ABSTRACT
The author met Tom in the old oak grove at the bottom of his property. Tom started with fire ecology and ethno-botany, the study of relationships between human beings and plants, a field that can be traced back to Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. He described closed-loop systems, waste repurposing, and how to catch rainwater by building bioswales and small ponds across the land. They created a network of drainage swales and ponds designed to hold water along the hillside and down in the garden during the rainy season. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her husband, Steven Hopp, an environmental studies professor, described the full long-term implications of large-scale industrial, genetically modified and petroleum-driven agriculture. As a recent graduate from the Presidio Green MBA programme in San Francisco, the author's friend had his finger on the pulse of the latest sustainability trends.
