I found permaculture a long way down the road of fighting my wife's cancers (thyroid & melanoma). It allowed me to test my food and soil to prove their safety and quality. I was able to see how I could achieve my vision of living off the land for food and medicine (though we'll never be able to produce our own thyroid replacement hormones). Perhaps if we'd been able to know these things earlier we would have been able to save her thyroid and be free of perpetual testing of her T3 & T4 levels, but we missed that window. We hope our experiences can help others avoid our painful experiences. I could spend a book on this depressing topic, but suffice to say, permaculture gave me hope and a clear set of actions that I could take to change the situation we were in, so we don't have to dwell on the hardships of the past, only the solutions today.

Using Geoff Lawton's online permaculture design course which is endorsed by Permaculture cofounder Bill Mollison, my soils became rich and loamy within only a few months. Generational farmers began paying me to show them how I did what I did. Water retention continued through August despite the drought turning the garden's soil hydrophobic last August. For the first time gardening here I began to get a yield without fences. Permaculture was the missing piece I was looking for all along. Beyond that I also saw that permaculture design applied to the way we organize a business, do a presentation, manage a relationship or design a farm. As a connective design science, it effortlessly explores the overlap between disparate ideas, techniques & technologies to create new solutions to our ever increasing set of new problems. We have a toolkit here to help us weather climate change and invest in a stable future, but we have to take action. We cannot hope for the few thousand dedicated & effective permaculturists to do it all alone; we must all join in the effort and put our shoulders to the wheel. This is the great work of our time as John D. Liu puts it, and we have a chance to take part. Let us start now and never hesitate.

Let us plant trees that we may never eat the fruit thereof everywhere we can.