Albert Bates is author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook and 14 other books on energy, environment and history, including Climate in Crisis (1990) and The Post Petroleum Survival Guide (2006). A former environmental and civil rights lawyer, he has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and written a number of legislative acts. He shared the Right Livelihood Award in 1980 for his work on the steering committee of Plenty, working to preserve the culture of indigenous peoples in the Americas. A co-founder and past president and chairman of the Global Ecovillage Network, he is presently one of GEN’s representatives to the UN, where the organization has achieved consultative status. When not inventing fuel wringers for algae or pyrolizing cookstoves at The Farm Ecovillage Training Center, he teaches permaculture, village design and natural building and is a special advisor for Gaia University. From 2007 to 2010 he traveled in Amazon region, the US midwest, and elsewhere to study terra preta soils, and in 2009 provided the first full semester course on carbon farming. His latest book, The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change, was published in 2010 by New Society Publishers. He also co-wrote, with Toby Hemenway, the chapter on permaculture for State of the World 2010. Albert teaches permaculture, transition and advanced village design frequently in the USA, Mexico, Belize, Ireland, Sweden and Estonia, blogs at http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com and tweets @peaksurfer.

August on the Emerald Isle

Permaculture design and cool living in Ireland - learn how to take us back to the Holocene from which we came

Koreen Brennan joins us in Belize

Get Your Food from a Firehose

We have been delving into the dirty secret behind our food, which is that it comes from bacteria, primarily, with considerable assistance from a social network of fungi, nematodes, micro-arthropods and soil-dwelling microbes of various descriptions, many

Stoneleigh joins the PDC

Nicole (Stoneleigh) Foss will be getting her permaculture certificate in February at the Maya Mountain Research Farm in Belize.

Nuevo Año 2012

In 2012 being at ETC is like being inventor of a better mousetrap at the onset of a Great Depression.

Spring 2011

Plans for the season

Late Winter 2011

Albert will be leaving the Farm in February to teach in Mexico and Belize and visit Plenty projects in Guatemala before returning to ETC for another season, beginning in April.