Call for interviews

If there are any millennials on here who have chosen to follow a permaculture path rather than going to college and pursuing a traditional career track, I'd like to interview you for a blog article. If interested, please message me or comment on this thread. Thanks.

This may sound daft, but I don't know if I'm a millennial or not.  I think I just squeeze into the older age bracket but I have no cell phone or any of the tokens of my generation.

Can you tell us more about your blog?

It's not strictly necessary that you be a millennial. My blog is called "Other Things to Be" (http://www.otherthingstobe.com) and the theme is alternative ways to live your life and meet your needs, with a focus on approaches to dealing with ecological and economic issues. It's in its beginning stages right now, as you'll see if you follow the link, but I hope to make something of it.

Just posted this article on my blog: http://www.otherthingstobe.com/an-alternative-pathway/



"One young woman whom we’ll call Bright Sky (a name she received while spending a month on the Ojibwe reservations during her college years) began to rethink her future when she graduated from Penn State in the summer of 2009, shortly after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression began. “I didn’t think about it until years later,” she says, “but that transition period is very likely the reason I chose an alternative pathway.”

Bright Sky has forged her alternative pathway by a nurturing a strong interest in stewarding the environment and by getting educated in permaculture, a system of agricultural design principles that mimics the patterns found in natural ecosystems. Developed in Australia in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture is made up of many disciplines, including gardening, energy, architecture and community building, and is now practiced throughout the world as a path to sustainable living. Years before hearing about it, however, Bright Sky’s journey in this direction began with a unique learning experience that inextricably connected her to nature."

Would love to interview anyone else with an interesting story to tell about your permaculture journey. Feel free to message me or comment below.

r ranson wrote:This may sound daft, but I don't know if I'm a millennial or not.

Born in 1983, Gen X. Born in 1984, millennial.

I thought GenX ended in '79 - but I might have been misinformed.

Oh, according to wiki, it's a bit more complicated.  With some sources having it end in the mid-seventies and others in the mid-eighties.  

Sounds fun. I'm a millennial born in '89, but I did the college career thing before finding permaculture. Now my wife and I working hard to ditch the 9-5 and become full life permies. If you check out our blog in my signature you will see the things we are into, lots of cob and natural building. We could also link your blog to our own.

I'm a Gen X! I never knew!

(Now we gotta figure out how to exploit that information and a pay a bill...)

I believe strongly in Permaculture, found out about it by a revulsion for my career choice in professional cooking, and a pursuit for something honorable to do with myself, starting with study of Alice Waters, then Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, then rippling outward into Bill Mollison, Joel Salatin, Mark Shepard, Masanobu Fukuoka, Gary Nabhan, and others.

I built a restaurant almost ten years ago called Gwendolyn, where we use perishable products strictly from within 150 miles, using pre-industrial, classical techniques and preparations from 1850 or before.
You can flip through history and that sort of stuff at restaurantgwendolyn.com.

To walk my talk I bought 10 acres of land, I bought a mobile home and started living on it. I currently raise (that's a very gratuitous choice of word) sheep, goats, ducks, and chickens. But I am far from permaculture ideals. I am actually pretty poor, so everything moves slowly around here. Getting set up out here with well, living accomodations, electricity, septic system, etc. has stripped me of pretty much all my savings. A divorce with child support cuts what is left of my income pretty thin--then the common expenses of caring for new wife and two year old baby.

Bit by bit I study and adopt whatever I can afford to do alone, with a shovel or a "come along" or my pickup truck. (That's probably not all that unusual.)

I taught myself to weld, built (and buried) all my electrical lines, built the cedar fence around ten acres with my two older children. Move all the pieces of my poultry operation (chicken tractors, water storage, daily restaurant scrap dumps) every day to rotate the land and critters for benefit of all involved.

Recently been cutting open the baby's used ecologically-sound diapers to harvest the hydrocolloid gel to deposit in our very dry sandy soil, where hundreds of trees struggle against months of blazing heat.  

I have killed many rattlesnakes with a stick or a branch, in sandals and shorts. I do carpentry outdoors late at night while the ground is a parade of scorpions.

Anything useful in there?

Well, I've been through some college, studied biochemistry at Duquesne, that didn't work-out. I was happier when I was living on the streets and helping with a permaculture project on some squatted urban land.
I moved back in with my parents, after that group got "disrupted" and I've been growing increasingly dissatisfied with the overly comfortable living situation and the scale of my permaculture options on this suburban property and this low paying job.
I'm planning a bike-kayak trip down the Ohio River, this will ideally involve organizing local community permaculture and green infrastructure projects along the way, with side missions involving environmental activism and the highest goals of re-establishing the surviving American Chestnuts to its native range, and pre-emptively introducing thousand canker blight resistant black walnut genetics to existing stands to help preserve that species.
I already have stories, but it won't get interesting again until the next time I put rubber to the road and paddles to the water.