I have lived in Oregon my entire life and have been surrounded by lush greenery, a privilege beyond measure. I grew up camping and hiking and spending a lot of time outside. I was fortunate enough to live in a house with a forest for a yard for three years of my life, which influenced me more than I can put into words. I also spent lots of time in the kitchen with my mother when I was younger.
I became interested in permaculture by accident. But my interest in gardening, plants and off-the-grid living really started when I was 17-18 years old. I was very uptight for a long time, but then I smoked some marijuana and loosened up a lot.
Started to actually think.
The more I thought and the more people I talked with, and smoked weed with, the more perspectives I heard, and the more I realized there was a lot of shady business happening in the world. Far more than I was ever privy to.
My senior year AP Environmental Science class was a immense influence on my thoughts and actions and has shaped me into who I am today. In that class I learned about dead zones, overfishing, pollution of the air and water, monocultures, factory farms, soil erosion and, to a degree, what we were doing to fix it.
Fast forward. I graduated, did a little community college, found culinary school. Did it. Graduated. Realized during culinary school that I don't want to be a line cook my entire life and prefer to garden and see where my food is coming from. Found earthships while researching planting methods, that lead me to permaculture and I been hooked since I read the first wiki page on it.
Right now I am planning to transform a piece of my apartment complexes yard into a few keyhole beds and, with time, change the rest of the apartments yard space into an edible forest (if they will let me, of course). After that I am going to tackle the project of changing wasted sidewalk grass strips into food forests and then transforming neighbors yards into forests. There are too many plain grass yards in my neighborhood, and I want to change that.