I grew up between the suburbia of my parents home, my grand-parents house in a woody area with a great garden and my not to distant living relatives who used to farm and still do some today.

As my father read "Limits to growth" and many other books I became quite familiar with all sorts of problems concerning sustainability very early in my life.
I never had a doubt that there will be a time where I will be able to use my bike to ride on the high-ways. (A little foretaste :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgQ9HqZ49yA)

But as many boys of my generation my ideas of the future where also heavily influenced by Star Trek. When I became older I even learned about Ray Kurzweils Singuarity... Well, to cut a long story short: after I learnt about more details about resources depletion (while I studied chemistry) and about the fallacies of believing in unilateral scientific solutions for problems in general (while I learnt about dynamical systems while I studied bioinformatics) I came to the conclusion that we first have to solve all sorts of problems of sustainability here on earth before we follow stupid pies in the sky.

About 3yrs ago I came across with the ideas of permaculture when I attended a course of Thomas Fischbacher about "Solutions global crisis" and I was instantly set on fire. A few days thereafter I found out the a permaculture teacher, Edouard van Diem (the only one in my town so far) lived just 120m away from my door. Although I spend my life on a bell curve, I was pretty amazed by this coincidence. I joined a permaculture community garden project nearby and started reading and did not stopped it till today. As time goes on I co-stared a garden-sharing initiative in my home town, I co-founded the transition hamburg group (now the transition town network hamburg), I co-initiated a crowd-sourcing project to translate the transition town primer from English to German, I took a course about permaculture gardening and started gardening, I took a course on bee-keeping and started to keep bees, I read a book written by Paul Stamets and began to grew mushrooms, ...

Just in September of 2011 I am proud that I could attend the pre-IPC-PDC with Geoff and Nadia Lawton, Warren Brush, Brad Lancaster and Bill Mollison as well as attending the International Permaculture Conference in Jordan. At the moment I am setting up my own courses with a focus to combine permaculture with thoughts about resilient and (financial) independent living as a prosumer (= producer + consumer) and with entrepreneurship. Although I have to admit that a permaculture future will heavily depend on knowledge and thus education and consulting will always be the most crucial part, I am a little bit dissatisfied with the fact that there are still so few permaculture entrepreneurs. I think we need a future which does not consists of corporations that distroy and some NGOs that try to limit and manage damage - the eco-social businesses of the future have to act in a different way and I am pretty eager to start my own permaculture business.
I just started to set up another permaculture garden (3/4 of an acre) with about 80 fruit trees where I will introduce some aquaculture next year and am engaged in translating 'Transition 2.0' into German.