CQUniversity has awarded an Honorary Doctorate to the co-originator of the permaculture concept, David Holmgren, during the launch of the Graduate Diploma in Permaculture Design.
David Holmgren accepts his Honorary Doctorate from CQUniversity Associate Vice-Chancellor (SA region) Professor Drew Dawson.
The event at The Joinery in Adelaide, on 19 April, echoed the launch of the Graduate Certificate program (by South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill) which took place early last year and included the award of an Honorary Doctorate from CQUniversity to the late permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison, accepted on his behalf by Geoff Lawton. This year’s event featured a speech by State MP for Ashford Stephanie Key and also introduced a new David Holmgren book titled RetroSuburbia.
State MP for Ashford, Stephanie Key.
Published by Melliodora, RetroSuburbia highlights changes to our residential landscapes to make them ‘fit for purpose’ before the world slides into energy descent. As author David Holmgren remarks that “the incremental and ongoing retrofit of the built, biological and behavioural domains of the household is recognised by many as the best bet to weather the storms of uncertain times and contribute to a better future for the next generations”. The recent event in Adelaide also enabled a showcase of the first year of the Graduate Certificate in Permaculture Design. It featured presentation of ‘capstone projects’ which have enabled Graduate Certificate students to apply what they have learned to a specific idea. Projects presented by the CQUniversity students ranged from conventional permaculture designs for food production through to the application of permaculture ethics and principles to projects in existing disciplines like the ‘perma-psychology’ project, and permaculture education projects.
Permaculture Design and Sustainability Program Leader Dr Keri Chiveralls congratulates David Holmgren
The projects also included development of proposals for new start-up businesses like ‘Companion Planting’ (a sustainable/regenerative pet memorial service involving pet burial via container gardening) and The Food Print Experience (a food van that sells delicious permaculture food while also providing educational permaculture workshops).
From here. You can read David’s acceptance speech in its entirety, here. Pedro Souza has been kind enough to translate David’s speech into Brazilian Portuguese, which you can read here.
Here is what judge Peter O’Mara had to say about all of the poems entered in this year’s Venie Prize: In such a conjectural, estranged times, this year’s entries arrived, not coincidentally, from a multifarious array of the environmental poetry index — the polemical, the elegiac, the embodied, the observed, the incidental, the expansive, the
Congratulations to Isabella G. Mead for writing the winning poem of the 2024 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, Melt Ice. Here is what judge Tim Loveday had to say about the poem: Melt Ice is a work that speaks back to our colonial inheritance with an acute and painful awareness of how our complicity as
Many thanks to all those who attended the screening of Reading Landscape with David Holmgren at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. Here are some snaps of the night:
Comments