Whole Systems Design, LLC

03/26/2025

Excited to be rolling this out after two years of hard work producing it...
https://pond-masterclass.wholesystemsdesign.com/sign-up

01/20/2025

Have gotten a lot of questions over the years as to how mead and cider process and this interview gets at many of them...

My guest for this episode is Ben Falk. If you don’t know Ben, he’s the author of The Resilient Farm and Homestead, 20 Years of Permaculture and Whole Systems Design, which I would describe as THE homesteading manual and is the result of decades of Ben’s life in Vermont designing, implementing,...

12/30/2024

Permaculturing computing?

Watch every episodes ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjonesAnjan Katta is the founder and CEO of Daylight Computer.SPONSORShttps://a...

11/21/2024

https://youtu.be/xbBdIG--b58?si=XykTeNbg0Gr7lnwX

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison journeys with the UN World Food Programme to the country of Niger in the African Sahel to see an innovative land reco...

11/12/2024

As we head into moderate drought over the past few weeks it's been a great time to find and harvest water. One of the new springs and pond sites I just developed - almost filled in two weeks from a spring (probably a new spring) - the result of storing water uphill for the past 10+ years. Very grateful to have new ponds filling from pure spring water during a drought. When it's wet look for dry ground, when it's dry find and store water.

10/04/2024

This lady and her husband had just made it down the mountain and her heart needed some mule love. She said it was the first time she had cried. What Apache did for this woman in just allowing her to release those pent up emotions, is something no human could have provided! ❤️🇺🇸

06/29/2024

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

George Orwell, 1984

05/01/2024

The lack of interest by nations, international "health" orgs and the like in even reflecting on, exploring and doing a serious debrief on what of the responses may have worked and what may have only exacerbated harm should tell us all we need to know about the legitimacy of both the ad-hoc approaches and those mandating them.

Luckily a few smaller orgs have been looking into this most important of questions and finding things like shown below. TLDR Clif notes: Lockdowns have caused at least 5x as much harm as the virus itself by this point in time (which is a fraction of the long tail harm compounding from the affects of destroying so many small businesses and increasing poverty more than was ever accomplished previously in such a short span of time).

"Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, “
Our findings are also in line with Allen's (2021) conclusion: “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid- 19 deaths.” Poeschl and Larsen (2021) conclude that “interventions are generally effective ininfluenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to
Reports from the 1918dramatically reduce transmission [...] In Edmonton, Canada, isolation and quarantine wereinstituted; public meetings were banned; schools, churches, colleges, theaters, and other publicgathering places were closed; and business hours were restricted without obvious impact on the epidemic.”
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mitigating COVID-19 spread”. But, 9 of the 43 (21%) results they review find “no or uncertain association” between lockdowns and the spread of COVID-19, suggesting that evidence from that own study contradicts their conclusion."

Another study:
"The cost-benefit analysis is shown in Table 6, finding on balance the lockdowns cost a minimum of 5X more WELLBY than they save, and more realistically, cost 50–87X more. Importantly, this cost does not include the collateral damage discussed above (from disrupted healthcare services, disrupted education, famine, social unrest, violence, and su***de) nor the major effect of loneliness and unemployment on lifespan and disease. Frijters and Krekel have estimated that “the [infection] fatality rate should be about 7.8% to break-even and make a radical containment and eradication policy worthwhile, presuming that would actually eliminate the disease (page 422)” (180). A similar cost-benefit analysis for Canada is shown in Supplementary Table 5, with the cost at least 10X higher for lockdowns than the benefit. A different analysis for Australia is shown in Table 7, estimating the minimum cost is 6.6X higher than the benefit of lockdown (181, 182). "

04/30/2024

In my recent piece, ‘Genetically Engineered Armageddon’ I used a tale about technology gone wrong in the agriculture domain more familiar to permies, ecological farmers and food sovereignty activists, and asked a series of questions about how we might have responded when faced with such a challe...

02/24/2024

02/22/2024

"My point is not that women should get back into the kitchen: it is that we all should. Modernity prised the men away from the home first, as the industrial revolution broke their cottage industries and swept them into the factories and mines, where their brute strength could be useful. Later the women, who had been mostly left to tend the home single-handedly, were subject to the same process. The needs of business were sold to both sexes as a project of “liberation” from home, family and place."

The reason this happened is clear enough. Making a home requires both men and women to sacrifice their own desires for that of the wider family — but this kind of sacrifice does not feed the monster. Only by unmooring the human being from his or her roots in community and place can the emancipated individual consumer and self-creator be born"

Our dysfunctional society must return to the hearth

01/24/2024

One thing people don’t commonly think about when planting trees is how they will storyify their home place. How they will embed themselves into their habitat by adding living anchors between past and present. I gaze out from the bathroom at this this black locust and recall when it was part of a small nursery I had there for a few years. Then one spring we moved the potted trees but the locust had grown through the pot attaching itself to the ground. I was going to cut it down, since in my mind I hadn’t planned to plant a tree there (so it wasn’t the “right spot”). But said something to the affect of “that’s an ok place for a tree, no?” We both decided it wanted to be there badly and also that it could be nice shade out the kitchen door on a hot day. And that it would be a nice slackline anchor eventually with the hemlock nearby. So we left it. Now it’s a beauty that is beefy enough for the slackline and serves as a nice end of driveway marker. So much so that our plow guy backed up into the other day. He then came out looking at his precious truck and yelled “this place is a damn hellhole!” at my wife. There are many reasons that when you’re wondering “if I should plant a tree here” the answer is always yes.

01/12/2024

Shipping in the coming week to two! Special offer up for the next five days too.

https://mailchi.mp/wholesystemsdesign/rfh-pre-launch?fbclid=IwAR3FPQ8Wrp5nStNarGBCQsgcGUxGSxODOV3_5z3NXszI0XrcH4_-TmkpFZ8

I am excited to announce that after 11 years, the revised and expanded edition of the Resilient Farm and Homestead is available for pre-order right now.

01/05/2024

Early bird still open for another few weeks and course is until filled...
https://www.wholesystemsdesign.com/permaculture-design-course

12/22/2023

Thanks for the input on the cover folks - we finalized it some weeks ago and the book will be on shelves within about 3-4 weeks from now...

10/17/2023

Going through some photos for the new book cover.. What are folks favorites?