Peak oil? Peak water? Peak soil? Humanity now stands on a precarious peak of high energy use, resource use, and population. Storms approach from many directions. The key issue of our age concerns how to gracefully and ethically descend from this peak, while rebuilding healthy ecosystems and thriving human communities.

Permaculture offers a fundamental strategy that involves designing cultural systems which consciously mimic ecosystem structure and function. Landscape design represents a critical slice of this broad strategy, for landscapes teach us how to apply ecological design principles to the tougher challenge of designing ecological societies. This talk introduces the core principles of permaculture with practical examples for town- and country-dwellers alike, offering occasional nods to the larger cultural systems that we must also consciously design.

We are all designers! Design is the key verb of permaculture. What does an ecological design process look like and how does it work? This half-day workshop provides opportunities to experience ecological design as an interconnected ecosystem, and as an inherent part of ourselves as human beings. This is a playful, hands on workshop with serious lessons to learn.

Enter the GreenMan's Lair! Join Bruce on a tour of a working 20-year old permaculture homestead on his lot in Traverse City. See how Bruce integrates flower and vegetable gardens with fruit and nut plantings and other interesting landscape plants. Bruce will talk about building a lot from recycled and salvaged parts - both plants and materials. Most importantly, you'll see a snapshot of a dynamic system evolving over time, and learn firsthand how to use that foreknowledge (Bruce's hindsight) to avoid making costly mistakes! This is a bonus workshop not featuring Dave Jacke.

Grow your own! Join Jim Ruster, Antrim County farmer and an old-hand at mushroom growing, for a hands-on workshop in growing three strains of delicious edible mushroom - oyster, shiitake and wine cap. You'll participate in building totems, preparing logs for spawn and making use of materials you can buy at any landscaping or farm store. Catalogs for finding spawn and other materials will be handed out free. This is a bonus workshop and is not led by Dave Jacke.

Move beyond companion planting. What is a guild? What is a polyculture? Polyculture design offers the most interest and challenge in ecological garden design. Learn to create effective perennial polycultures: combinations of perennial plants growing in one patch that minimize competition, create additive yields, and minimize the gardener’s work and outside inputs. This workshop explores the specific ecological theories behind polyculture design and lays out practical polyculture design techniques such as Niche Analysis, Guild Building, Ecological Analogs, and Patch Design.

Let’s explore myriad principles and approaches to the ecological design of water within human habitats. Where do we fit into the water cycle? How can falling and flowing water benefit forest garden ecosystems while improving aquatic ecosystem health? Come learn the prinicples of catching, storing, cleaning and moving water, and tackle design problems for water system development at the Eco-Learning Center site. When we design to accommodate natural water cycling, we begin to heal the landscape, build fertility and increase yields.

Ecosystem agriculture attempts to mimic the structure and function of natural ecosystems in food-producing ecologies. This workshop explores the vision, theory and design of ecosystem agriculture using the temperate deciduous forest ecosystem as the model. The forest gardening vision helps us grasp the value of ecosystem architecture and social structure as concrete design elements. We will develop patterns and principles for garden design and management based on these basic facets of forest ecosystems. This workshop corresponds with Volume I of Edible Forest Gardens, but does not require that you've read that text.

Permaculture cofounder Bill Mollison once said, "Everything gardens". Every organism in your garden or on your homestead or farm interacts with and changes its environment in multiple ways. Animals, in particular &mspace; from large livestock to small, poultry to insect pests &mspace; have multiple functions and interactions we mostly ignore. We thereby lose opportunities for beneficial interconnections that can reduce work, waste, and pollution and increase yields. Whether we know it or not, we create food webs and ecosystems all the time. When we do it unconsciously, we don’t do it very well, so we may as well get good at it. General principles, practical examples, and tantalizing tidbits of research provide lots of room to play, so let’s get to it!

Forest ecosystems have evolved to gather, store, cycle, and conserve nutrients, building “natural capital” over time. In a world of increasingly expensive energy and fertilizer, we must learn to mimic and improve upon this anatomy of self-renewing fertility to maximize our own garden’s nutrient-conserving behavior. One hint: perennial plants do it deeper all the time! Along the way, we will discover that the most fertility-building ecosystems tend to be those in mid-succession: fields half way to becoming forest through natural ecosystem changes over time. What other secrets do forest succession processes hold for ecosystem designers? There are a few good ones, but the key is this: succession helps us understand ecosystem dynamics better than almost any other aspect of ecology can. Come get your mental models revised and see the world anew! You’ll never design the same again. This workshop corresponds with Volume II of Edible Forest Gardens, but does not require that you've read that text.