This is kpbs midday edition. Relearning the lessons of nature many and using that knowledge in your own community. That's the core of a noosers of workshops starting in San Diego. The perma culture academy is a course designed for landscapers, homesteaders and just about anyone intent on living in harmony with their natural environment. Joining me to explain more about what lessons will be learned is Larry santoyo the director of the academy and welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. And diana moss is director of the nonprofit new village in San Diego's mount hope neighborhood. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Now Larry what brings this series of workshops to San Diego? Well we teach all over the country. Question have been teaching since 1989. It's Saturday of a -- a near and dear to our heart using natural systems as our model for urban planning. I'm a planner by training since 1989 we have been traveling around the country anded world actually teaching different groups to apply what nature has to offer us in a planning setting. In this case an urban setting. Perma culture. That term sounds like it means creating some sort of permanent, sustainable culture. That's a first time anyone has guessed off the bat. Yes A lot of people -- it's kind of the same as with perm nans in agriculture. It's -- probably perma culture is sexiest role or most well known application is in gardening and in home gardening especially. You can use nature's pattern which is what we are trying to teach in just about anything. Anything that can be designed you can use perma culture to do that Give us an example of using an environment differently when you understand how it works with nature. Well in a natural system every piece plays a part. Every plant, every animal, every place has a function. So, what we do is we look at your business or your community and we try to match people and places to functions and eco systems. We are converting or helping people find that we actually live in an eco system. We can't help it. Every time we go somewhere we create something that Hassin puts and outputs, it's an eco system. We are looking at how that works in nature, very stream lined, very efficient and nature there is no waste product. If we had a company that had something that we were trying to get rid of in nature something would rush over to pick that up. So in our work what we do is we look for someone who needs that as their resource base. The surplus of one thing is the resource base of another. That's what we see in nature and what we try to do for businesses and services and skills and on and on. Civil that what you mean -- when you say things like looking to the forest floor. I mean how things are used and discarded and then reused by nature? Exactly. The forest floor has build up of leaf litter and it starts to decompose which in any -- any situation that -- that's not -- the best place to be but if you are looking for life to happen that is exactly where it's happening. We treat a garden like a forest floor. We try to recreate that. In one sense that -- our actions are multiplied by many. In a forest we have a light shaded canopy that gives rise to the next thing that start coming up. Natural selection. In our garden we do that same thing. One of our favorite things to do is convert lawns into gardens. We have a program, workshops where we get a lot of people together. We were talking about this a second ago and take your bright greenlawn, resource, water -- we will cover it with card board. Another waste product. We will create an area where light can't get through. Then we will cover that up with mulch and build a garden on top of that. It is speeding up evolution and natural succession by tens of thousands of years in one afternoon. Why Do you think this is important information to bring to the San Diego community? I think one we are concerned about urban agriculture. We want to have the best yield. We want to be good stewards and this is the appropriate way to look at it. Now you have -- using the environment as something you have started doing by establishing community gardens. So tell us why you started project new village. I live in a neighborhood where we don't have enough access to healthy food. We have an aboundance of empty lots. We thought if we used those, backyard growing that we can grow our own healthy food and help the economic development in the neighborhood as well. It's not as easy as that to put it together. That we have a lack of -- we have a lack of healthy food and look at this empty lot. How Do you do that? How do you do that? There is a lot of community building, a lot of building relationships, educational pieces to that. We have -- one of the labor movement people said we are about a decade out in front of where we want to be so be patient. People will come along because this is the way to go. It's a sustain build model . How many projects do you have going? She will have to count on the fly. We run a farmer's market every week and we have a network of farmers we are working with with in southeast San Diego and then we have the mount hope community garden. Is the hope that the perma culture academy can take all of this activity one step further with education? No. Not at all. What we wants to help them do that. We want to learn what they are doing so that we can both together enrich it and help the efforts that are going on. We -- we don't want to take it on. We have sort of a protocol for designing and looking at natural systems that we want to offer. So we -- we have -- they have offered their site and for us to look at and examine it and the whole community can learn about how to make it more efficient or -- whatever the objective is really. What are -- what are the subjects that are going to be taught? We start out talking about something that I think that everybody can -- kind of agree on. What we find is biology and physics and ecology. We retalk about what we learned about it. We learn and we bring in what we now now about soil and about air and even some of the pollution issues we have. Then we sort of look at what we have learned and we apply it to how or -- how we solve our own needs. So -- again using the eco system as a metaphor. It'll get nutrition or water or -- all of it's basic needs from each other. All of the players in the system. That's what we look at in the situation. So in the classes we will kind of go a to z on how to create a sustainable human settlement and how to use your own homeos and neighborhoods as the living lab. One of the things that -- one of the topics you cover is listed as modern homesteading with style. What is that? I think there is a lot to it. I remember one time I was crossing the border and they saw all my things in the car and they were searching the car and asking me these questions, what is this? I said you know how your grandma used to have a garden outside the kitchen door because it was convenient and maybe even herbs in the window of the kitchen and he is going yeah, yeah, yeah. I said they made a science out of that. It's like -- and it can be very elegant. It doesn't have to be like homesteading like little house on the prairie or hippy communes. It's pretty elegant. It's very popular and people are learning what the benefits of home canning is and backyard chickens is pretty popular. We want to kind of take it to that next level and incorporate it into filling our needs in our neighborhood. We will soon have a surplus eggs and chickens and it'll be kind of a back to the land movement but really back to the city movement. And so, will all this instruction take place at the jab on center or will you have like hands on instruction in the natural environment? We will bounce around. We will have at least one classroom session a month. You know one weekend a month for six months and then the other weekends we will have workshops at different sites where we will learn to convert a lawn into a garden. We may have a -- a fermenting workshop or canning workshop. Cheese making workshop but with style. And then -- get some real sort of creek restoration work and broad scale stuff. We will visit farms and talk about farming on a little bit of a larger scale and then again the restoration work and in southern California we want to talk about how to prepare for fires and drought. We like to cover as much as we can and certainly are open to other people's ideas as the years go by. We have adopted new things and brought in new speakers. We will bounce around the county. The price tag for this course is a little steep. It's a $1,200. Is that affordable? We have been talking to people about the course coming and there are those that want to take the course, they know the value, they know it costs and there is no problem. There is also scholarships available and we are looking at who would benefit and how we get the most bang out of someone getting it. Give us an idea of who you are looking at for the scholarships, particular people or types of people. Why would they german getting scholarships? We are looking at people who are already doing something with their neighbors that would benefit from having a tool to bring more people into looking at sustainable practices. There is a woman in -- in [Inaudible] she is organizing her neighbors to plant succulents, to take out grass. She is shipping me -- helping me with my yard. She wants to enjoy it and share it with year neighbors. And to pass it on. Yeah. I'm wondering what you see as the overall goal of establishing. This sort of sustainable gardening and food growing in an urban environment. Is it to make residents moveself sufficient? Think that's a good way to say it. For me this lifts up if you will practices of IND egnious people and on a cultural basis it's relevant to the people I work with that we are looking at what exists and what we can do with what exists instead of bringing in power and wealth and those kinds of things it's where you are, start where you are and it's a problem solving tool. Yeah. I think that beingself sufficient is anti our goal. We want to be as resilent andself reliant. It's not how nature works. It's reliant on each other and that's what we want to do is depend on each other and be those people. You know come to the occasion. Come -- bring something to the table. That's what we want to teach. We want to teach the teachers first. And I'm getting from what you are say that you feel there is been a sort of break-in culture and it's relationship to where you are living and what your environment is like and where your land is what it can do. Yeah. I think the food system is a little broke Ken broken and this industrial way of farming isn't what we should do. Gets us back to where we should be. And so far the projects that you have been involved in. How have they been accepted by the communities they are in? The gardening piece is going well. It has a social part. He get thumbs up when people walk by. Our farmer's market is going to take more work. That's saying source something one day a week and sometimes that's not convenient. There is education around the purpose what we are seeing. We are in this for the long hall. And you are ten years ahead of your time. Yeah. So, with that in mind does the academy tend to stick around to see how the lessons are used? Yeah. I think we have got to offer sort of not just our experience but our own sweat. We want to create teams of people that are trained, that can also become mentors themselves and keep the ball rolling in one sense. Mostly assist with the program that are already existing. There is so many things going on that it's just, you know, a matter of piecing things together and introducing some groups to the other groups and making it even stronger. And just really fast. In the time I have left it sounds like this is sort of like a movement that's developing not only in this community but in other communities. Throughout California. Most definitely. Not just California but across the country and around the world. We have taught just about every continent for almost 30 years. The great thing is that it's slowly and quietly moving along. As soon as you turn it's -- there is something on the ground already. The academy classes will be held at the Jake on center for neighborhood innovation on euclid avenue and classes start April 1 sergeant. I have been speaking to the director and the director of the nonprofit project new village. Thank you. Thank you.
Relearning the lessons of nature, and using that knowledge in your own community is the core of a new series of workshops starting in Southeast San Diego where it has long been considered a food desert.
The Permaculture Academy is a course designed for landscapers, modern-day homesteaders and just about anyone intent on living in harmony with their natural environment.
Diane Moss, who lives in Mount Hope and is the director of the nonprofit Project New Village, was involved in bringing the Permaculture Academy to San Diego.
“I live in a neighborhood where we don’t have access to healthy food and we have an abundance of vacant lots,” Moss told KPBS Midday Edition on Thursday.
She said she hopes it will be an extension of the organization's mission to introduce community gardens and farms and promote self-sufficiency and community engagement in her neighborhood.
"There's a reluctance to do it for some, but what choices do we have?" Moss said. "It can be a hard conversation to have, but you must have it when you look at the lack of fresh healthy produce in the community."
Permaculture Academy Director Larry Santoyo said all of the academic work learned during the workshop will be put into practice. He said students will be designing projects that they will create in the community and will hopefully be continued beyond the workshop.
“We teach all over the country and we’ve been teaching since 1989,” Santoyo said. “It’s near and dear to our hearts to use natural systems as a model for urban planning.”
The Permaculture Academy is open to the everyone, including those outside of Southeast San Diego. Workshops will be held one weekend each month beginning in April and will run through September. The cost for the entire course is $1,200. Scholarships will be awarded to 10 community members who are already involved in activities around food and gardening and who teach others those skills.
