The founders and co-directors of the Regenerative Design Institute, James Stark and Penny Livingston-Stark, recently announced their plans to leave Commonweal Garden in Bolinas. The site has been their home and the base for their permaculture and leadership organization for the last 13 years.
Although they will continue to direct R.D.I. and teach worldwide, the couple is heading to Whidbey Island in Washington State to settle into a different pace of life. “We’re excited about it, and I’m sure a little sad,” Ms. Livingston-Stark said. “Our family is here. But it’s so beautiful up there and we love our new place. We’re off to new adventures.”
Over 6,000 students have participated in R.D.I.’s education programs, whose subjects range from leadership to physical vitality, ecotherapy, animal tracking and, most recently, herbalism.
According to Ms. Livingston-Stark, “[Permaculture] is a design system, basically. People think it’s about gardening tips. But it’s really about ecological literacy—ecological literacy in the realm of how to be a human being. How do we provide for our needs—whether it be food, water, shelter, sanity—in a way that’s regenerative and actually beneficial for the earth? How do we provide more than we take? And what we’ve found is that this is actually doable.”
A Marin native, Ms. Livingston-Stark started off in landscaping and market gardening. (With a laugh, she said she was a “back-to-the-lander. You might’ve heard of them.”) Mr. Stark grew up on a sheep and cattle farm in Eastern Canada, later working in social justice and sustainable design. After meeting in California in the late 1980s, the couple united around a desire to transform the human relationship with the natural environment.
The Starks began developing the backyard of their three-quarter-acre home in Point Reyes with features like a cob cottage and a bread oven, a koi pond that recycles and reuses laundry and bath water, rainwater catchment systems and a permaculture food forest garden. Their home quickly attracted regular herds of people hoping for a tour. Using their backyard as a “living classroom,” they began teaching permaculture classes.
Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren first coined the term “permaculture” in the mid-1970s, referring to the idea of a “permanent agriculture.” Mr. Mollison’s philosophy of “using food and natural resources that are abundant in such a way that we don’t continually destroy life on earth” encompasses energy efficiency, sustainable building, water use and food production. In his 1991 publication, “Introduction to Permaculture,” he wrote: “I think harmony with nature is possible only if we abandon the idea of superiority over the natural world.” Today, there are permaculture demonstration sites, education programs and experts worldwide.
As the demand for their classes grew, the Starks expanded to two other sites, and they founded the Permaculture Institute of Northern California, or PINC.
Then, in 2003, they received a generous offer. Michael Lerner, president and co-founder of Commonweal, invited them to live and work on a 17-acre site near the center, in Bolinas. The spot, Commonweal Garden, had been developed in the late 1970s as an organic farm, but had been largely reclaimed by the wild and its infrastructure lay in disrepair.
Mr. Lerner described meeting the couple as he searched for the next directors of the garden. He had just had a heart attack, and had told them he was feeling fragile.
“My wife, Sharyle Patton, and I drove to Point Reyes and knocked on the gate of the compound that Penny and James had turned into an exquisite permaculture-based home and garden,” he said. “We did talk for a while, and then I went to a lay in a bed of chamomile by a little watercourse in the sun. It felt so healing and peaceful and I knew beyond any doubt that Penny and James should inherit the Commonweal Garden. I knew it in my heart.”
Commonweal supports a dozen different programs in three core fields—health and healing, art and education, and environment and justice. It has a 50-year lease on 60 acres on the southern end of the Point Reyes National Seashore and is home to a retreat center as well as the garden.
With their expansive new site and Commonweal as their primary funder, the Starks founded the Regenerative Design Institute, a nonprofit whose mission was to “serve as a catalyst for a revolution in the way humans related to the natural world.”
“We were doing a lot of other things, like nature awareness, tracking, mentoring, group process, leadership training, and ‘inner work’ for personal growth,” Mr. Stark said. “None of that fit within the standard permaculture curriculum that was taught worldwide by other practitioners. We decided to call our work ‘regenerative design.’ That way, we could retain the brilliance of permaculture, while expanding our vision in other dimensions.”
Lydia Neilson was a student in the first-ever yearlong permaculture design course at R.D.I., which she now co-facilitates. Over her 10 years at the institute, she has watched the garden evolve—from the initial work to establish a small, productive farm to the days when many people lived and worked there, to the current project of downsizing. She said she has enjoyed watching the evolution of the Starks’ interests—which, Ms. Neilson said, invariably manifest as new components of the organization.
“For both of them individually and together, their magic is in the way that they hold space,” Ms. Neilson said. “They’ve really seen me go through a lot of ups and downs in my personal life, and they have held the most beautiful space for me personally. And then I see them also professionally, holding groups where really intense material and emotion is coming forth, and the safety and the humanness they have… It’s love.”
The Starks have historically had different roles within the organization. While she spearheads the permaculture design certificate training and classes that focus on ecology, he focuses on the leadership programs. With a master’s degree in spiritual psychology from the University of Santa Monica, Mr. Stark is primarily interested in exploring how a healthy “inner ecology” can impact one’s work in the world.
The couple admitted, with their usual good humor, that the leadership programs developed organically from one, haunting question. If people were leaving their programs invigorated and ready to create societal change, why weren’t any changes apparent? They said they realized they were attracting a certain kind of individual who was against the grain and, to some degree, alienated from society. In response, they decided they needed to focus on encouraging people to step up as leaders and visionaries.
“If there’s any crisis at the moment, it’s a crisis of imagination,” Mr. Stark said. “Everyone is spending all their time either in denial or panicking about how we’re going to do this, defining all the problems we have. But there isn’t a lot of capacity for people to really hunker down and imagine: What is this world that we want to live in? What is our 500-year plan? What’s the North Star that we want to start moving toward in this generation for future generations to come?”
Permaculture, to him, fundamentally addresses the challenge of the next generation. He said Commonweal Garden is “a nursery for a vision” for people to come out and begin to imagine the world they want to live in.
So what is the vision behind the Starks’ decision to leave their land?
“We can’t assume an eldership role when we are totally overstretched,” he said. “The elder is somebody who has more spaciousness and has done their healing and their inner work and can really devolve, selflessly, the service of the generation that’s coming. This is an opportunity to begin to provide that spaciousness and to dig deeper into being in harmony in the natural world so that we can begin to support the millennials that are coming up. So, I’m totally stoked.”
Whidbey Island is home to two other organizations affiliated with Commonweal, and R.D.I. and the Starks will continue to receive the organization’s support after their move. That move won’t happen until 2018, before which they hope to secure funds to support a management team to maintain Commonweal Garden.
The Starks will be missed. They have not only been leaders through R.D.I.; she co-created an ecological design program at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture and the permaculture program at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and the couple co-founded local groups like the West Marin Growers Group and the Community Land Trust Association of Marin.
In a send-off, Mr. Lerner said: “Permaculture is one of the most beautiful embodiments of our ability to transform the place where we have been planted. Penny and James are prophets of that consciousness. May they be blessed with long and healthy lives of continuing service, and may our friendship and work together endure for many years to come.”