무제 문서
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Invest in PRI-De and Support our Programs |
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Resilience and Sustainability |
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The challenges we face, the Perfect Storm, are unique in human history.
We face dwindling supplies of energy and the challenge of transitioning to non-fossil fuels globally. We face the challenge of the effects of over 160 years of burning large amounts of fossil fuels, wasting water, destroying the ecological services upon whihc our civilization and our lives depend.
Communities must become resilient to both long-term and short term anomalies in terms of climate and energy, and thus economics. |
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Links |
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PRI-De supports IICD.
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PRI-De supports the GSCC.
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We were honored to particpate in 2010 GELT program. |
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Seedballs
Images
Presentation
Course Photos
Note: While we would like to be appreciative of Penny for taking so many photos, we are not appreciative that she has ignored all requests, verbal and written, for her to make them available to PRI-De and to attribute properly. We have asked Facebook to remove them if she does not comply. It does us no good to have unattributed pictures of our PDC on her pages and for her to be taking credit for the course.
It's in the books. The ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit
Permaculture Design Course and Design Charrette is done, and was our most successful thus far. We handed out eleven Design Course certificates, rewarding our group of 12 participants for creating a design firm, then using that as a vehicle to develop a viable design - all in twelve days.
Aurora's principles
reached out to the community, interviewing a number of people from around Detroit. A BIG thanks goes out to those who stepped into Aurora's design space. It would have been difficult to create a design relevant to Detroiters without your participation.
Larry Santoyo did a masterful job leading the PDC and the Design Project, with much support from Penny, Kimberly and Keith. He challenged the group to achieve what to me seemed impossible: Design a company *and* a project design. I expect a mock firm run like a mock firm and that looked and acted like a mock firm. Instead, they divided the house into Group areas, created an office space and set up a corporate structure. Then they created a vision of Detroit a hundred years from now and set it in a narrative walking you through it as if you were on a visit to discover how Detroit had done it. How, a hundred years from now, it could become a lamp unto the world.
You won't find anything earth-shattering in the design. What you will find is a sense of place borne of connections, natural patterns, people. Rivers rediscovered, businesses connected as if designed that way, because they were. Classrooms imagined as being in all places, pathways imagined as evolving from connections rather than being created to create connections that are not there, ending up disused or used only by those with time or money to pretend at being connected. Connections.
I had virtually nothing to do with the success of the course or design charrette, but beg the indulgence of those who did in saying this course, this charrette, and Aurora's design - these are my seedballs. These are the future fruit of efforts begun more than three years ago. Whether any element of the design is realized or not, it was created, and is offered, openly. It represents a possibility of true, unadulterated, community-based design. If every neighborhood in Detroit used a similar approach, the corporations and $150,000/yr. experts would simply not be necessary. Useful? Perhaps. But not necessary. We don't need to keep creating plans for planning. We can simply do it.
Seedball One is the hope you will look at what was achieved in so little time by a group of non-experts, almost all from this area and greater Michigan, and be inspired to simplify, disengage from corporate interests, politics and foundations, and take control of the design process. Not because they are bad or evil, but simply, merely, passionately... because you can. They are all guests in your Design Charrette. Or can be. Perhaps must be? It is not up to them, it is up to you.
Imagine, if you will, every neighborhood breaking out for its own charrette, coming back together to align elements, breaking out, coming together... until there is a future borne of your hopes, your dreams, your imaginations and your blood, sweat and tears. Not just of today, but in a way that honors the wisdom and knowledge of life here going back many decades, if not hundreds of years: the great gifts the people of Detroit have to offer to each other and those places beyond the city limits.
Seedball Two is the deeply held belief that Aurora will, in some form, seed change. Whether collectively, or individually, by design or default, they will be a part of a better future - should humanity be wise enough to seek It. To see simple abundance in what others see as broken, denuded or dead is a powerful thing.
We face insurmountable opportunity. The problem *is* the solution, and the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
You may judge differently, but a circle has closed, and I judge it a good circle.
Cheers
Go to PRI-D Blog
Gratitude and many thanks to
Carol Izant, Travis Childs, Andy King, Marie Walker, Paul Angelini, Megan Kellepourey, Ariel Longtin, Michelle Camilleri, Clark Thompson, Kim Daugherty and Justin Price
for creating something special from nothing at all,
and to
Larry Santoyo, Keith D. Johnson, Penny Krebeihl and Kim Daugherty
for creating the conditions for it to happen.
And a very, very special THANK YOU to the many donors - known and anonymous - who truly were the Angels without whom this course and charrette would never have been possible. We were lucky enough to be there, but you truly gave us this gift.
May we repay your generosity and faith with good works and passing it on.
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The ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit
Permaculture Design Course
as
Design Charrette
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Urban Decay Porn
Media about Detroit tends to be pessimistic, though that is changing, so much of it has the distinct feel of watching a train wreck in progress. Even when the intent is good, the results are often mixed: |
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Ironically, the Detroit Works project (DW), and even this course, could be seen to reinforce the idea Detroit needs fixing. Though the city is, in fact, in the process of redesigning itself, it is a vibrant, breathing, roiling city that is taking itself seriously and celebrating its own rebirth.
Detroit is a city of the future. It's a city that has what few others have: open space to grow in, and grow into; abundant water; industrial infrastructure; a relatively high latitude to keep a hotter climate at bay; cold and snowy, but no severe, winters; and lots of idle hands. For a permaculturist, at least this permaculturist, it's a dream city. What other city in the world has this combination of elements? What city is better poised to model what post-industrial, post-carbon cities can, and will, look like? And if you look beneath the edifice Detroit is now infamous for, much like any burnt forest or mudslide zone, flood or even man-made disasters like Chernobyl, you see life. But it's not below the surface, it's in your face: |
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DCOH |
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No, if you're flipping through images of urban decay porn, you're missing what Detroit is, what it can be, and what it can mean to other cities as a potential example of the future.
That's why we chose to work in Detroit. A Design Charrette for Detroit
The idea for a design charrette for Detroit had its genesis last September in the first public meetings for the Detroit Works project, my participation in the design charrette for the Imagination Station, and discussions surrounding the DW meetings at the Boggs Center. Dissatisfaction with the DW process was running high, and perhaps no higher than in my own fevered brain. Why wasn't this organized from the neighborhood level up? Why had so few known about it for so long? Why was so little information coming out of the Mayor's office? Why shrink the city when the future is almost certain to see flows of climate refugees into Detroit and the region at large? And many more...
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March 27th - April 8th, 2011
Larry Santoyo and Keith D. Johnson, Instructors |
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An Invitation to Mutually Assured Succession
The concept for the ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit - Permaculture Design Course is inspired by Detroit's efforts to re-imagine itself after decades of slow, steady decline. In Detroit, real green shoots arise in once-empty lots as individuals and organizations create community and market gardens as ways to beautify, create green spaces, provide fresh, nutritious food to city residents, create or recreate community, and pursue self-reliance as entrepreneurs in the food system. While some pursue food justice via gardens, others pursue racial and economic justice. Some do all three, many of them via a garden, or urban farm. On some streets a rooster may crow, a goat bleat or a duck quack. Pheasants, raccoons, opossums and deer can be seen in various places. But this is not chaos and ruin, it is edge meeting edge, which is where magic happens. This is nature saying, "Join me. I haven't forgotten you." This is opportunity to design a regenerative, sustainable city. But the city is more than fallow fields and squawking chickens.
Old meets new as the Motor City becomes a city with a growing reputation for attracting entrepreneurs, artists and wanderers looking for niches, and filling them. Some are wary of the new, some embrace them. Tension like the surface tension of a bubble stretches until boundaries burst and edges blend creating magic and conflict. Techno whizzes bring the whiz-bang of new frontiers while social media rides a wave of enthusiasm for ethereal connectedness. Grace Lee Boggs sings a song of resistance to powers tangible and hidden while schools descend into chaos and overcrowding, and a new style of education seeks to rise from the ruins of industrialization...
.Click for more
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Microgiving.com
THANK YOU!
Our faith in community, friendship and the kindness of strangers has been restored by your kindness and generosity.
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authored by GELT-er Zach Holden
As we came to the door, I was feeling pretty negative. Tired, frusterated with the cancellation of our early morning appointment, I had bitterly informed my partners that they should take the ‘lead' on this house, that I just wanted to follow orders and let one of them take up the task of explaining who we were and everything we were doing to the home owner. I had a vague sense of ill ease as we reached our destination on Hill Street in the northwest of Highland Park, as the last time we had lugged a weatherization kit through the neighborhood, we had been told we were ‘in the wrong neighborhood' by a group of teens.
When we came up the front steps and knocked on the door, I noticed the tape holding together the screen door and the lingering smell of stale tobacco, thinking we were in for a interesting experience. We heard a man hollering at us, asking who we were. A woman soon came to the door, asking who we were and who we were looking for, telling us she didn't want our ‘shit', Needless to say, we were taken aback by her rather aggressive manner, and the weatherization was nearly dead on arrival, until the man, her husband, informed her that he had in fact signed up. She was further relieved when (in direct contravention of my previous promise to my partners) I explained to her that our service was in fact free, and that we would not only give her the supplies but actually install them as well. When she realized we weren't trying to scam her or otherwise pull some trick, her demeanor instantly shifted from stand-offish to absolutely friendly, and a smile came over her face.
As we headed into the basement, her husband offered a brief explanation of her initial resistance to us- there had been a ‘death' recently, and tensions were running high. I didn't have to wait long to hear the full story...
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Together We Rise
For the past few days, my younger brother has been reading a book for school called The Fate of the Earth . If the title weren't depressing enough, the book primarily consists of an account of the hysteria over the rise of nuclear arms, the resulting existentialism, and what those arms mean for…well, The Fate of the Earth. Supposedly, with the development of these weapons in the 1940s, humans officially became the first species in history with the potential to devastate not only our own population, but every other species, and quite literally the entire planet. Even today, nuclear annihilation is on the world's mind as the greatest potential manmade disaster.
The truth is that humankind developed destructive potential long before the rise of nuclear arms, and the greatest threat to our extinction today is not a nuclear threat, but an ecological and environmental one. We are the only species that is knowingly and voluntarily causing its own demise…literally. Okay, so I know we all know the story. Everyone and their mother has seen An Inconvenient Truth , heard politicians use catchphrases like “green energy” and “sustainability,” and thrown things at Glenn Beck. But too many of us, like me, are used to sitting on our butts at home, preaching from a high horse about turning the tap off while brushing our teeth.
The most difficult part of “environmentalism,” from my point of view, anyway, is internalizing it. Learning to see it as a movement that is not foreign or outside of oneself is difficult. When we watch the news, we are passive creatures, mentally absorbing oil spills, holes in the ozone, floating piles of garbage by the Great Barrier Reef, and distancing ourselves from them. But when we encounter those things up close and personal, and when we can physically see the differences our personal choices make, we realize how big and important this whole thing is. And it becomes most evident on a local/community level. I know it all sounds cliche, but it's true. And that is why I have decided to spend my summer in Highland Park, Michigan as part of the Green Economy Leadership Training.
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| Permaculture & Detroit’s Urban Agriculture Movement: What is Done, Not What is Said |
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by Rhamis Kent March 20, 2010
A million thoughts are racing through my head as I prepare for my upcoming trip to Detroit to teach a PDC next month. I’m hoping to develop relationships with those leading the urban agriculture movement in what many call "America’s first post-industrial city". This undertaking is hugely significant for the global permaculture movement, in general ? and America, in particular. |
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Well over 80% of Detroit’s population is African American ? the demographic most severely impacted by the economic disruptions seen most recently. With the collapse of the automotive industry, the city’s unemployment rate is officially 30% ? although many say real unemployment is easily in the 50% range. The burgeoning urban agriculture movement that has emerged in its wake has been a revelation. However, it hasn’t been without its problems.
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| PRI-De: A Detroit Story |
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Permaculture in Detroit seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but urban agriculture is blooming all
over the city. From the city-wide efforts of The Greening of Detroit in educating people on
gardening techniques to the smaller-scale efforts of individuals such as Kate Devlin and her
Spirit of Hope garden to groups such as the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network
and their 2-acre D-Town Farm and the Georgia Street Community Gardens/Collective,
community gardens are being sown on vacant lots dotting this city of nearly a million, filling the holes left by the loss of nearly half its peak auto industry-driven population. Photos of the streets of Detroit from eras long past and rusted nearly away show tightly packed, neat homes. Today, half those homes have devolved into ruins or grassy, often debris-filled, lots. Estimates on the number of lots range from 60,000 to 80,000. Those numbers don’t include the many parks now being left largely untended by the city government.
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