Bob Randall bio

Bob Randall, PINA Board Secretary
Houston, TX

PDC, Diploma in Teaching, Diploma in Design, Bob has been a food systems activist for more than five decades. After youth in the mid-Atlantic states, he spent two years teaching high school in the rural Nigerian Sahel and followed it up with an MA looking at the food systems there. He then went on to pursue an Ecological Anthropology doctorate from UC Berkeley. For several years, he researched fishing-farming system change in the Basilan Strait between Mindanao and Borneo. He got his doctorate, taught anthropology, and wrote about the Philippine poor, their problem-solving skills, the destructive international economy, and the deteriorating ecosystems caused by it. 

While teaching in several different bioregions, he also began to garden fruits and vegetables and he became active in organic food co-ops in several states and British Columbia.  Just before he moved to Houston in 1979, he read and began applying the Mollison-Holmgren first permaculture book.  In 1987, he quit academic life and became a professional food activist first as a community gardens specialist at a hunger-fighting agency, and then 7 years later as E.D. of a new non-profit: Urban Harvest, Inc. (http://Urbanharvest.org )

He began teaching habitat-friendly organic fruit and vegetable gardening in 1986, and taught aspects of this in PDC’s in the early 1990’s. He met and visited with Bill Mollison three times in the early nineties, and finally completed the PDC in 1996. Since then, he has been a main teacher and facilitator for PDC’s in Houston. Under his 14-year leadership, Urban Harvest grew from nothing to an $800K budget when he retired in 2008.