Episode 4: A Permaculture Path (with André Soares)
The one where a grandfather & permaculture designer points out my “old paradigm” thinking. Click Play above to listen to this seasoned teacher, André Soares, founder of Ecocentro Ipec in Central Brazil, talk with me about:
- his more than 25 years in international permaculture design and teaching
- unlearning “business as usual” thinking
- healthy home design
- the abundance of our planet, coexisting with the inequality between people on different parts of the globe
- being a grandfather
- the view that thriving living systems are true wealth
- how to understand “sustainability”
- and shifting our old paradigms (like mine, where there was such thing as “building from scratch”)
André Soares is a trilingual permaculture designer/teacher and natural builder, and since 1994 has trained more than 7 thousand designers in Brazil, Portugal, Australia and the USA. Co-founder of The Permaculture Institute of Central Queensland and NAG community radio in Australia and Ecocentro Ipec in Central Brazil, a living and learning ecovillage centre that has seeded the Permaculture and Natural building movement in many regions of South America. Andre has received multiple design awards for his work with Ecovila Santa Branca and Boom Festival, a biannual gathering of 50,000 people in Portugal. Andre was the first representative of GEN in Latin America in 1998 and has been recognised since as Social Entrepreneur in three continents.
Check out the international, online Permaculture Design Course André is offering through the Global Ecovillage Network: https://learn.ecovillage.org/course/permaculture-design/