An unusual by-product of the global pandemic was that a lot more people ended up becoming gardeners - one study estimated that over 18 million Americans discovered gardening while spending more time at home. This week on Sea Change Radio, we revisit our 2020 discussion with author and sustainability expert Paul Wheaton about his book, Building A Better World In Your Backyard. Wheaton provides us with some innovative ideas on gardening and permaculture while outlining the many benefits of Hugelkultur techniques. We also look at some home efficiency solutions, including warming up our bodies rather than the air in our homes, and the advantages of using a rocket mass heater.

00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability.

00:15 Paul Wheaton (PW) - If you've got an amazing chef, they will find the weeds to be more valuable than your garden plants. And so a chef with a potato and carrots and corn and whatever else is in your regular garden, it seems like they could only go so far with that. But you give them those weeds and you will have something far more amazing to eat.

00:43 Narrator - An unusual by-product of the global pandemic was that a lot more people ended up becoming gardeners - one study estimated that over 18 million Americans discovered gardening while spending more time at home. This week on Sea Change Radio, we revisit our 2020 discussion with author and sustainability expert Paul Wheaton about his book, Building A Better World In Your Backyard. Wheaton provides us with some innovative ideas on gardening and permaculture while outlining the many benefits of Hugelkultur techniques. We also look at some home efficiency solutions, including warming up our bodies rather than the air in our homes, and the advantages of using a rocket mass heater.

01:47 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Paul Wheaton. He's an author and a permaculture expert, and his new book is called Building a Better World in Your Backyard - Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys.” Paul, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

02:01 Paul Wheaton (PW) - Alex, thanks for having me.

02:03 Alex Wise (AW) - Well, this is a pleasure. You are informally known as the Duke of Permaculture. You and your co-author Sean Klassen-Koop have penned a book about maximizing your little space to make a better world. So the opening quote you use in the book is from Frank Zappa – “without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” So what kind of progress do you hope to achieve with this book?

02:32 Paul Wheaton (PW) - I hope that I can solve most of the world's biggest problems and so by deviating from the norm. Of course, as Frank put it so well, I kind of feel like it's a long list of things and and a lot of my frustration, which led to writing. The book came from watching An Inconvenient Truth more than a decade ago, and then Al Gore got to the end of the movie. I mean, he starts the movie off by saying, “ohh man, we're in trouble. Here's the problem.” And at the end of the movie, it's like, “here's what you can do, you know, check your tire pressure, buy this light bulb, things of that nature.” And I kind of felt like that stuff is really, really weak. Then later out came another book by Derek Jensen - “Fifty Ways to Stay in Denial as the World Burns,” and he said if all of the United States, if everybody in America did all the things that Al Gore suggested in his book, it would cut 22% off of our collective carbon footprint and at the same time. We gain our footprint, our collective carbon footprint grows 2% each year. So in 11 years, it would be a wash. That really bothered me also and of course Derrick Jensen goes off in a completely different direction. But those two pieces combined made me feel like we need a better list of recipes we need something that's going to make it so that if people want to make a change at home that it makes 10-20 times more change than that simple recipe book.