NEW REALITY CHECK

Peter Kilde, Chair
Partnership Strategic Initiatives Task Force

The Age of Limits | June 7, 2013 
 
Admittedly, it may not be everyone’s idea of a vacation, but being overly normal has not been my primary problem over the years.  I took vacation the last half of May to attend two back-to-back events at a rustic and highly unusual religious retreat center in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains.  The first event was a five-day intensive training in basic Permaculture called Sustainable Life Skills, the second, a return to an event I attended and reported on last year; a serious and unflinching look at our growing human and environmental predicament called The Age of Limits Conference.
 
I went to the Permaculture pre-conference training looking for some fresh insights on how to deal with the New Reality as it unfolds around us.  This turns out to have been a good call.  As a reader of this blog, you are likely familiar with the central New Reality themes of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and economic turmoil as they impact on low income families and communities.  This description of Permaculture from the US Permaculture Institute web site suggests why I went here looking for clues:

• “Permaculture is an ecological design system for sustainability in all aspects of human endeavor. It teaches us how build natural homes, grow our own food, restore diminished landscapes and ecosystems, catch rainwater, build communities and much more.”

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