Permaculture Lifestyle: Recent Episodes
Sam Sycamore
Permaculture Lifestyle aims to apply the principles and ethics of permaculture to our everyday lives -- to align our core values and our daily habits towards a more sustainable, ecologically conscious way of thinking and interacting.
Join host Sam Sycamore in discussion about living intentionally, finding purpose in the modern era, and taking meaningful action to heal the world by healing ourselves.
Dig the new theme song, written and recorded by yours truly!
In this special live recording from the Louisville Permaculture Guild's March meeting, I talk about my background as an ecology student, share my perspective on the three ethics of permaculture -- plus my proposed fourth ethic -- and offer a self-assessment exercise for defining personal values and achieving true integrity of mind.
I had an excellent time connecting with the fine folks at the LPG, and I am so grateful to everyone who came out and listened to what I have to say. I hope it will resonate with listeners of this podcast as well!
By the way, have you signed up for the 2017 Local Farm and Forage Challenge? Visit http://permaculturelifestyle.com/lffc to learn more!
Cheers, Sam
What does it mean to be illegible and irrelevant to the dominant culture of destruction and exploitation?
It means reclaiming a greater sense of autonomy, a self-directed lifestyle, freedom from the rat race and the pursuit of financial capital.
It means rejecting the distractions and false narratives that are manufactured to divide and conquer the non-elite classes of the world.
It means rebuilding our divided communities and taking direct interpersonal action to achieve harmony through the common goals and values that we all share.
We can design intentional systems and lifestyles for ourselves which generate yields that the system doesn’t understand.
We can generate non-monetary forms of capital that can’t be taxed by a system that only knows how to rationalize financial value.
If they can’t measure it, they can’t tax it.
I think that making ourselves illegible is a very practical, pragmatic way of responding to the bizarre and dysfunctional zoo of civilization.
If we don’t wish to participate in our own annihilation, then we need to put our money where our mouths are — which is to say, we need to generate and exchange value in ways that don’t involve money.
That’s liberation permaculture: the fertile intersection of ecology, anthropology, rewilding and anarchist theory. (Please don’t let the A-word scare you off!)
Sustainable land design and resilient communal networks will never be organized from above. It’s up to us to make the spaces we occupy into the world we wish to see — and we can start today.
For show notes and further resources, head over to permacultufelifestyle.com and click on “listen to the podcast” at the top. From there you’ll find a link to this episode’s notes.
All music is my be, under the name Airplane Jumper, and you can find some of that music over at airplanejumper.bandcamp.com.
If you enjoy this show and want to show your support, please take a moment to review us on iTunes – it’ll go a long way towards spreading the word. And please, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me if there’s anything I can do to help you in your journey on the path back to nature.
As a culture, we've lost our fundamental connection to the natural world. This has led to a surge in dysfunctional behavior, like attention issues, depression, anxiety, and obesity, and in general I believe that this disconnect explains a lot of the suffering that we observe in the modern era.
We all feel the detrimental effects of nature deficit disorder, but most of us just aren't aware that this is the source of our troubles, because we've been so deeply conditioned to accept the status quo of the human-dominated, human-constructed environment.
With that in mind, I put together this episode to arm you, dear listener, with the basic vocabulary to describe the symptoms, causes, and treatment of nature deficit disorder.
The solution, I think, lies in cultivating ecological literacy at the individual level, which can only come about through immersion in the natural world -- observation and interaction.
This topic offers a great entry point into a critique of how civilization relates to nature, and how our environment influences our behavior and our underlying worldview.
Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for show notes, plus more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world.
Music is by me, under the name Airplane Jumper -- visit airplanejumper.bandcamp.com for more.
Like the show? Follow & share on social media, and tell all your friends!
This past week, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the underlying “intentions” found in the works of Bill Mollison, David Holmgren and Masanobu Fukuoka, particularly after reading some of Mollison’s more philosophical writings.
Following permaculture’s pragmatic “top-down thinking, bottom-up action” line of thought, we can observe how an individual’s intentions inform their thoughts, actions, and behaviors, and how this, in turn, shapes our culture.
But what is a culture anyway, and how do cultures relate to their environments? What does the environment of the industrial world look like, and how does it inform the dominant civilized culture?
In order to design the world we wish to live in, it is crucial that we use mindfulness practice to set positive intentions for how we comport ourselves in the world.
When we make the effort to realign our values and actions toward a more natural way of interacting with our environments, then we are able to come together in good faith as communities with shared ethics in order to put in the group effort required to repair the earth.
Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for show notes, plus more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world.
Music is by me, under the name Airplane Jumper -- visit airplanejumper.bandcamp.com for more.
Like the show? Follow & share on social media, and tell all your friends!
There’s a lot we can learn by critically assessing our culture’s relationship with the wild world, and when we do, we come to recognize the limitations of our abilities to control our surroundings, even as we work – and we must – to learn how to be a regenerative asset to the land, instead of a liability.
Today on the show I explore my relationship with weeds and invasive species, by sharing my experiences with these much-maligned plants, and how they've altered my worldview.
Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world.
Music is by me, under the name Airplane Jumper -- visit airplanejumper.bandcamp.com for more.
Like the show? Follow & share on social media, and tell all your friends!
When we discover that we truly need very little, then we are finally able to revel in the magnificent abundance of the natural world. Today on the show I explore the concept of intentional simplicity, and offer some guidance for putting this life philosophy into practice.
Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world.
Music is by me, under the name Airplane Jumper -- visit airplanejumper.bandcamp.com for more. Like the show? Follow & share on social media, and tell all your friends!
Our increasingly globalized culture is in dire need of a basic moral compass that we can all agree upon. Permaculture offers one such solution.
Today on the show I explore the ethics of permaculture -- earth care, people care, and fair share -- and share some ways that we can incorporate them into our lives to better care for ourselves, each other, and the planet.
Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world. Music is by me, under the name Airplane Jumper -- visit airplanejumper.bandcamp.com for more. Like the show? Follow & share on social media, and tell all your friends!
In this introductory episode of Permaculture Lifestyle, I introduce myself and explain my reasons for starting this podcast. Then I offer a sketch of what a "permaculture lifestyle" might actually look like.
Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world.
Music is by me, under the name Airplane Jumper -- visit airplanejumper.bandcamp.com for more.
Like the show? Follow & share on social media, and tell all your friends!