Permaculture

Permaculture is a way of designing landscapes (or any kind of system) in a way that works with what is already there to produce more variety of plants for less labour. It's wise and wonderful.

Yesterday I took part in an introductory class on the topic.

Wikipedia: Permaculture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
Permaculture design principles extend from the position that "The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children" (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth's ecosystems.

Permaculture Education Template Design Building
http://podcollective.com/fora/viewtopic.php?p=9162#9162
visioning a workshop template
for permaculture education-in-action
this is a virtual record of an applied workshop template
for introducing basic permaculture concepts
in the context of creating a community permaculture education demo site