iPermie! How to Permaculture Your Urban Lifestyle

This is a good-life design guide for
Millennials, Boomers, and Generation X.

Contains strategies, tools, and techniques to help you navigate the cardinal threats
of peak oil, climate instability,
economic irrationality, and political criminality.

iPermie is an almanac of useful information and permaculture self-study guide.

This book is about empowerment. Far too many of us feel powerless in the fact of the gigantic forces at work in this world. We don't understand the power we retain within and we certainly don't want to trust ourselves. This book will help you understand that everything that you need is already within you. Sure, you may need some details, skills, and etc., but you already have the most important things you need for the future. We begin our journey as you and I learn to trust ourselves.

To date, most permaculture work has been identified with particular sites, typically in rural or peri-urban areas. That's fine and important work but going forward we need to pay more attention to how we can live sustainably in the city. That context demands much work with invisible structures – which is permie-speak for organizations, systems, businesses, governments, etc. – that will help us to live more sustainably in the city. If you live in a high rise apartment building, you won't be able to raise all your own food. So structures such as local food cooperatives and farmers markets are basic building blocks of living sustainably in a city.

I have a particular concern for people of low to moderate incomes. There is a definite focus throughout the iPermie text on what people can do to care for the earth, care for people, and have a care for the future without spending big piles of cash they probably don't have. Indeed, besides the sustainability aspects, iPermie could be considered a manual of "champagne living on a beer budget," which is to say, "How to have a great life without spending big piles of cash and going deeply into debt."

Permaculture, as a design system, works every bit as well for people in cities as it does for those in rural areas. It is not primarily about growing food or using perennial plants in landscapes. It is about designing ways to live in accordance with the permaculture ethics, so that we care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future as we design and embrace voluntary limits on consumption and ensure that surplus circulates and does not centralize or concentrate.

More than 1,000 pages, 14 sections, 245 chapters, and 388,000+ words. iPermie is a holistic approach.