Designing for Abundance: A Permaculture Vision with Penny Livingston

What if the future of real estate was rooted in regeneration, not extraction?

In this episode of The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, Neal sits down with legendary permaculture designer Penny Livingston, whose work has spanned continents and inspired a generation of land stewards, builders, and community weavers.

Penny shares her journey from conventional landscape design to studying under permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison—and how that shift redefined not just her profession, but her entire worldview.

Together, they explore:

• What it means to design human environments with nature, not against it
• How permaculture principles can inform development at every scale
• The power of whole-systems thinking in real estate, architecture, and community
• A moving story from her work with the Ketchwa people of Peru
• Why regenerative design doesn’t just sustain—it creates overflowing abundance

This is a conversation that goes far beyond gardens and green roofs. It’s a reminder that how we design our places is how we design our future.

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The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast is an independent show exploring the people, projects, and capital reshaping how land gets used and communities get built. Two organizations grew directly out of this work, and they're worth knowing:

Hamlet Capital finances and advises on projects that integrate agriculture and conservation with mixed-use development. If you're building one or looking to invest, let's talk.

Latitude is a real estate brokerage representing sanctuary properties rooted in nature, beauty, and meaningful living.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

All of these things, I think the biggest thing, whether it's we're talking about cattle ranching, we're talking about logging, we're talking about garden design or execution of a productive sort of permaculture garden, it's how it's done, is really what it's about. Like you can regenerate old growth meadows with cows if you run them the right way.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Conversations that educate and inspire people looking for a different way to do real estate. I'm Neil Collins, and today I'm joined by someone who has been a guiding light in the world of permaculture for decades. Penny Livingston. Penny is a renowned permaculturalist and landscape designer whose work spans the globe. From the coast of California to the mountains of the Andes, weaving together beauty, functionality, and deep ecological wisdom. One of the core motivations behind this show has always been to seek out the people building bridges. Bridges from the transactional and extractive world of real estate to a world that is alive, equitable, and truly regenerative. Because let's be honest, the systems we've inherited and continue to invest in aren't working. Not for the planet, not for people, and not for the future. Now, I don't think we need to rehash all the symptoms of the polycrisis we're living through. The truth is, none of this happened by accident. The world we're living in is a direct result of the systems we've designed for and the values we've prioritized. But what if we design for something else? Not for scarcity, but for abundance. Not for extraction, but for generation. Not for short-term gain, but for lasting resilience. In this conversation, Penny and I explore what that looks like. We talk about her early shift from landscape designer to permaculturalist and what it was like to study directly under Bill Mollison, one of the co-founders of permaculture. We dive into the opportunities and the challenges of integrating permaculture into real estate and development, where the dominant mindset still favors linear design and waste while overlooking externalized cost. Penny offers a radically different worldview, one rooted in generosity, beauty, and whole systems thinking. She also shares vivid stories from her work from around the world, including a powerful example with Quechua people in Peru. And of course, she leaves us with one of my favorite takeaways. When you design with nature, be careful. You might just create too much abundance. I say that in jest, so without further ado, let's get into it with Penny Livingston. Where I would love to pick up is is to ask you if there's been a North Star that's guided you over your lifetime or anything like that that you can articulate.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

So I really only go where I'm invited. And I usually don't talk about things unless I'm asked. And I've been invited many places and asked a lot of questions. So that that little commitment of mine has served. But I just didn't want to be like a woman on a mission, you know. Reimagining our relationship with the earth and what who who are we, you know, as keystone species on this planet, and how can we as humans be a benefit to the earth? Not just be less bad, but actually be a regenerative, I guess, force, if you'd will. I don't know if that's the right word, but a regenerative energy on this planet.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

When did you start to put that together to be in service? Was that something from an early age?

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Uh I don't think so. No. I it it it came, I think actually it was earlier than the 90s. It was in the 80s. Uh I was in a a car wreck, and uh I lived in a community in West Moran County that I mean, I didn't have to ask for anything. I couldn't do anything for myself. And the community just stepped up and took care of me and you know, provided for needs I didn't even know I had. And through that experience, I sort of had an epiphany of surrendering to being of service to the earth.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

That's incredible. At that point, were you doing landscape design or were you doing something different?

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Yeah, I was doing, let's see, what was I doing? I was actually a textile artist. I was weaving and I was doing gardening. I didn't actually get into landscape until later. But yeah, I mean, there's been so many different uh episodes in my life. But yeah, and then I started landscaping and then I learned about permaculture design, and that changed my life. It brought me to trust more about what I know from my experience as opposed to what they say and what what what I've been taught. For example, uh, in conventional development, um, you know, we call it the pipe and pave, where engineers come in and they just try to shunt water off the land as quickly as possible and in the process making it dangerous. So that's in one example where we do the opposite. That never made any sense to me. Because you see what happens when the away, when they shun it away, it's fire hosing out of pipes and culverts and eroding and killing salmon eggs in the process and you know, and creating so much damage. So that's one example. And then the other example is just in agriculture how people are used use pesticides. And when you start to understand biology, it makes absolutely no sense to start putting poisons to kill microbes in the soil when they are your best friends when you're trying to grow as a landscaper. It made no sense to me that to use herbicides and pesticides because then you end up with every kind of disease and fungus after that because the plants don't have what they need to protect themselves.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Oh, absolutely. Like water is going to be something that I would love to get back to, uh, mainly my my own struggles with civil engineers. But I I want to keep going on on that journey because you said that that you started to interface with permaculture. And that that's really where I know your name from within those permaculture circles. But what what was that? And I I think I've heard on another podcast that you're you're really into lineages. And I thought that would be a really interesting way to ask that question of what what lineage would you identify yourself in there?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

I'm definitely a lineage of Bill Mollison, of the founder. Uh, he we became almost like an uncle to me, and he taught me so much. But my other lineage is the Pacific Northwest lineage of I took my first permaculture class at a place called Lost Valley Education Center, south of Eugene, with their name at the time was Tom, aka Hazel Ward, and Jude Hobbs and Rick Valley. They were my first teachers. And then I took um a teacher training with a woman named Lee Harrison and a man named Max Lindiger. They're kind of some couple of the first permaculture people that Bill trained. And then I took some courses with Bill, and I ended up, you know, he we became dear friends and hosted him and organized things for him, taught with him.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Why do you think that you're so attracted to permaculture, especially at at that time, whenever that it was definitely not even close to the mainstream lexicon, but was there some aspect of it that particularly drew you in?

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Yeah. I mean, I was doing landscaping and it was sort of like comforting the rich. You know, I had these big wealthy people who wanted to sit on their patio and stare out at their garden and not really have any relationship with it. And they always kind of wanted it to look finished the minute I left, as opposed to letting it grow and watching and being involved in the process. So as a result, I started getting really apathetic about my work. I wasn't, I didn't enjoy it very much. So I decided that I would rather, you know, after I took a permaculture course, I would rather work with people who wanted to grow and learn and be engaged with their gardens and with their landscapes rather than people that just didn't want anything to do with anything. And then of course that led into being really lit up about connecting people back to the earth and teaching it, you know, permaculture is really a form of eco-literacy. It's about really understanding how our world works, you know, how water works, how plants work, how biology works, how energy works, um, how humans interfacing with the earth are impact. It's it's it's just uh it opened my eyes and my heart and my mind and everything in the process of learning things. Um, natural building is another thing that I love. In my learning, you know, a brand new house built in the United States today has over 2,500 different chemicals in it, you know, between plastics and glues and paints and from aldehyde and fire retardants and you name it, carpets. You know, we put our little babies down on carpets, and it's like it's these things are so toxic, especially when they're new. And as I've grown up and gotten older, there's all these diseases that are coming up that I've never heard of. Like we never had diseases like this when I was young. You know, I'm wondering, is it from the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe, the houses we live in? And that includes what's in your house. So yeah, I love working with clay and and stone and wood and straw and natural materials.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

How do you make that shift? I, you know, I know a lot of people in the landscaping trade, if you're you're catering towards a certain clientele, just to keep the roof over your head and beans and rice on the stove, but how do you actually start to really work with these different themes and this design approach and find that clientele base that sees that value recognition and it's way easier now than it was because nobody'd ever heard of any of this stuff back when I was starting. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Now I think there's more, I think people, you know, if you're a landscaper, just advertise what it is you want, you know, put your shingle out there and say, you know, like say if you're organic or you build you you design ecosystems, just put out your vision of what you want. And then I also, since we're on this subject, is as a landscaper, I could educate my clients. I have a young uh permaculture student who just got given a lot of landscaping jobs here on Whitby Island, and she's doing the same thing. I mean, she's got she's a very strong woman, and she's she's like if the client is saying they want to do something that is really damaging to the earth, she'll speak up about it in a tactful way and explain to them why it's probably not a good idea to do that. And here's another alternative, or here's an option, or here's a solution to what it is you're trying to do. We are educators if we really step into that role.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Aaron Powell And would you call it permaculture or have you taken a different tact of just this is embedded within my practice, and we're not even going to use that word right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

I like using the word because of the lineage aspect. But I started a nonprofit called Regenerative Design Institute because I believe regenerative design and permaculture are synonymous. I do use the word regenerative design. I had a business also called sustainable living designs back when sustainability was kind of the thing. But if you're talking about your relationship and you say, How's your relationship? And you say, Well, it's sustainable. All right. But when you say it's regenerative, you know, because I permaculture and all of this kind of work is really about our relationships with the earth and with the plants and with the soil and with each other and with and that's what we look at in permaculture is we really try to understand what are the it the relationships between, you know, the microbes in the soil and the roots of the plants and water, for example, you know, they're all connected. If you're doing site planning, you know, what's the relationship between the building and the water? That's a big one. People don't always think about. Or what's your relationship between the building and the trees around you? Or the building and yeah, and the soil that you're building on. You know, we don't just plot buildings just anywhere. We look at the whole site and figure out the best place to put a house. Often we do it through what where is the good place not to put a house? Are you gonna put a house in the most beautiful spot on the land? You know, you do that. What have you just lost? You know, you go into like the little grove of trees, oh, this is so awesome. I want to put my house here, and then you put a house there and you've just lost your spot.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

I I'm I'm curious about really where you've worked in your career. Has it been more urban environments or rural environments? And and really I'm I'm trying to understand the scale. I know this is at all scales, right? But where have you really been most attracted to?

SPEAKER_00 15:20

More rural, you know, where there aren't really sidewalks and people have maybe eight, one acre parcels. That's mostly where I've worked, but I've also done work in cities. You know, I used to live in the Bay Area. I've done work in San Francisco and and Oakland and Berkeley. People do have have yards.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

There's not a lot of like here's where we can orient the house. It is very much you are stuck in this orientation.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Oh, yeah. That's most common. I mean, it's it was rare that I would actually get to be on the really ground floor because I'm not an architect. Often the designs are kind of a done deal, and I have to work with what what is.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

You know, if somebody wants to come in and really transform a piece of property with with their vision, and maybe it's more of a community scale that we want to put in multiple different buildings. It always seems like a civil engineer gets called in very soon, if not the the architect. They design this thing, and the landscape architect, much less a permaculturalist, is is really far down the line. And by that point, you're just like, well, what what can we do here? And and that's really a question that I've had that's enduring of how do we actually bring a permaculturalist in from the very beginning and how do we actually work as a team on that?

SPEAKER_00 16:42

In the ideal world, it would be brought in at the very beginning during the site planning phase of a new project. That's ideal because, for example, we start with water rather than spreading buildings out all around the landscape, and there's nowhere for the water to flow across the site, you know, clustering buildings. That's also a lot more common now than it used to be. But the whole concept of clustering buildings was not considered, you know, normal. You know, they'd have to be, you know, spreading the houses all over the place, making like, you know, one acre parcels all chink, chrink, shrink, chrink, shrink, and then there's no open space for a farm or a garden or a pond. And also when you're clustering buildings, the infrastructure, you save a lot of money, you know, on wire, copper, pipe, you know, roads. So just economically, both ecologically economical and monetarily economical makes sense to to, for example, cluster buildings if you're doing a development. And that with good design, you're not looking in your neighbor's bathroom window. You know, you can design them so that you you don't you're not aware that you're in a high density development.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah. I think there's there's the clustering aspect and then there's the nesting aspect. And so many people that are trying to do that, they they do make that mistake of, wow, we're we're washing our dishes and we're looking right into somebody's bedroom.

unknown 18:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

Yeah. No, that's it, that's not okay. And that's not good design. I mean, and there's always solutions to those things.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Aaron Powell Well, so how have you found ecological literacy amongst the trades? Has that been increasing over time and and you're finding that the architects and this the designers and the civils are they coming on board? Um, or do you still find some reluctance there?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

I should back up a little bit and say I made a decision years ago that I was only gonna work with people who shared the same values as me. And if they if they didn't find, they can go find someone else. And I was lucky enough to be able to do that. You know, I didn't have to take jobs I didn't want to do. So, and and so a lot of the green architects that I know now, they're they're pretty ecologically literate. I mean, for so many years, it was mostly about energy, energy efficiency, solar, and not so much about water. I think there could be more education with architects and definitely with civil engineers around water. And also putting in where do you put the septic system? That as a landscaper, when you were talking about the me being brought in almost toward the end, that was would drive me nuts. They'd put the septics that plop it right in the middle of everything. And okay, great, we're gonna pay homage to our poop.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Are you on that that curve of like we want to get off a septic if possible and really you know take the sazol to the the gray water and and put in more reclamation ponds and and things like that? Or or do you find we actually really need to work with what is with prevailing technologies around the sewer and the septic?

SPEAKER_00 20:08

I mean, you know, there's the ideal world, and then there's what society now accepts, especially with dealing with sewage. So most engineers are just kind of like out of sight, out of mind. Whatever the cost, they do not want people to come in contact with sewage. And I get it, you know, I agree with that. And what happens when in the flatlands, when you have a big flood, you can't tell me that it is not just full of untreated sewage that's flowing through people's houses, throwing down, flowing down the roads. So I'm all for treating sewage biologically. There's many, many different ways of doing it, everywhere from composting toilets. It's like, why are we spending all this energy purifying water to potable water and then pooping in it? One of my favorite sewage treatment systems is constructed wetlands or on-site wastewater treatment systems, where they're it's going through a biofilter and being treated so that by the time it's being released out of that, it's like lake water. And the pathogens are eaten.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Yeah, finding finding those civil engineers that want to take on constructed wetlands, I'm I'm finding can be a challenge. And and that's why I I've been sitting over here with this question, and I'd love your perspective on it, but it it's like what profession, if you could give them permaculture education and they are a willing receptacle of that, would be the biggest catalyst? Is that landscape designers, civils, politicians, investors, and planners?

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Like there's that, yeah, golly, all of those. I mean, developers, I mean, whoever's calling the shots, people in Power, like policymakers, absolutely. And I really believe that it would be, you know, if I had my in my perfect world, is that all of these professions would be given, not necessarily a full-on permaculture certification training, but cherry-picked the topics that are pertinent to what they need to know. Like if a civil engineer could understand biology, like, and I'm talking basic biology, this is just how microbes work, or or agriculturists, you know, farmers, how biology works. There's an amazing video uh out there that you can buy, I think, for $20. And it's a four-part series called Roots So Deep. And this is having to do with running cattle on land. And it's brilliant because they bring in science. They bring in soil scientists and ornithologists and biologists and people concerned about animal health and hydrologists and all of, you know, all of these scientists doing these comparative studies between conventional, how a lot of ranching is done, and then there's a different way of doing ranching. Some people call it holistic management. It comes with many different words, but it's what some people call it intensive grazing, but you're not using uh, you know, hormones and antibiotics, and you're running cows in a in a more natural way, the way wild herds would run on the landscape. And as a result, the nitrogen in the soil is higher in those at the end, you know, I'd say after a year's study, than they are with people that are feeding tons of urea onto their inner nitrogen fertilizer onto their land. I mean, it's just it just makes so much sense. Production goes up. And uh why and but the but the mystery to me is why are people so hesitant to change? The real crux of it is even though the people doing the more organic, holistic, more productive methods, the more conventional people really had no interest in changing.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

That might be a rhetorical question, but w what's your theories on that?

SPEAKER_00 24:11

I don't know because I'm not that I'm not like that. I am really easy to change. I am a changeable person, so I can change on a dime. I'm not, I have a very different relationship to change than some people. So I'm not a good person to ask that. But I guess they just get, you know, they know what they know and they don't want to, you know, it takes effort and and there's um risk, you know, if you try to do something different, there's risk of failure or risk of loss of some sort, a fear of loss. That's my guess.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah. I always go back to culture. Like we have fashion such a linear culture, linear thinking. And that's the risk. Is it how do you deviate outside of that? If you are going to to adopt a more ecological literacy and into your lifestyle, it's oh, is that a lot of work? Is that is that gonna take a lot of money?

SPEAKER_00 25:08

And oh, that's uh I'm so glad you brought that up because that is the two assumptions people make. They'll they'll they'll make the assumption that it's a lot more work and that it's really a lot more expensive. And the fact is, neither are true. The amount of time I put into my garden compared to how much I put into my lawn, in my garden has been growing and taking up the lawn more and more and more and more and more. You know, once you get it established, it it doesn't really take that much effort.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

Well, the lawn is such an interesting phenomenon, too, because it's it's really a relatively recent phenomenon to have lawns in North America. It was brought over from the British aristocracy and and then really caught fire with post-World War creating creating suburbs. And so it's like, what actually needs to happen within our culture to create that catalyst towards more adoption to get away from that? Like it if it can happen relatively quickly, an inverse reaction can happen as quickly.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Yeah, it came from plantation mentality. You know, how how much stock do you have in terms of animals was an expression of wealth. And so if you had these manicured feels all around your house, that was a very appealing look to people because it represented wealth. And it's carried over to this very day, lawns and it's what's kind of tidy and what's acceptable and what's organized and very boring, really. When I go out to my garden, I'm looking at it right now, there's a window in front of me, and there's just bees and butterflies and birds everywhere. If you put in like a little pond, you know, water is a big attract and start actually planting pollinator plants, most of our food and aromatic herbs are pollinated plants, pollinators love them. You start creating this magic ecosystem in your garden in the suburbs or in the city, your garden becomes like the hotbed of life. It's really exciting. I did that in a in a suburb. It was a preschool. We put in a little pond and did, you know, native plants. And, you know, it wasn't so much of a food garden as it was a habitat garden. But there were more birds there than, you know, I'm sitting out there about 10 o'clock in the morning one morning, and just the amount of birds that came in, and it was a postage stamp, very small, probably 200 square feet garden, little tiny thing.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

It's incredible to create little islands like that. We've even seen people adopt, you know, just neighbors passing by. What have you done here? This is amazing. And then you see it a couple houses down. They they do the same thing or they start start that journey. And it's funny to watch that ripple effect. And I I wanted to touch on something real quick just around the concept of genuine wealth. If we redefine what this means and and really starting to look at the intersection between the exploding rates of disease and cancers and Hodgkin's lymphoma, and we start to put it together, that that pristine landscape that you're looking at at your front door and that convenience culture that we have, at what point does society become so overt that we cannot ignore this anymore? And that we have to make that shift.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

I've been praying for that day for 40 years. Um I don't know. I mean, that's again, it's like, how are people going to connect the dots between the simplification of our lives and disease, for example? It's kind of a biological fact that when you have a lot of biodiversity, this can be applied not only in a garden, but it can be applied in your life. Like if you're doing the same thing day in, day out, day in, day out, or if you have one job or one skill, say, and something falls through, what are you going to fall back on? You know, once upon a time, and uh most people had a garden. You know, most people had land. And like during the depression, when the whole economy collapsed, they could go back to their gardens.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

I've spent a lot of years internationally for work, and it and it's so funny to actually come back to the United States and to hear these sentiments around, you know, gardening is a luxury that is it is unattainable whenever the paradigm around the world that I have been used to is this is a necessity. And uh, you know, I we've been to to some of the quote unquote poorest parts of of the world. And what does strike me is how much beauty in life can come from those places. My first foray internationally was in Peace Corps in a country called Moldova. And it was like you definitely had a garden. You were like if you didn't have that, you would be considered the weird one in in the neighborhood or in the village. And that's the interesting thing is like, how do we make that adoption and and really move from, you know, that perception of permaculture being it's messy, it's anti-capitalistic, it, you know, we it's not in my aesthetic value, and really shift into that abundance and prosperity mindset.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

This is another kind of misconception that I want to address is that a permaculture garden doesn't have to be messy. My garden is in my front yard, and I am in the tidy, perfect little suburban place where I live now. And my neighbors love my garden. It's very tidy. I mean, but it's it's got a lot going on. But it's no, things are trimmed and it's I made I do that on purpose because I wanted to appeal to suburbanites. You know, if you're trying to sell an idea, you've got to make it beautiful. And that was another thing I think I was part of transforming that actually in my career was the idea of making permaculture gardens beautiful. Because I I do remember some of the early permaculture, and it was these guys that really had didn't they didn't have a landscape background or a garden design background. They were just like sticks and mulch and stuff and things, and they were interested in productivity, but they weren't really interested in how it looked. And uh I I like beauty.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

My brother-in-law and his former girlfriend, they really fell into the rabbit hole of permaculture and one day brought in 6,000 pounds of busted up concrete somewhere and and tried to build this huge herb spiral in our backyard. And like I was having that moment of like, we can't do this. We cannot have this here.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

But on the other hand, you know, I have some friends that live in the suburbs and they weren't used, they didn't do an herb spiral, but they did a retaining wall out of what we call herbanite out of concrete, and they stacked that. And what the guy did, he trimmed up the edges of the concrete. So by the time he was done with it, it looked like those expensive, you know, retaining wall things that you buy, you know, those blocks that you buy. All of these things, I think the biggest thing, whether it's we're talking about cattle ranching, we're talking about logging, we're talking about garden design or execution of a productive sort of permaculture garden. It's how it's done is really what it's about. Like you can regenerate old growth meadows with cows if you run them the right way.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

Yeah, much of my world is spent around return on investment. It's amazing to me that we're now making that shift to understand more of the full cost accounting and a long life cycle of accounting to realize that if you're not accounting for the externalities and you're just indexing and trying to optimize for profit, uh, you can no longer stand in a defensible position to tell me that the conventional methods of the last 70 years are the most profitable, period.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Oh, they've they've discovered that. Well, with logging, like they did that. They clear cut all of this, and then in 50 years and sprayed the other things, the DDT spraying of all the broadleaf deciduous plants, the nitrogen fixers, the alders, the oak trees, they're killing them. And at the end of the day, when they harvest their wood, it's this pithy, terrible lumber. And as a result, even now today, you cannot buy lumber like you could when I was a child in terms of quality of the quality of the wood. Because they haven't been taking care of the forest. And now the good news is the industry has the information about how to really think about forest health first. Because if you look at that, your productivity will automatically go up.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

So in in those circumstances, Penny, it's funny was I I find I love going scale jumping. But for this question, you know, I think that larger landholdings, especially farms that have adopted more regenerative practices that are turning that corner in profitability, you can actually value that. That does show up as both an intrinsic and an ecological value, and it can translate into serious financial value. But if we if we actually go down in scale towards the home level again, one of the things that that has killed me working within residential real estate over my career is seeing people rip out the intelligence and the designs that they've installed, thinking that the next person that comes along won't recognize that value. It will be too much to maintain. And this is where I really have a thing against realtors is them actually giving their clients the advice of nobody's gonna want what you just put in over the last 15 or 20 years. You need to rip that out. And I'm curious like how you see that conversation around value and around thinking through that people do move or they properties do need to get sold. Do you think that buyers are really interested in permaculture design and seeing the intrinsic value of it? Or do you still think that we've got the culture of I don't know about that?

SPEAKER_00 35:59

Well, that's an interesting question. Most people think permaculture is about food, but it's it's not just food. It's also about pollinator gardens, native habitat, medicine, like to be able to walk out your garden and pick tea plants. Most aromatic herbs and teas and native plants require very little maintenance, way less maintenance. The ones that require probably the most maintenance are maybe fruit trees, but a house needs maybe three. You don't need that many fruit trees. And you can have what they call fruit bowl trees, where you have one tree that might have four or five different varieties of plums, or four I have one that has four different varieties of cherries on one tree. So I've been trying to keep it down to a dull roar in terms of quantity. And I think that when you're talking, I think it's more there. That's a common, I believe it's an error when people just overplant. Then when you come in and there's like apples dropping all over the place because you've got like five apple trees, and each apple will produce at least a hundred pounds of apples once they're grown, you know. And what do you need? 500 pounds of apples? Not everybody wants that. So it so if it's kept kept at scale of use, you know, then I can't think of anybody that wouldn't want that.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

This is why I I do think that agriculture is a community act. If you have a community orchard, it becomes so much easier. You know, my one of my neighbors is is like, we should get a cow and have a community cow. And it it's funny because we we have a milkshare with Jahint Bonnie, where you know, we go pick up our milk, and if you want to milk the cow, you can sign up for the rotation. And and I think we're living in this isolated individualistic world because some urban planner designed our our roads and our subdivisions that way. But just imagine what what we could do if we were to really reorient the way that we constructed our our communities so that abundance doesn't become crushing, but it becomes a resource for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

Yeah, I I absolutely agree. And it's fun. You know, when you're doing things and as in a community, it's a lot more fun to go out and prune a bunch of fruit trees when you're doing it together. And at the end of the day, you've accomplished, you know, a lot more than you would by yourself.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

This episode is brought to you by Hamlet Capital, an exciting new endeavor I founded to invest in the future of thriving communities. If you're developing an agrihood or conservation community, you know how complex these projects can be. From land acquisition and master planning to entitlements and securing investment capital, there's a fine line between a stalled-out vision and a thriving built reality. That's where Himlock Capital comes in. We provide development, advisory, and investment solutions that align financial returns with environmental and social impact, helping bring projects to life in a way that's both financially viable and deeply impactful. So if you're working on a project and need guidance or capital, or if you're looking to invest at the intersection between real estate and regenerative agriculture, reach out and let's build something lasting together. Visit us at hamlet. Penny, I know that you've spent some time overseas internationally, and we were kind of hinting at this earlier, but I would love to really get your perspective on where that conversation is internationally as well, particularly within indigenous communities. I spent a year in Gujarat, where Gandhi had his ashram and studied this whole movement around Swadeshi and political economy. And it it is striking how similar this is if you overlay it with permaculture. And I know that it's the same for traditional ecological knowledge within indigenous communities, but I I would love to just really hear what your firsthand experience has been in those communities.

SPEAKER_00 40:25

I'll tell you this one story. I was working in Peru in the Sacred Valley outside of Cusco, outside of Pisac in a little village. A local person organized a permaculture training. And we gave scholarships to the Quechua farmers who came. Because I was really speaking to them. I mean, it would the course was made up of Quechua farmers, more urban Peruvians, um, expats, and then travelers who were just like cruising it off. It's like a permaculture course on my travels. So it was kind of a fairly diverse group of people. But the first day I said, you know, this this is the Andes, you know, Sagar Valley. And I said, you know what? I said, when I come here, because I'm a guest, I come here and what I see is a climate that is amazing. You know, you've got your apples and pears here, and you've got two hours away, you've got your mangoes and your coconuts and bananas, and then you've got water pouring out of the mountains, this pure water. You've got this glacial-tilt soil. You've got, you're the home of the superfoods, you know, so many of the Andean tuber plants and berries. There's so much highly nutritious food that is native to the Andes. The potato came from the Andes, as we know. But the stories I'm hearing are about poverty and malnutrition. I'm like, because that's what they're saying, you know, and I'm like, what is up with that? And then we went on and did the course, and the Quechua people, they were all kind of in the same group, you know. In a permaculture course, everybody does a design project. And they were doing their design project, but they were all the Quechua speakers were all in the same group just for the language, so they could talk to each other. At the end, they presented their design project to the class, and then they said, you know, Penny, they said, I just want to thank you because we have been colonized so long that we thought we were really poor. And now we know that we have so much because they all have land. They all have gardens, like you said. They don't have access to the same kind of education because a lot of the education they're getting is about spray, spray, spray, you know, plant corn, spray, plant corn, spray. And before I started working down there, the word I got was you can't grow corn without chemicals. It's impossible. And at first I thought, well, that's a bunch of BS. And then I thought, actually, it's probably true because they have destroyed their soil. So what we ended up doing, and it took us two years to do this, but we I can talk all I want. And they'll be like, oh, yeah, right, you know, Americano, whatever. But what we did is we actually grew a beautiful crop of organic corn. And there's a favorite kind of corn, a big kernel corn called Chucco that they like. And we served it to the cooperative. You know, there was a big gathering, and we brought Chicha and a bunch of corn down, and they ate it, and we said, it's organic, there's no chemicals here. So we had to prove it to them. And now there's an organic farmers association. And then and when I I during the pandemic, you know, I got stuck down there. I couldn't leave because they closed the country. And while I was there, the farmers asked me if I would do. Teach them and the first thing I taught them was biology. You know, we were making bucacchi and bio brews and different kinds of tea, like compost teas and worm teas. And and I was just telling them the beauty beauty of biology, and that that is their that is what supports an organic farm. And now I sit on a board of an organization called Sweet Child Peru, where there's they're teaching um the children from the high Andes how to garden organically. And so it's it's happening. I never I never have to go back there again.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

How do you see education coming into the westernized world and other parts of the world? What what are the pathways? And I know that you've done a lot of teaching, but how are people interfacing with that? Is it they go for a residential two-week permaculture design course, or is this coming through schools? What what does it look like? And and what do you think it should look like?

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Yeah, well, that those two questions. Well, prior to the pandemic, you know, permaculture courses were very popular of in-person. You come, or we would do like a year-long course. People come once a month for a year. Uh we had one called Four Seasons Permaculture, and that worked really well because we live within an urban area where people could come out. That was in West Marin and Bolinas. I had a garden called Common Wheel Garden, and we out of there. So we were one hour from San Francisco. So we people could come out for the day and take a course, and it wasn't, you know, a one-hour drive, and that worked really well. Traditionally, it was a two-week intensive where people come and camp or stay, and you get fed and housed or camping sites, and that's just getting so expensive that people can't afford it. So now I teach an online course at a place called Ecoversity, and we're actually going to be going into a new sales cycle. We do two a year, and it's a six-month course, and it's a a combination of live video and and just watching, watching presentations on a video, and then live interactive video. It's a pretty nice that seems to be the format that is becoming more popular. But I think the sweet spot ultimately would be a combination of some online with some in-person. So we could really teach hands-on and do things, not just through videos, but through real contact. That would be my my preference. Yeah. I'd like to see that. And I'd also like to see uh high school kids really need permaculture curriculum in the schools. All all kids need it, but but right now, like there's a lot of kind of programs for elementary school kids, but high school doesn't really have much. And when they get environmental sciences, they're getting species extinction, overpopulation, climate change, ocean collapse, you know, all this stuff. And you know, at the end, you know, you wonder why our youth are so depressed. They don't give any solutions about what to do that we can turn this ship around if we have the political will and knowledge. I think those are the two things that we need. We need to educate people. And you know, we can do it. It doesn't have to be a two-week intensive course. I mean, a th a one-day course could do a lot, a three-day course would do even better.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

But do you think if you were to go back and actually do this over again with Bill Mollison, Hazel, but online, would you be the Penny Livingston that you are today? Would you have had that same career trajectory?

SPEAKER_00 47:54

No, I I think the hands-on was really key. But see, what I did too is every year I would immerse myself in something. And I ended up organizing my own projects because nothing was happening. When I was up at Las Valley, we went to a place called Aprovecho, and I found I saw my first cob house. And cob is made of earth. And everybody else kind of wandered away, and I'm sitting in front of this building going, Are you kidding me? You can build a house out of dirt balls, you know. I was like, that's just amazing. And the house was beautiful. So I ended up teaching at San Francisco Institute of Architecture in in San Francisco, and we organized a workshop called Foundation is a building with earth. And we were doing innovative foundation systems, and we did this hybrid office building, it was 120 round feet. And it has since been legalized by the County of Marin. And I have since been uh appointed unanimously when I lived in Marin County to the Building Appeals Board because of all those buildings, the natural building work that I did. It kind of, you know, quasi-legal, but they they're those buildings are all legal now. So I got really into natural building, and then I got passionate about poop, designing all different kinds of composting toilets and constructed wetlands. I I threw uh the Bioneers community, I got to meet a man named John Todd who could take toxins of all sorts out of water using plants and aquatic microbes and shrimp and snails and stuff. So I've designed a gray water system, I constructed wetlands. I never heard of a constructed wetlands, but I was just using what I knew about biology to design these things. So most of what I did, I did in my own yard, actually. And then I'd invite people over, and they'd we'd we'd pool our money, hire a teacher. That's how we'd built this cob structure. I built the first cob building in California. So it's just a journey of learning and immersing myself. And yeah, organize, find a good teacher, hire them, pay them, and everybody pools their money, and it actually can cover travel costs, pay a teacher, get a model built, teach people. It's a win-win-win-win-win-win situation to organize workshops.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

Incredible. Because you had built up so much intelligence and abundance and Bolinas. How did you end up coming to Whitby Island? I mean, there's this contingent of of the Bolinas folks on the island. And it's like you gotta start all over. And I just I'm trying to wrap my brain around that.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

When I was in Bolinas, I was in a national park. We were working for a nonprofit, and we were located in a national park. You know, at the end of the day, I didn't get, you know, anything out of it other than restoring this garden and creating kind of a permaculture paradise that's still there. It's under the commonweal.org. It's the Institute, uh, Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine, is who's there now. Before that, it was when we were there, it was the Regenerative Design Institute. So Commonweal is a nonprofit that has all these different programs. And one of them is here up in Whidby Island, is Healing Circles Langley, and that's a program of Commonwealth. So the founder of Commonweal uh basically told me when we were getting ready to kind of move on from the garden, I said, you should check out Whidby Island.

SPEAKER_01 51:34

And that's Michael Lerner.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

Yeah. And he he pulled out his iPad right then and there and started showing me real estate. You know, I got here in the nick of time because I there's no way I would be able to afford to buy a house here now. But I got here in 2016 and I bought this beautiful house. It's got a view of the water and it's beautiful garden space and the mountains and the sunrise. And I love my house, and it's in the suburbs, which I hadn't really ever really lived in suburbs before. But um, but it's a it's a different experience, that part of it.

SPEAKER_01 52:12

Penny, we could we could keep going, but I I'm I'm gonna cut us off here. We we don't need to do the Joe Rogan thing and go for three hours. This was an extreme pleasure. Uh it's it's so good to actually put face to name and and learn more about that story. Uh I've had a lot of fun and learned a lot and um hope to to keep going and will certainly I've I actually saw your your program for Thursday night about water. I was like, I'm gonna go to that. What a great program. Uh so it is a pleasure to have you on.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

Well, there's one thing I do want to say about this for people when I'm talking about not being able to afford the house I'm in now. I just want to add one piece is that if you if you are educated, if you have skills, if you have an eye and you can see the diamond in the rough, you can get property, like a fixer-upper type thing. And if you do the work yourself, that's that's one way, or going in with other people into some land. You know, I just want to say that there's there's ways of doing things creatively, even now when real estate prices are what they are. So for those of you who are feeling like hopeless around never owning a place, it's it's not impossible.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

That that's great. I love that we ended, we're we're actually ending there. That has been the pattern that we've done, even on the place that we're at now, of just seeing the diamond in the rough with the 16-foot-high blackberries on several acres and a beat-up small house. And and I think a lot of people are called to be the transformer. And at this day and age, I don't know what it is of just like, oh, wouldn't it be amazing to be able to do that? And and I think you're right, we could go for hours on the amount of people that want to live amongst friends and community or family, and the prohibitions that we have with our zoning to actually allow for that. Uh, but mark my words, that is gonna be a thing of this century that more and more people are gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

I believe so. All right, well, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

Just search Neil Collins. And if my team at Hamlet Capital or Latitude Regenerative Real Estate can help bring your vision to life, whether it's buying or selling a home or developing a community integrated within a farm, do not hesitate to reach out. Let's build something meaningful together, a lot of the money.