| And so what about permaculture? Like last year, I found it impossible to photograph... but I tell ya what: any natural builder without a good working knowledge of permaculture principles has an incomplete education, and anything they build would benefit enormously by pursuing the underlying philosophies of it. You don't have to know the Latin names of plants; what I'm talking about isn't botany or anything. It's seeing patterns and relationships with an encompassing eye, thinking about cause-and-effect with an open mind, understanding that everything is a part of something. It's really not that hard once it all clicks into place. It's like realizing that a house is an assemblage of different bits all working together to achieve optimal results - and in that light, in the learning stages before building, examining each component to understand what it does and how it does it - having a long look not only at each piece of the building, but also at its relationship to all the other pieces, and in all groupings, in terms of function, assembly, longevity, interaction with other components and the weather and what you do inside and out, etc. And then that wisdom gets extended to the yard... the neighborhood... the town and city... and on and on. Big! So big! And so much more exciting than these pictures of folks like Joel Glansberg, Scott Pittman, Mike Skinner (yes, people from the CREST strawbale email list: that Mike Skinner - he's the guy in the yellow hat), Kim Swearingen (yes, that Kim Swearingen - she's the woman with the black hair and white shirt), and even Tom Watson (insert grin here).     |
