Peter Bane
PINA Executive Director
Michigan
Peter Bane has served PINA as a Director, Board Secretary, President, Chair of the Diploma Program Committee, Application Reviewer, and Field Advisor. In October 2018, he stepped off the board to take a part-time staff position as Coordinator for the Board. He holds diplomas in Site Design from PINA, in Media and Communications and in Education from the Permaculture Institute (USA) and from the Permaculture Academy of Britain. From the latter he also holds diplomas in Trusteeship and Community Development. He was presented the Permaculture Community Service Award in 1994 from the Permaculture Institute Australia.
Peter trained in permaculture with Lea Harrison and Max Lindegger in Hawaii in 1990. He went on to organize two more PDCs and advanced training in Design and Education (which he also took) taught by Max and Lea in Hawaii. Then, after moving back to the North American mainland, he began teaching the PDC in Tennessee in 1992, and has taught 100 courses and many shorter workshops in every year since and in territories ranging from Ontario to Chilean Patagonia, from Colorado to Vermont to Florida to Argentina and to Trinidad and Tobago, where he was the first to teach the PDC.
For 25 years, Peter published and often edited Permaculture Activist. He remains editor emeritus with its successor title, Permaculture Design magazine. The author of scores of magazine articles published in the USA, Britain, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, he also wrote the definitive manual for permaculture in North America, The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country.
A founder, officer, site planner, and one-time resident of Earthaven Ecovillage in western North Carolina, Peter has consulted for universities, intentional communities, religious orders, businesses, farmers, and residential land owners in much of the USA and Canada. He is an experienced owner builder, off-grid and solar energy pioneer, and has implemented water catchment, cisterns, ponds, and waste treatment systems at a range of scales. He has served on four non-profit boards in the past 20 years, and contributed the Sustenance chapter to a report commissioned for and adopted by the Bloomington, Indiana Common Council, titled “Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience.” He also authored chapters in two compendia, The Overstory Book (on coppice systems) and The Art of Natural Building (on siting houses).
A frequent conference speaker and radio interviewee in the USA and Canada, Peter has served as a delegate or presenter at three international permaculture convergences, in Nepal (1991), Scandinavia (1993), and Croatia (2005). He made his television debut in Trinidad in 2007.
Peter is a father, grandfather, and farmer living in west Michigan, where he stewards 10 acres of sandy savanna and oak woodlands with his partner Keith Johnson.