Sustaining Ojai with Connor Jones

Permaculture expert and advocate Connor Jones has been immersed in the Ojai Valley land for decades, building a consulting and education business on permaculture as a way to preserve, protect and flourish in this often dry, harsh environment. A serendipitous encounter with a textbook while still in high school led him into his life's passion, where he is sought out by landowners, students, farmers and others to help them bring their land into a state of flourishing health and diversity. He trained at the one of the world's leading permaculture centers in Australia before returning home to Ojai to implement those ideas as a farmer, researcher and entrepreneur at his East End Eden farm. Some of Connor's more intriguing ideas include "food forests," where the vertical nature of crop allows people to use much less land and water for the amount and quality of the harvest. He believes that we have been for generations looking at humans as apart from their environment and not a part of it. This has led us away from natural solutions that tend to the whole system - sinking rainwater into the aquifer, using herbivores to help in that process and to fertilize the land naturally, building year-round crops into the rotation and having "an abundance mentality." We talked at length about "holistic range management," which was developed decades ago by Rhodesian gamekeeper Allan Savory, who noticed that predators - lions in his case - kept the herds of wildebeests and other herbivores tightly compacted and moving around in high-intensity, short duration grazing, which kept the land vibrant and fruitful. That process has been duplicated at East End Eden farm with goats and herding.  The problem with people and sustainability often is,  "that we have this disassociation with the cycles of nature," Connor says. "We need mutually beneficial relationships with surrounding ecology so it doesn't destroy us and we don't destroy it." You can learn more about Connor and his work at ojaipermaculture.com or on Instagram @eastendeden.  We did not talk about Vittoria Sica's film cycles, Blackbeard or favorite life hacks.