I'm a college student in Rhode Island, working towards a degree in Urban Studies that I'll receive in May 2014. I live in a cooperative house with chickens and a garden and take part in campus and local activism for environmental and social issues.

I took a year off from university and travelled extensively to various permaculture, smallholding, ecovillage, and reforestation projects. It was a crash course in permaculture design, from cold wet Wales to the hot and rocky Haitian drylands. I gained an immense appreciation not only for the permaculture design principles that I saw and used in many of these places, but also for the people and communities I met. To me, permaculture is a way of life. And of course, as Bill says, all the world's problems can be solved in a garden.