Profile

Andrew Langford here, born 1949, England.

I am one of the two founders of Gaia U and came to do Gaia U after an eclectic career as a permaculture designer, a shoemaker before that, a sometimes jazz musician and, once upon a time, even earlier than that, I had a proper job working in production management in manufacturing industry.

I did make it to college as a mature student in between industry and shoemaking (taking a Diploma in Management Studies and M Degree in Organization Design) and that was when I found out about how distant and irrelevant formal education can sometimes be from the world of projects and work.

This realization strongly shaped my life from then on so when I was ‘found’ by permaculture in 1986 I knew that this was an invitation to go on an action learning adventure of epic proportions. At that time permaculture was very fringe so nobody knew how it would turn out – it all proceeded through improvisation and bootstrapping, a culture of invention (lawlessness?) and creativity which really suited me.

Along with others in the Permaculture Association of Britain I developed an action learning pathway to a Diploma of Applied Permaculture Design that is now a mainstay of permaculture community building in several countries in Europe. The Diploma, initiated in 1993, is a long running strategic means of building capacity and coherence in an emerging, self-organizing network (the permaculture network across the world) that is seeking to find new, post-hierarchical forms of organizing for effectiveness.

My living situations during this period included a 5 year spell in an intentional community – living, working and organizing in such close quarters with a gaggle of other people had its own challenges and membership of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) was one route through which we sought to expand our awareness and also get some support around transforming a stale consensus decision making system. Re-evaluation Counseling was also an important tool for some of us.

Through GEN, in 2004, I met Liora Adler who was a world traveller with La Caravana Arcoiris in Latin America. Liora and I teamed up to take the Diploma system, mentioned above wider and deeper – hence Gaia U, now 13th years old (2 years designing and consulting with peers followed by 11 years of operations).

That about brings us up to date except to mention that over the last 3 years we have been working on a land base project to reconfigure almond growing in California, USA, partly sponsored by Lush Cosmetics. Primary goals are to lessen demand for irrigation water, drawdown large volumes of carbon into the soil, eliminate use of toxic chemicals, reduce harvest dust and have some part of the 1.2 million acres of almond plantations in California provide healthy ecosocial functions. We are at an early stage of this exciting and impactful project as we are about to plant our first experimental orchard on drought hardy rootstocks and using naturally disease resistant top varieties.

I am also working on the Permaculture Colab project, an organization development project initiated at the International Permaculture Convergence in Cuba in 2013. This project seeks to bring added coherence to the world wide practitioner network and Gaia U is a significant player in this work with a current focus on Open Badges for the accrediation of learning centers and for the validation of experiential un/learning.