Tuesday, June 10, 2014

You can permaculture anything, so how about a thesis?

Permaculture is not just about gardening, as many people seem to think. I just completed a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) which was very little to do with gardening. I have learnt that permaculture is a good system for designing good systems. It involves a whole lot of principles that can be applied to just about anything, and since I'm doing this PhD thing, I thought I would experiment with applying it to my research. The following is a presentation I did for the PDC.


First of all, I sang a song, because that's an appropriate thing to do, right? It's a song about the Monsanto because that is one of the nasty things that motivated me to look for positive alternatives, so it's totally relevant.




Wait, what is food sovereignty?


So that sounds like it has a lot to do with permaculture to begin with...


Then I tried some funky mind-mapping (not my strong-point), because in permaculture there is this thing with interconnectedness and stuff.


Then I tried looking at the permaculture principles in light of my research


And this thing, which, as it turned out, was totally compatible with my notes already:


And then there's the permaculture flower:


So through this process I realised that I was doing this whole research thing backwards (as I usually do things), so I ended with the question that I should have probably started with: