Ideas For Upcoming Geoff Lawton DVD's

I just finished listening to the second podcast and did not see a thread dedicated to the topic discussed about upcoming DVD's that Geoff Lawton and his team can make in the future. So, here are my ideas...and actually, they will help clear up my questions as well.

1) Ancient Food Forests

I would love to see a whole film dedicated to Ancient Food Forests, complete with both agriculture science and also archeology...perhaps with someone like Jonathan Gray who specializes in Ancient History. I have seen little clips here and there on You Tube, but I would love to see a well made film with alot of detailed "permaculture geek" information.

2) Cultivating A City

A great film to see would be with people who have a PDC interact with city officials to try and better the living conditions in their area. It would be great to see several different countries represented, the different challenges, as well as different cultural views of things such as greywater, blackwater, and lawn vs. food. It would be great to see interviews with rental property owners and their thoughts on greening the city, rain water catch systems, etc. Both success and failure would make for a great film...showing great approaches to working with a local government along with approaches that did not work...as well as the results.

3) From Big AG to Permaculture

Another great film to see would be actual BIG AG farmers that got turned onto permaculture and then started to try and heal their land. It would be awesome to see interviews, what they are doing with their land, and if they are trying to instill the values in their family, etc. If you need a BIG AG farmer...I volunteer my dad, you can start from the ground up with him.

Hi Marcella
thanks for the ideas.

You're welcome!

DVD Ideas:

Wetlands

Lowlands, Chinampas, Aquaculture

Cold/Cool Climates

Something aimed at areas that receive significant amounts of snow fall. Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Up state NY, New England area. I guess that would include our neighbors to the north as well.

Housing

Permaculturally designed dwellings, new construction and retro fitting of existing structures.

Support Species

You obviously already know what that would be about.

Fungi

Cause lets face it Geoff, your a fun guy.

Dealing with difficult situations, like high winds on overgrazed, nearly barren, Zone 4 clay

I would love to see Geoff's take on "The Urban Frontier". Bill did one of his Global Gardener segments on the urban environment, and it's somewhat of an under-represented aspect of permacultural application.

I've watched Geoff's Food Forest videos and it is very informative. However, most people will NEVER have the chance to work on the kind of scale that is shown. A lot of people who live in cities want to practice permaculture as well and have much smaller spaces to work with. For that reason I would be interested to see Geoff's perspective on urban permaculture.

This is an interesting thread, but it shouldn't really be Geoff or Bill's responsibility to realize all of these ideas. We are all working on the edge of a massive transformation not just in terms of our practice of sustainable living, but in what we create with language and communicational media (video, internet, "The Humanities" etc...). The list is really a call to action for everyone who would do it.

permablitzing...
communities coming together,helping one another, rotational gardening where people of that community can eat of their neighbors herbage, and down the line...a harmonious system

WOW - Just saw that Geoff has made an urban permaculture DVD. Look who hasn't been paying attention.

Just to clarify...this topic goes with Podcast #090...Geoff Lawton had mentioned that he would like to hear upcoming video ideas from the listeners.

Hi all,

I would love to see something from a permaculture point of view dealing with turning swampland and seasonal swamp into productive permaculture. I say this for two reasons: 1) We've seen lots on reversing desertification, and there are times every year where I am very grateful for that section of the permaculture tool shed (yah, it's a shed. Buckets are for wet fertilizer and slop, and tool boxes are for toting things to and from the shed), but I've often wondered what can be done on the other end of things, taking an abundance of water and water-growing organisms and turning it into permaculture (the aforementioned chinampas come to mind); and 2) There are plenty of pieces of raw land here in Ontario that are sold for less than the average because for most applications for which city folk buy land in the country, swamp is only good for breeding mosquitos.

Thanks,

-CK

New DVD ideas - sorry these suggestions come so long after your intial request for ideas

1. the process of establishing a community permaculture project in terms working with people - building and maintaining a functional group, building broader community support, dealing with community objections, liaising with government, ensuring financial sustainability. To this end there is currently a community proposal to create a Canberra City Farm and we are currently working on securing a physical site for the farm - could be an interesting case study, and I am happy to provide more information if needed.

2. Permaculture aid

I would like to see Geoff Lawton redoing the Bill Mollison Global Gardener series, same ideas but updated and with many more examples, it should end with one interview of Bill Mollison where he talks about what changed since the original series and what are his main concerns about the future, end with one of Bill jokes and a big smile from both.

Best Regards

Brad Davies wrote:DVD Ideas:

Wetlands

Lowlands, Chinampas, Aquaculture

Cold/Cool Climates

Something aimed at areas that receive significant amounts of snow fall. Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Up state NY, New England area. I guess that would include our neighbors to the north as well.

Housing

Permaculturally designed dwellings, new construction and retro fitting of existing structures.

Support Species

You obviously already know what that would be about.

Fungi

Cause lets face it Geoff, your a fun guy.

+1 for the cold/temperate climates video

wow those are some great ideas..I also will double up on the wet and cold areas and also the sneaky droughts that come in an surprise you and those darned late freezes like we had this year..I know Paul is working on this type of thing with his land search too..so hopefully there will be a lot of new info in this direction coming out soon..

I think we should get him teamed up with Paul Stamets and make a video about introducing Mycology to Ecosystems.

1) Like using Entonomorphic fungi as insecticide to houses in Zone 0

2) Using beneficial fungi to promote healthy immunity in the food forest from outside disease.

3) Working with Pluerotus for remediation, and building composting plastic bins

4) Building a MycoLab on the property to support your aquaponics system would be interesting to see,
mycology is based on a utilitarian principle which should be injected into the inner zones

I'd like to see one outlining how inject forest gardening into commercial production systems, and to show examples for as many climate types as possible. Eg. 'Instead of a strict orchard of nothing but apple trees, mowed grass, and synthetic chemicals how about doing it like this...'

I'd like to see him do a bunch of perm-crashes (permaculture yard crashers style... sort of). go in, draft the design in details, let the owners execute, check back, iterate. would be educational in a directly applicable way if done for variety of terrain, soil, and weather/zone types. and many people would appreciate the free consult.

Personally I would love to see more small scale projects just normal small suburbia type plots

toan tr wrote:I'd like to see him do a bunch of perm-crashes (permaculture yard crashers style... sort of). go in, draft the design in details, let the owners execute, check back, iterate. would be educational in a directly applicable way if done for variety of terrain, soil, and weather/zone types. and many people would appreciate the free consult.

I will volunteer my place for a video if it would be helpful to anyone. I have 40 acres in a temperate climate, flat ground and hillside, pasture and woodland, wetland and a drainage ditch running through, no rocks to speak of. The flat ground hasn't been tilled in about 25 years and the acres of walnut plantation are the same age. We've spent several years getting to know the site better and are preparing to start somewhere in the spring. Our spring projects include hugelkulture beds, pond building, harvesting trees to create a house site and provide material for building, planting new trees in various locations and re-arranging the camp site. If someone wants to give advice and get some video footage to boot, I'll listen and learn!

The height difference from the top of the hill to the lowest spot in the wetlands is near 50 feet, if my memory of the website where I captured the map is any good. The hill is completely wooded and there are "volunteer" trees on both the east and west sides of the flat field with an additional belt of trees on the south that separates me from the farm field there.

Raising poultry the permaculture way

I had a geology professor who did environmental water analysis for a lot of the abandoned GM and Ford plants in Michigan (Lansing area mainly). They say there is no way to clean up the damage those factories have done to the water on their property -down to the water table. Whomever purchases these properties is then responsible for the environmental impact which conventionally would require millions upon millions of dollars. Granted these factories sit upon acres and acres of land and would most likely need many years of work (Oooo lots of videos). I would like to see, on any scale, permaculture tackle the issues of cleaning and re-greening abandoned and hopeless industrial land.

Imagine the impact this would have on the communities near these sites, not to mention the media coverage that would follow a successful project of such magnitude.

Has Geoff ever considered making his videos available for download? I would be way more keen on buying his videos if I was just given a password to download the video straight to my computer. It would also may the material wayyyyy more affordable for everyone. Not to mention saved fossil fuel consumption on shipping things from Australia to the US.

Extreme Makeover: Permaculture Edition

"Johnny here says he likes flowerbeds. So we're digging a massive swale through the center of his lawn and planting these nitrogen-fixing tulip trees... and in-between... lupins!"