The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

I was born 1955 in Germany, where I still live. I come from a family of market gardeners and greengrocers. As a young man I travelled a lot, specially in Europe and Asia. This gave me the insight, that Europeans live in a land of milk and honey and that we should share what we have a lot more than we do.
I am a landscape gardener and social worker for more than 30 years and do these days therapeutic gardening work with mentally ill people.

Around 1989 I came across permaculture when Bill Mollison gave a workshop at the dutch ecoprojekt "de kleine aarde" in Boxtel, NL.
I found, that Bill was giving answers to many of my questions, how our world could be fed and restored at the same time.
After this initiation I did a couple of courses at the European Permaculture Institute, two of my teachers were Margrit and Declan Kennedy.
It was the Permaculture Institute of Europe that gave me my design diploma in 1993. I became member of the Permakultur Institut of Germany and I was its chairman from 2005 to 2007.

Since 1993 I work as a pc consultant and teacher as well as strawbale building advisor all over continental western Europe and also Romania, the Ukraine and Turkey.
I took part in the labour of adapting the fruit forest concept to the cool temperate climate and introduced strawbalebuilding to Germany and the Netherlands as well as to some other european countries. Since 2005 I do research about the production and use of anthropogenic black soil ( terra preta).
At the moment I am building a strawbalehouse for my family, thats within the small pc demonstration project "folxgarden" and work as a consultat in this field of small scale self sufficiency and a low carbon livestyle .