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Maddy Harland offers a unique frontline take on the environmental successes and challenges facing this planet and its people. She explores the rise of permaculture globally, from its origins in Australia in the 1970s to its current worldwide activities, and describes the positive developments of this global movement and its huge potential.
Amid a wealth of solutions and the ecocide of business as usual, Maddy interfaces practical permaculture with global transformation and deep ecology. She writes of regenerative culture, earth restoration and social permaculture long before they became core ideas and practices.
Her deep connection with the natural and human worlds and all that our differing cultures have to offer adds a beautiful dimension of heart to this book, a treasure trove of gems of inspiration arising from the edges where the personal, local, national and global intersect and a glimpse into the life and mind of a remarkable woman.
Maddy Harland is a co-founder and editor of Permaculture International: Practical Solutions Beyond Sustainability, a magazine which offers practical, innovative solutions and global perspectives. 2017 is the magazine's 25th Anniversary Year. In 1990 Maddy co-founded Permanent Publications, a publishing company specialising in practical ecological solutions, and the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, UK, once a military base, and now a thriving immersive learning centre. She is a founding member of Gaia Education, which developed the Ecovillage Design Education course endorsed by UNESCO. An activist, gardener, teacher, community leader, Queens' Award-winning entrepreneur, and mother, Maddy is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is a Visiting Knowledge Exchange Fellow of the Institute of Theological Partnerships at the University of Winchester in the UK.
"Maddy Harland's regular columns have, in turn, offered inspiration, a shoulder to cry on, rousing calls to arms, space to mourn and lament and signposts to stories to sustain an activist's heart. They are essential reading for many. Gathered in one place, they offer a fascinating history of the development of permaculture, its ups and downs, its breakthroughs and its epiphanies. To have them gathered in one place is a joy. Give yourself a treat, and swim in their deep, wild waters."
– Rob Hopkins, co-founder of Transition Network, author of The Power of Just Doing Stuff
"Maddy Harland's work and life are an inspiration to anyone who dreams of devoting their energies to regeneration of land and community, and making a right livelihood from that work. As editor and publisher of Permaculture magazine, she has a global scope and more than two decades of her own thoughtful, protracted observation of the growth and development of the permaculture movement. A really valuable resource!"
– Starhawk, permaculture teacher, activist and author of The Spiral Dance
"Reading Maddy's collected thoughts from over the years as she raises her family, documents a growing body of knowledge of immediate and urgent importance, while observing humanity crashing and burning its way through selfish, absurdist, feudal, materialist collapse is breathtaking and strangely rollicking good fun."
– John D. Liu is a film maker and Founder of the Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement
