Toby Hemenway – How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization
Hemenway is a frequent teacher, consultant and lecturer on permaculture and ecological design throughout the US and other countries. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review and American Gardener. He is an adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Education at Portland State University, a Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and a biologist consultant for the Biomimicry Guild.
22 Responses to Toby Hemenway – How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization
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@piisskopp I don’t know if you need them or not. But I do know that pure cow’s milk is extremely nutritious for the human body. key word being PURE. Cow’s make human civilization so much easier; it’s a divine relationship.
parkerjwill
December 8, 2011 at 4:06 pm
@parkerjwill but do you NEED butter, yoghurt, buttermilk, cheese etc.? 😉
piisskopp
December 8, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Brilliant lecture, so informative. Thanks for posting x
lovelovinghorses
December 8, 2011 at 5:18 pm
@greenman124 You are asking for the impossible. There is no such system, it is against the laws of physics!
lordmetroid
December 8, 2011 at 5:28 pm
@lordmetroid That’s one of many reasons why cow’s are so important; they produce milk, which can be turned into butter, yoghurt, buttermilk, cheese, etc.
parkerjwill
December 8, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Toby is an amazing teacher – I had the pleasure of earning my Permaculture Certificate in his class at PSU. So glad to see his name continue to grow. Toby has a lot to offer, and we can all use “guiding principles” to live by.
MsPersimmons
December 8, 2011 at 6:38 pm
When ey talks about meat, that it is not a great source of energy. Ey intentionally only inclue the muscle. Which is true, muscle is not such a good source of raw energy. However there is a lot of yummy fat surrounding the muscles on an animal which turns out to be a really rich energy source and the number one nutrient which the human body is tuned to make use of.
lordmetroid
December 8, 2011 at 7:25 pm
@danfromabove
This is a matter of semantics. Sure, we can not ‘create’ energy. The wind blowing through a tree moving its branches back and forth is energy, but it is not energy that is supplying us with the energy we use every day in our homes. So, instead of ‘creating’ energy, we are harnessing energy where it exists elsewhere and converting it to energy we can use in our homes with minimal impact on the environment.
REPuck
December 8, 2011 at 7:26 pm
@greenman124 Dude I’m all for sustainability but you can’t ‘create’ energy, its a law of the universe.
danfromabove
December 8, 2011 at 7:50 pm
@WhichDoctor1 No, he said we can have culture and society without agriculture (or civilization).
johan404
December 8, 2011 at 8:45 pm
@freezemyheaddotcom Troll.
johan404
December 8, 2011 at 8:57 pm
@freezemyheaddotcom No your little technical tribe doesn’t have a monopoly on certain words. Language is fluid,a model. When he’s speaking he’s painting an abstract idea of what it means to be human. He puts up a broad group of pictures that don’t necessarily correlate exactly to what he’s saying at the moment. Narrowly trained nerds like yourself are the reason we’re in such trouble, wasting resources on things that aren’t thought through. Learn diminishing returns, ROI, etc.
BlindWebster
December 8, 2011 at 9:47 pm
A sustainable system is one that transduces or “creates” more energy that it consumes over the lifetime of the system and includes the energy it required to create that system.
greenman124
December 8, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Love you Toby! We miss you in Portland!
JamesTyreeII
December 8, 2011 at 11:11 pm
…/wikipedia/en/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution
the time machine can still work with a little recalibration…
toby is a well respected, passionate and dedicated teacher
ewerbo
December 8, 2011 at 11:57 pm
and the lascaux paintings are not 40-50,000 year old. jesus christ can you even check the most basic facts before you twist them??
freezemyheaddotcom
December 9, 2011 at 12:19 am
i like your yarn time machine critique of agriculture, but uhh the human species is not a million years old. kinda embarrassing to see that. do you know the difference between genus and species? so… anything hominid is an “us”?
and then you show pictures of people weaving baskets and say we have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years? yup.. there we were… just weaving baskets.. for..how many thousands of years? oh, you know, hundreds… whatever.
freezemyheaddotcom
December 9, 2011 at 1:06 am
I’ve learnt So much watching this video. THANKS!
zezt
December 9, 2011 at 1:08 am
@dovlinhos “I don’t think we need to give up on these to make a sustainable society.”
His hole argument is that we dont need to. His point is that civilization is Independent of food production. The old idea was that we could only have a civilization because of farming but he says that’s not true. You dont have to give up education, safety, art and culture just because you give up farming.
WhichDoctor1
December 9, 2011 at 1:20 am
@dovlinhos – He is getting away from Sustainable in the first 10 minutes of the video… I think if many plots of land had permaculture food would not be a problem for the people who do education or legal work or deliver packages… Food is 50% of our society. Most things revolve around feeding ourselves. We could do ourselves a massive amount of good by these methods… like pollution.
dberisford
December 9, 2011 at 2:09 am
I think the title of the video is not quite right – he proposed that permaculture would bring an end to agriculture, but not civilization in general. Civilization has many more implications than food production (writing, legal system and organized education are the first ones that pop to my mind) and I don’t think we need to give up on these to make a sustainable society.
dovlinhos
December 9, 2011 at 2:58 am
Thank you for sharing this program. ~ J.B.
quarryjoy
December 9, 2011 at 3:52 am