I grew up on a small organic farm milking cows by hand, and raising most of our food. After a degree in Natural Resources Conservation I started a fly fishing lodge in Labrador, Canada, and built an off-grid solar powered home in central Maine. Some years later I ran a fishing lodge in Western Alaska.

From there I went into teaching Life Science and subsequently have taught in Kuwait, Mongolia, India and now in a small native village in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of Western Alaska.

My wife and I bought our home in Southeast Alaska from the people who had originally homesteaded it. The place is off the road system and only accessible by boat. We have been designing and building our home to be fossil fuel free and implementing Permaculture design principles on the land since 2010. Systems include gravity and roof catchment water, RMH, wood cookstove with water reservoir, humanure toilet, methane biodigester for cooking and compost. Once living there full time we will include chickens, ducks, goats and perhaps pigs.

The area is zone 7b, Sunset Zone 4, and is a temperate rainforest full of salmon, deer, bears, wolves, eagles, halibut, Dungeness crab, Sitka spruce, red and yellow cedar, and more.

SouthEast Alaska Permaculture(SEAP): A Summer of Progress

The Rocket Mass Heater