Colorado Permaculture Convergence

This past Sunday the annual Colorado Permaculture Convergence was held here in Denver at The Grow Haus. The Colorado Permaculture Guild organized the event along with hosts, the Grow Haus. Since the convergence was held in Denver, an urban environment, most of the focus seemed to be on urban permaculture. It has taken me a few days to process all the information, and even now I will not be able to tell you all about it in one post. It was really amazing to get together with permaculture people from all over the state of Colorado in order to discuss the present state of permaculture and where we want it to go in the future.

We started the morning off with a beautiful indigenous blessing and burning of sweet grass and sage. This helped to bring a feeling of peace, serenity and purpose to our gathering. In permaculture we are seeking to create environments that are regenerative and mimic the natural eco-systems, it was proper to remind ourselves of the presence of the earth in all of our discussions that day. After the blessing we opened up to a town hall, with long time permaculture practitioners leading the way, voicing their concerns, opinions and ideas about how we should be approaching the current issues we may be coming up against.

There was a common theme among many of the speakers that we need to make more of an effort to turn "consumers back into humans again", which got a laugh a few times but is a very interesting statement, and which also set the tone for the discussions about urban permaculture that followed. Permaculture is at an interesting point in it's existence; it's coming out of obscurity and becoming a path more people are using and interpreting every day. There is a huge movement to go back to more "natural" gardening. Low interference, low maintenance but with high yield and biodiversity is a very appealing gardening strategy, and one that many more are starting to take seriously.

My favorite discussions were about urban permaculture though. Permaculture, when taken in an urban context, is not really about the types of plants, bed arrangements or guilds that work best, but about how we can apply permaculture principles to an urban environment. How can we use the idea of zones in a human culture? The Grow Haus is a non-profit hydroponics facility, located in a "food desert" in Northern Denver. There are no grocery stores for over two miles in any direction, which means the residents of the low income community have no real access to healthy fruits and vegetables. By creating the space and reaching out to the community, the Grow Haus is participating in a zone 1 that will be quite productive in generating food and positivity for the locals. They have programs for the neighborhood youth that teach them how to grow food, leadership principles and community participation, leading to what could be zones 2 and 3, homes and the greater city proper. If we can think of our urban environments in a manner similar to our garden environments we can create places ripe with hope and results. Focusing more on creating sustainable communities and environments will bring the foundations of permaculture to the greater culture.

After the town hall we had lunch and several breakout sessions so we could focus on specific issues. There were quite a few presentations that I wanted to see but since most were held at the same times (four presentations per session) I was not able to. The ones I did attend were green house design, patterns in people care and urban permaculture 101. I will be writing separate blogs for each session as I want to do justice to all the presenters and the information they shared. We came back together at the end of the day for a nice little wrap up and to reconnect to that group solidarity we had at the beginning of the day. It was so refreshing to think about permaculture outside of the garden and into the community at large, definitely gave me lots of ideas to incorporate into our non-profit. Many thanks to all who attended and spoke at this year's convergence, it was quite a dynamic day and I can't wait for next year.