The episode with Jeff Speck left me curious about what the details Jeff mentioned look like in practice. I followed up that conversation by sitting down with my guest for this episode, Steve Nygren, founder of Serenbe.
Visit Our Partners:
Wild Abundance - Top 10 Vegetables to Grow that Will Really Feed You!
Marjory Wildcraft - How to Grow Food!
Donate Directly to the Podcast: PayPal -or- Venmo @permaculturepodcast
Join Our Patreon Community: Patreon.com/permaculturepodcast
Want to listen to more conversations about Permaculture?
Visit Our Partner:
Building a Better World
Serenbe is a model community located half an hour south of Atlanta, Georgia. Bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders, Steve and the others instrumental in this project created a suburban town based around conservation, preservation, and nature connection.
During our conversation today, Steve shares his vision of what one model of sustainable suburbs can look like. This includes the actions, policies, and practices necessary to pull it off.
Find out more about Steve Nygren and Serenbe at serenbe.com and the podcast, Serenbe Stories at serenbestories.com.
As I prepare for the end of the year and consider the direction of The Permaculture Podcast in 2021, I’ve been reviewing and typing up my notes from the last ten years of classes, workshops, and interviews. While working on this, one of the recurring themes from my teacher training was that permaculture education should focus on how rather than what. In this way, we look at a site, design, or solution holistically from the top-down, rather than in a mechanistic one-size-fits-all reductionist fashion.
This was on my mind while editing this episode and that what Serenbe offers is a model that reveals the ways, as Steve shared with us, we can adapt the methods of this project to bring something similar and wholly unique into the world. By looking at what exists, we have a concrete guide to what is possible. So when we engage to preserve or create more green space where we live, we can point to places like Serenbe. We can advocate for transfer development rights to increase, rather than decrease, housing density and the work done in Montgomery County, Maryland or Boulder, Colorado, and discuss whether the holistic or patchwork results of one versus would work best in our community. If we live in an area without a lot of places that allow us to connect to nature, we can work with organizations like The Rodale Institute or Children and Nature Network to adapt our specific place and situation to create a more bountiful, verdant, and integrated world.
In time, what we do today can be an example for others in the years ahead.
But, those are just my thoughts at the moment. What are yours?
Leave a comment below or email: The Permaculture Podcast
From here there are only two episodes left in the year. Next up is a conversation with Joshua Hughes to check-in about his work with Blacksheep Regenerative Resource Management and the recently launched RewildOrganics. From there is the final episode of 2020, a look at the future of The Permaculture Podcast.
If you’d like to join in the conversation, including The Permaculture Podcast discord, join the community at patreon.com/permaculturepodcast.
Until the next time, spend each day creating community while taking care of Earth, your self, and each other.
Resources
White House Council on the Environment
Biophilic Design (Wiki)
Urban Land Institute
Transfer Development Rights (ConservationTools.org)
Live Works
Nygren Placemaking
The Rodale Institute
Richard Louv - Last Child in the Woods - Children and Nature Network
Wholesome Wave Georgia
Biophilic Institute