Instructor bio (5m 44s)

Hello everybody and welcome to the Permaville Permaculture Design Course online. My name is Brian Newhouse, I’ll be the facilitator of this course and I’m the person who put these videos together in the last few months. In this video, I’ll share a little bit about myself and my motivation for making these videos.

I’m from Atlanta Georgia in the USA and I went to university at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. And for about the last 10 years, I’ve been living in different countries and have been learning different aspects of sustainability.

After college, I went to New Zealand and ended up riding a bicycle around the country and writing a book and making a documentary about the project called bananadog. That’s also the name of my blog that I keep up now (www.bananadog.co)

Later I went into the Peace Corps and for two years I lived in the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa and taught high school drafting, then on the side with another colleague and our students, we built a solar still, a way to clean water. And I made various videos about sustainability with colleagues around town.

After the Peace Corps, I went to a technical school for about six months and later got a job building wind turbines around the US, lived in small towns and was part of the construction process for a lot of these large wind turbine projects. That ended up financially supporting a lot of this experience up until about a year ago.

Later I went to Haiti after the earthquake and helped out with some of the post-earthquake reconstruction efforts with All Hands Volunteers (www.hands.org). We built schools around neighboring communities. Later that year I found myself in Dominican Republic and I was working with a Haitian community there. I started a small organisation called Village12 (www.village12.org) and I was working with volunteers out of SuncampDR (www.suncampdr.com) a local tourists place there, to work with the Haitian community.

We cleaned up trash, we planted gardens, we made these large wall maps, we dug a septic tank, did various projects. Long story short, I ran out of money, then went back to work for six months and later found myself in Asia where I attended a natural building workshop at the Panya Project in Thailand (www.panyaproject.org). I ended up staying at the Panya Project, and we built this large earth brick building, called the sala, it was a community building. We later installed this pond liner for this large pond at the top of the property with a big group of people, and we also built some composting toilets and some water filters there.

I also helped start a project at the Art of Living Ashram in India (www.facebook.com/aolpermaculture), just outside of Bangalore, and along with a group of people we built some gardens and a mud structure and that is still being used for classes today.

At this point I felt confident in my understanding of the practice of permaculture and self-reliant living and I wanted to start facilitating courses. So along with a few other friends, we facilitated a course at the Saelao project in Laos (www.saelaoproject.com) and we did another course at Mango Tree Eco-resort in Nepal (www.mangotree.com.np). And we did two courses at Kailash Akhara in Eastern Thailand (name has since been changed to www.trikaecoresort.com). We did 4 courses in total, we had anywhere from 8-16 people, we simply made a webpage and people signed up. It was really amazing energy from these permaculture courses, certainly the ones we facilitated and other ones as well.

After the last PDC at Kailash Akhara, I went to Auroville (www.auroville.org). Auroville is in South India, it’s a group of about 100 communities doing this type of stuff and I wanted to start a project from the ground up. I found a group of people who had recently gotten there, they rented a piece of land it was an acre, they rented it from a local Indian guy. They later had to leave, but I took the project on from there and along with some volunteers, we installed a garden, we made a kitchen, built some water filters. I had just written a second version of the book Permaville (www.permaville.com/book), I wrote the first version just before I went to Asia. And after writing the second version, I found one of the areas I wanted to learn more about was the microbes, microorganisms. And trying to grow microorganisms. So I sort of innovated a system that uses a bio-char kiln, as well as petri dishes, fertiliser barrels as well as compost tea. Compost tea has shown results in increasing plant health and the speed at which plants grow and things like that and I would like to learn more about if we can increase the microbial content I want to see how much faster we can grow plants and how much healthier the plants could be.

On the side at Magic House (www.magichouse.farm), I wrote the scripts, recorded the audio and recorded about 10 of the videos outside at Magic House. I’ve since returned to the US and recorded the rest of the film using whiteboards to share here with you.

Ultimately I think this course about survival. I’ve been on a quest for a long time to learn how to survive and once I came across permaculture, I found this was sort of an organised field that is about structuring all these things we need to survive. I don’t consider myself an expert in any one of these areas. This is simply one person’s perspective on this field, at this time. Just another voice to add to the conversation of permaculture we are having around the world.

So I very humbly share this course and hope that it can provide something of use for you. And hopefully you know in the future I hope to try to stay in touch with the people who are practicing this field and to try and grow some sort of network, I think could be useful.

Without further ado, thank you for watching, thank you for signing up for the course, and thank you for your time.