As I mentioned yesterday, I'm trying out Will Hooker's free online permaculture class.  The course was originally taught once a week, with each day's lecture cut in half and put on the web in two pieces.  Since it makes sense to review and react to each pair of lectures together, this post contains my take on lectures 1 and 2.

First of all, our internet was running terribly slowly when I started listening, which made it painful to jump to a spot in a video if I got interrupted partway through.  Luckily, the university didn't protect against visitors simply right-clicking and saving each video to their computers, so I recommend you do that first.  After downloading, it'll be easy to skip past all of the information that's really only relevant to local students --- like the getting-to-know you half hour that made up most of lesson 1.  In fact, if you know anything at all about permaculture you might skip lesson 1 entirely and maybe even lesson 2 (which covers permaculture ethics and principles).  The only really interesting tidbit I took away from these two lessons is the idea of adding bird perches to the tops of garden-trellis-and-staking posts to make it easier for our feathered friends to hang out and deposit manure below.

Your homework before delving into lesson three includes:

• In Grave Danger of Falling Food --- This 50 minute video about Bill Mollison is interesting, but drags a bit, especially since you're likely to have heard everything he's talking about before.  It's intriguing, though, to hear permaculture-related stances straight from the horse's mouth, and to guess how current-day forest gardening grew out of Mollison's mixed-species garden.
• Earth Day Ecological Footprint Quiz and Carbon Footprint Quiz --- These quizzes are fun, but suffer from a very narrow worldview.  I can understand why they don't give you the option to say you use a composting toilet and why they can't delve into the complexities of when meat-eating makes sense, but how hard would it be to let you input your actual electricity usage per year?
• Gaia's Garden chapters 1 and 2 and Introduction to Permaculture chapter 1 --- These two books are the required texts for the course (with other books offering optional reading).  I skimmed both of these books when I first got started with permaculture many moons ago, but recent reading (with a more experienced eye) changed my review of each dramatically.  Now that I've tried a lot of permaculture techniques on the ground, I find parts of Gaia's Garden naive and overly enthusiastic, plus the book is obviously geared towards rich suburban Americans who don't really need to grow any of their own food.  On the other hand, Bill Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture has improved with age, and I can't quite figure out why such an excellent book is out of print.  Sure, it's based in subtropical and tropical Australia, so you have to use completely different plants than Mollison recommends, but the underlying themes are thoughtful and rooted in experience (and the drawings are beautiful and informative).
  

I'll write more specifics about the reading when I listen to the relevant lectures (3 and 4).  That post probably won't show up here until next week, so you've got plenty of time to catch up if you want to join this year's version of last summer's book club.  The more the merrier!