Serenbe is a model community located half an hour south of Atlanta, Georgia. Bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders, Steve and the others instrumental in this project created a suburban town based around conservation, preservation, and nature connection.

During our conversation today, Steve shares his vision of what one model of sustainable suburbs can look like. This includes the actions, policies, and practices necessary to pull it off.

And that was Steve Nygren. Find out more about him and Serenbe at serenbe.com and the podcast, Serenbe Stories at serenbestories.com.

As I prepare for the end of the year and consider the direction of The Permaculture Podcast in 2021, I’ve been reviewing and typing up my notes from the last ten years of classes, workshops, and interviews. While working on this, one of the recurring themes from my teacher training was that permaculture education should focus on how rather than what. In this way, we look at a  site, design, or solution holistically from the top-down, rather than in a mechanistic one-size-fits-all reductionist fashion.

This was on my mind while editing this episode and that what Serenbe offers is a model that reveals the ways, as Steve shared with us, we can adapt the methods of this project to bring something similar and wholly unique into the world. By looking at what exists, we have a concrete guide to what is possible. So when we engage to preserve or create more green space where we live, we can point to places like Serenbe. We can advocate for transfer development rights to increase, rather than decrease, housing density and the work done in Montgomery County, Maryland or Boulder, Colorado, and discuss whether the holistic or patchwork results of one versus would work best in our community. If we live in an area without a lot of places that allow us to connect to nature, we can work with organizations like The Rodale Institute or Children and Nature Network to adapt our specific place and situation to create a more bountiful, verdant, and integrated world.

In time, what we do today can be an example for others in the years ahead.

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