Life Designers

These are all people or projects (organized alphabetically) who have been living experiments in life design and chose to pass their knowledge to us.

There are others who have focused on more specialized components of life design like those investigating group facilitation processes, forms of spirituality that incorporate planet-wide interdependence while also providing rituals and ceremony through which people can connect with each other, and the hundreds of  experiments being conducted world-wide in community and sustainable living (e.g., homesteading/back-to-the-land, co-housing, ecovillages.

• Auroville. Ecovillage in India.
• Bill Coperthwaite lived on his homestead in Maine, brought the yurt to America, and left the gift of his book, A Handmade Life. Another excellent book about Bill, A Man Apart, is written by his friends, Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow
  
• Buddha
• Bullock’s Brothers (permaculture on Orcas Island, WA)
• Crystal Waters (Australia, founded in part by David Holmgren, co-founder of Permaculture)
• William Coperthwaite (A Handmade Life; he brought yurts to North America and had a homestead in Maine)
• Ecovillage Findhorn (Scotland)
• Ben Falk (The Resilient Farm and Homestead; video overview of this approach; TEDx video)
• Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage (MO)
• Earthaven Ecovillage (NC)
• Masanobu Fukuoka. One Straw Revolution. Developed his own form of non-tilling permaculture, “do nothing farming”, before the term was coined
• Sepp Holzer. Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture. Using “permaculture” principles before permaculture became a term.
• Hummingbird Ecovillage (NM)
• Marcin Jakubowski works on Open Source Ecology (OSE) to prototype, build, and document for replication the fifty industrial machines needed to create a closed-loop economy, of virtually any scale, with modern comforts.
• Geoff Lawton on Greening the Desert (Jordan)
• Kakwa Ecovillage (Canada)
• Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. The creators of permaculture. David Holmgren at Melliodora (Australia) (1, 2). Blog of Gabriel Engle, an apprentice at Melliodora in 2012.
  
• Helen & Scott Nearing. The Good Life. Homesteading.
• Peter Sellers, a woodworker in England, who talks here about life design.
• PermaEthos: Hire these folks to get your farm permaculturized to profitability and market your products under their brand (video; Wheaton podcasts with them: #1 and #2)
• Dick Proenneke: 30 years in Alaska, highlighted by Alone in the Wilderness (DVD) and One Man’s Wilderness (book)
• Allan Savory (NM): Holistic Management
• Mark Shepard (Restoration Agriculture; 18 years of broad-scale, commercial permaculture in Viola, WI)
• John Seymour (The Self-sufficient Life and How to Live It; homesteading & “High Farming” techniques predating permaculture)
• Willie Smits. Working in Indonesia using social and physical permaculture to create economical and environmentally sustainable villages
• Tamera Peace Village in Portugal. Combining social and physical technologies to model a new culture of one planet thriving.
• Thoreau
• Paul Wheaton (MT; emphasis on community & ongoing, systematic experimentation)