About Me:
I'm a permaculture practitioner and lifelong environmental and social justice activist now operating a marketing and consulting company serving progressive nonprofits and socially responsible businesses. I'm also a freelance writer and author. I lived with the Happy Dirt Veggie Patch crew at The Farm at South Mountain in Phoenix from 2002-2006, then briefly, at Terra Sante Village, 20 miles west of Tucson, before relocating to the D.C. area in Sept. 2008. I'm interested in staying in touch with my permie friends in Arizona.
Comments
I won't be a routine blogger, but it will be fun to add a post now and then.
I'm enjoying this new website a lot. The format is engaging; the look is lovely; it's already growing strong; and it's a good design to support expansion. The only thing I don't like is the divvying up of the forums. It's harder to read everyone's posts and I worry that we don't have enough critical mass to keep separate forums lively. If we lose momentum with these forums, I recommend returning to a single forum for primary communications, and using the side forums just for in-depth information sharing among people deeply involved in a particular area.
Meantime, a group of folks have decided to launch a new permaculture listserve using the same Yahoo format we're accustomed to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/azpermaculture
We're calling it the Arizona Permaculture Network. It will no doubt start slow, just as the Phoenix Permaculture Guild's listserve did, and that's okay because the idea is simply to provide a discussion forum for folks who prefer the format we've been using up to now and for folks who want to network statewide instead of just local to Phoenix.
In other news, my Mother's Day gift site (www.idealistgifts.com) was pretty successful and my next step is to make it a year-round green and socially responsible gifts website. I'm looking for partners: copywriters, web geeks, marketing pros, and graphics gurus.
Life at Terra Sante is fun. We had a very nice full moon gathering (we have one every month) and dark moon women's circle (also every month). A lot of our members, woofers and wandering volunteers have left for the summer, so it's getting quiet on the projects front. However, Jennifer's interest in "the hole" has me motivated to do some more digging.
What is the hole?
It's a pit someone started digging in the ground here to conduct gardening experiments with shading and temperature. Time allowing, I plan to move it forward with a few small experiments this summer (provided I don't make my own great escape to cooler climates).
Thanks for the welcome comments!
Amy