025, Juliana Birnbaum: Sustainable Community

We are living through a time when the entire world is taking a good, hard look at itself. This has given humanity an incredible opportunity to shift focus and choose systems that feed life, that create biological resources, rather than only financial resources. We have a chance to turn away from systems that marginalize, extract, and degrade…and choose what we want to cultivate for ourselves and for future generations.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist and skilled in four languages, Juliana Birnbaum has lived and worked in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Nepal, Costa Rica and Brazil. She is the co-author of Sustainable [R]evolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms and Communities Worldwide and CBD: A Patient’s Guide to Medicinal Cannabis. She is also the mother of two daughters and has attended over 100 births as a doula and assistant midwife. Juliana currently coordinates the Volunteer and Faculty departments at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA.

In this episode…
Juliana’s fascinating background
Far-reaching effects of consumerism
Seeing life through the lens of permaculture
What a sustainable city looks like
How the Coronavirus pandemic is revealing the flaws in our societal structures
The cost of industrial agriculture
Relocalization of food
Relocalization of energy
Co-housing and ecovillage communities
Impact of our diet choices
Force and violence against Life that is inherent in our modern societal structures
De-commodifying humans’ basic needs
The need to develop communication skills that support the sustainable community
 

Resources

Sustainable [R}evolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms and Communities Worldwide

CBD: A Patient’s Guide to Medicinal Cannabis

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken

Mary Oliver

www.cultureofpermaculture.org