG: You started off in Seattle, moved to rural Oregon, and then to Portland, and you now live in the Bay Area. How did this follow your own evolution in terms of using permaculture design principles to guide your own daily life and choosing where to live – rural versus urban?
TH: I met my wife in Seattle in 1990 when I was working in biotech and she was at Microsoft. We both soon realized that our lives, stressful and busy, had strayed far from giving us what we desired in life. I had just discovered permaculture, and at that time, it was being applied mainly on large, rural properties. So we bailed on city life and moved to ten acres in southern Oregon. In retrospect, being such a newbie to permaculture, the move was a hasty decision that wasn’t well grounded in permaculture principles: our property didn’t have good water or soil, for example. But I believed firmly that by using permaculture design, I could make up for that. And we did, to a large extent. So it was a trial by fire and I made a lot of mistakes. One thing I learned, very much the hard way, was that each time I violated a permaculture principle, it didn’t work out well. Because we had a lot of land, I planted far more fruit trees than I needed—I didn’t do a good assessment of my needs, I just wanted it all—and put them far from the house. So I wasn’t following the principles of start small and start at your doorstep. And once all my other systems started producing, those trees got neglected and suffered.
I also was trying to run a large homestead by myself, not following the principle of “each function should be supported in multiple ways.” And the land itself didn’t really want to be a food forest; the soil and microclimate were much more suited to being conifer forest. Thus I wasn’t working with nature but against it. In spite of all those mistakes, the land became very productive and diverse, and we accomplished a lot—pretty much everything we had gone there to do. That’s when we realized we were driving everywhere and burning tons of fuel and other resources to sustain this supposedly sustainable lifestyle, and we were lonely. So we moved to Portland and were amazed at how much our resource consumption shrank. I was still able to grow a huge amount of food in a 6000-square foot yard, but we didn’t need to drive long distances to have a social or cultural life. That brought us back in tune with the principle of relative location: placing the things you use the most near where you spend your time. Thus I really learned the power of permaculture’s principles by breaking most of them and being taught by that why they were worth following.
Sadly, tragedy struck Toby and his family in 2015. In the fall of that year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After undergoing chemotherapy, he was nevertheless told that his cancer had spread from his pancreas to his liver. While Toby had begun his second round of chemo in October, he developed septic shock. Septic shock occurs when an immune system weakened by cancer allows for a widespread infection in the blood, as well as dangerously low blood pressure. Since, additional scans show the cancer continued to spread.
Toby passed away December 20th, 2016 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
However, there are many recorded presentations and podcasts of Toby so that his teachings will continue to inspire the next generation of those working to restore and repair the land we live with.
Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5
Image credit: permacultureacademy.com
Hosts & Guests
No transcript available for this episode.
