Toby Hemenway (April 23, 1952 – December 20, 2016) was an American author and educator who wrote extensively on

permaculture Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principle ...

and

ecological Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

issues. He was the author of ''Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture'' and ''The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience''. He served as an adjunct professor at

Portland State University Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland, Oregon. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the following two decad ...

, Scholar-in-Residence at

Pacific University Pacific University is a private university in Forest Grove, Oregon. Founded in 1849 as the Tualatin Academy, the original Forest Grove campus is west of Portland. The university maintains three other campuses in Eugene, Hillsboro, and Wo ...

, and field director at the Permaculture Institute (USA).

Career

After obtaining a degree in biology from

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

, Hemenway worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

in Seattle, and then at

Immunex Amgen Inc. (formerly Applied Molecular Genetics Inc.) is an American multinational biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. One of the world's largest independent biotechnology companies, Amgen was established in T ...

, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture. A career change followed, and Hemenway and his wife, Kiel, spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in

southern Oregon Southern Oregon is a region of the U.S. state of Oregon south of Lane County and generally west of the Cascade Range, excluding the southern Oregon Coast. Counties include Douglas, Jackson Jackson may refer to: People and fictional charac ...

. He was the editor of ''Permaculture Activist'', a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He moved to

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...

in 2004, and after six years of developing urban sustainability resources there, Hemenway and his wife divided their time between Sebastopol, California and

western Montana Western Montana is the western region of the U.S. state of Montana. The most restrictive definition limits western Montana only to the parts of the state west of the Continental Divide. Other common definitions add in the mountainous areas east ...

. Hemenway died of pancreatic cancer on December 20, 2016.

Publications

* ''Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture'' (2001, ), * ''The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience'' (2015, ),

Lectures

How Permaculture can Save Humanity and the Planet - but not Civilization

Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture

References

External links

Official website

''Gaia's Garden'' book page

''The Permaculture City'' book page
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hemenway, Toby 1952 births 2016 deaths American non-fiction environmental writers Newsletter publishers (people) Pacific University faculty Portland State University faculty Permaculturalists Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences alumni