Permaculture at farm, city, and watershed scale.
Permaculture Perspectives Podcast treats permaculture as practical systems work, from tree crops and biodigesters to city water reuse and bioregional planning. Its recent episodes move between guest conversations, reading reviews, and field-tested questions about food, energy, water, waste, and land stewardship.
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Permaculture Perspectives Podcast presents permaculture as applied ecological design rather than a set of garden tips. Its recent excerpts are full of systems: tree crops, riparian buffers, micro-hydro, biodigesters, anaerobic treatment, compost, perennial plantings, and watershed-scale planning. Andrew Faust appears as the recurring voice, framing interviews through teaching, bioregional thinking, and his book Earth is Our Home. The show often starts from a practical project and expands outward. A conversation about Selva Negra moves through coffee-growing, restaurant waste, composting, water storage, hydroelectric power, cold storage, and grid backup. An agroforestry accelerator session gathers people from regional cohorts and focuses attention on propagation, perennials, food systems, and land-based learning. In another episode, syntropic agriculture becomes a way to talk about fertility accumulation, natural succession, crops, and marketable yields. The show is not afraid of complexity. It assumes that ecological design involves infrastructure, history, labor, ownership, education, and maintenance. Urban design appears through Battery Park, anaerobic digesters, black water, gray water, and questions about retrofitting cities at broader scale. Social access also enters the discussion, especially around who can leave cities, who feels included in ecological communities, and how education reaches underserved populations. Reading episodes add a more reflective register. In the excerpt on The Burning Earth, ecological history sits beside questions of overhunting, extraction, empire, agriculture, meat, and dairy. Guest conversations widen the map through Buzz Ferver, Erik Schellenberg, Adam Lavender, Lee Barnes, Brock Dolman, and Michael Polarski. David Harper also appears in connection with Permaculture Land Trust and shared interviews. The pacing can be conversational and sometimes rambling, but the substance stays anchored in design problems. There is an educator’s patience in the way ideas are connected. There is also a clear preference for regenerative, place-based systems over isolated fixes. The show suits a listener who wants permaculture tied to farms, cities, watersheds, and long-term land care. Its value is the accumulation of lived examples, not a polished beginner’s overview.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants ecological design explained through real projects, infrastructure, land stewardship, and teaching conversations. Best for people comfortable with detailed discussion of permaculture systems rather than quick household tips.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by linking permaculture practice to bioregional planning, urban retrofit, agroforestry, ecological history, and land trust work. It treats design as a whole-system problem involving water, waste, food, energy, access, and long-term fertility.
One of the premier Permaculture teachers and designers in North America with over two decades of experience in the field. His passionate and visionary presentations and curriculum have inspired and motivated teachers and thousands of students since his days as a high school teacher at a open community free school which he graduated from in 86' in Glenmoore, PA. Andrew lived off the grid in West Virginia for 8 years where he designed and built his Permaculture Ph.d homestead, including a 1600 sq ft strawbale house. He moved to Brooklyn in 2007 and has been applying his knowledge to the urban landscape culminating in a Permaculture Design Certification course, with thousands of graduates in NY…
Goldenrod gets a defense, and your tidy tree beds may need a rethink.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded challenge to clean-culture assumptions within a broader case for perennial food systems.
Agroforestry Accelerator with Buzz follows a training conversation on bringing perennial crops into regional food systems, moving from tree-crop propagation to watershed-scale planning and riparian buffers.
A permaculture-minded reading of environmental history makes a measured case for wiser harvesting.
Andrew Faust brings a permaculture lens to Sunil Amrith's The Burning Earth, using the book as a way into extraction, empire, hunting, agriculture, and ecological decline.
A Nicaraguan coffee property shows how compost, water, and energy fit into one practical permaculture-minded system.
Selva Negra, a coffee property in Nicaragua, comes across as a working example of how a farm, hotel, and energy system can be made to support each other.
A grounded conversation about growing crops while natural succession rebuilds fertility.
Eric Schellenberg's conversation ties Black Creek Nursery, tree crops, agroforestry, and permaculture to the core appeal of syntropic methods: crops grown in step with natural succession, so fertility is built rather than mined.
A grounded look at urban retrofit, water reuse, and a more inclusive path for permaculture.
Urban retrofit is framed as both a design challenge and a question of access. The host and Adam Lavender use the Solaire building in Battery Park, where anaerobic digesters treat black water and gray water and the effluent helps irrigate nearby trees, to make water reuse feel…
Practical answers for real garden problems.
Straightforward seasonal beekeeping, minus the waffle.
Slow design for living systems.
Permaculture Perspectives Podcast's "Agroforestry Accelerator With Buzz Ferver" opens with David Harper of Permaculture Land Trust and Andrew Faust welcoming cohorts from North Carolina, Pennsylvania/New Jersey, and New York.
Andrew Faust opens Permaculture Perspectives as a winter reading review, says he is a "lay scholar of history," and places the episode in his northern-hemisphere downtime at 45 degrees latitude.
Selva Negra in Nicaragua is a 450-hectare farm bought in 1974, split between forest, coffee, and other uses from 900 to 1,580 meters above Matagalpa.
Eric Schellenberg describes syntropic agroforestry as a way to grow crops during natural succession, and he says one cacao system reached six times a conventional neighbor's yield on the same soil.
Permaculture Perspectives uses Battery Park’s Solaire building to argue that urban retrofit design can turn black water and gray water into usable resources.
An interview with Lee Barnes discussing his background in permaculture, his work in the southeastern US, and his bioregional perspective.
Andrew Faust interviews Brock Dolman about watershed-scale permaculture master planning and the roots of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.
Andrew Faust interviews Michael Pilarski, a longtime leader in permaculture design and restoration forestry in the Pacific Northwest.
Andrew Faust interviews Mark Lakeman about his work in permaculture, placemaking, and community design, including the City Repair Project and Village Building Convergence.
Andrew Faust discusses the inappropriate placement of solar arrays on historic farmland in the Rondout Watershed, contrasting it with permaculture principles.