What's Permaculture All About?

In a society troubled by overconsumption and disconnection, what are plants, Anishinaabe Indigenous worldviews, and science all trying to teach us about restoring balance? In Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how these three sources of knowledge show us how to flourish through a practice of mutual care with other people and the natural world.

As our industrial society puts increasing stress on ecosystems and climate change threatens the well-being of us all, we must shift from a consumption and competition mindset to one recognizing our interdependence. Then we can practice mutual care to enable all living beings to thrive. In this guide, we’ll explore models of mutual care evident in plants, Indigenous culture, and science. We’ll also examine how mutual care phenomena in the natural world translate to the human world, and we’ll update Kimmerer’s examples.

Why does inequality exist and when did it start? Is inequality a necessary evil of any large, complex society? In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow attempted to answer these questions by looking at historical and anthropological research. What they discovered instead is that our beliefs about the evolution of human societies have been wrong all along.

Throughout humanity’s long history, cultures have always been much more diverse than we tend to believe, and the presumed evolution of societies from “primitive” to “civilized” is a myth. Armed with this new worldview, the authors challenge us to use our imaginations to envision new possibilities for our world today.

In this guide, we’ll explore different notions of freedom and equality, and we’ll delve into the authors’ thought-provoking questions about the inevitability of inequality and the potential for dismantling and reorganizing social systems. Throughout the guide, we’ll clarify and expand on some of the academic concepts and examine counterpoints by other scholars and authors.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan explores how we answer the question, “What should we eat.” It traces four types of food chains from a food’s origin to the dinner table. He focuses on how food production in the U.S. has evolved from small farms to a mass production system of huge corn and animal farms operated on factory-based principles. This system has produced cheap, tasty but less healthy foods, while making it difficult for us to make better choices by obscuring our food’s origins and ingredients.

We have a viable alternative in true organic food, but to make better choices and influence change we must do the work of educating ourselves and giving up our addiction to convenience and unhealthy foods.

In September 2023, leading food and beverage companies came together with farmers, academics, and NGOs to establish the first industrywide definition of regenerative agriculture, underlining the important role of corporate sustainability in advancing global food systems. Regenerative farming can mitigate environmental and health impacts of traditional farming methods by capturing and storing carbon dioxide, improving soil health, and enhancing biodiversity.

How do cities grow? Why do some organisms thrive while others struggle? In Scale, physicist Geoffrey West reveals the mathematical patterns that govern everything from urban development to metabolism. Drawing on his groundbreaking research at the Santa Fe Institute, West shows how all complex systems—from organisms to organizations—follow predictable scaling laws that determine their success and survival.

This guide explores West’s insights about how networks shape our world while adding perspectives from Indigenous knowledge, historical examples, and modern urban experiments. You’ll learn why understanding slime mold networks can help us design more efficient subway systems, why we can’t engineer animals larger than blue whales, and what medieval cities reveal about sustainable growth. Whether you’re interested in making your community more resilient, understanding how organizations really work, or discovering the hidden mathematics of life itself, our guide offers tools for seeing the world in a new way.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan explores how we answer the question, “What should we eat.” It traces four types of food chains from a food’s origin to the dinner table. He focuses on how food production in the U.S. has evolved from small farms to a mass production system of huge corn and animal farms operated on factory-based principles. This system has produced cheap, tasty but less healthy foods, while making it difficult for us to make better choices by obscuring our food’s origins and ingredients.

We have a viable alternative in true organic food, but to make better choices and influence change we must do the work of educating ourselves and giving up our addiction to convenience and unhealthy foods.

Today, many experts claim that life for humans has never been better. However, in The Divide, Jason Hickel argues that today’s Western-led world order causes massive global inequality while simultaneously trying to cover it up. Western elites amass wealth and power while billions remain trapped in poverty and hunger. This “divide,” he says, arose through centuries of violent and exploitative European colonization that devastated the Global South while enriching the West.

Hickel, an economic anthropologist from Eswatini, saw this divide firsthand while growing up in a poor Global South nation. Today, he studies the structural injustices of the global economy and the politics that enable it. The Divide is for anyone who wants to know more about these complex global issues—and about the lesser-known world history that explains them. It’s also for anyone eager to think about solutions to these problems. In our commentary, we’ll explore related perspectives on economics, inequality, and development, including those from Doughnut Economics and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

Do you ever get the sense that the world is getting worse over time? In Enlightenment Now, psychologist Steven Pinker says you might be falling prey to psychological biases that are distorting your perception. Because, he argues, things are actually getting better by every measure.

Pinker provides statistics on such factors as health, wealth, equality, human rights, happiness, peace, and freedom, to show that all of those things have improved over time, all around the world. And he says the driving forces of this progress are reason, science, and humanism— values that are derived from the European Enlightenment.

In this guide, we’ll delve into the data Pinker presents to show why he believes humanity is on the path of progress. Throughout, we’ll compare his ideas to those of other scholars, provide counterpoints, and update some of the statistics with more current data.

The human race has left a mark on our planet, sometimes through carelessness and sometimes by design, but how permanent are the changes we’ve made? In The World Without Us, science journalist Alan Weisman asks what would happen if the human race vanished overnight. What effects, positive or negative, would our disappearance have on the world? Weisman’s goal is to address humanity’s environmental impact by imagining a world in which nature is allowed to flourish. In many ways, the world that follows us would be significantly different than what came before.

In this guide, we’ll examine Weisman’s portrayal of humanity’s footprint and what Weisman claims would happen if we suddenly disappeared. Also, we’ll look at other views on climate change, nature’s resilience, and the human race’s impact. We’ll list suggestions for how our species might adapt to a greener world, as well as scenarios that might cause our extinction.