Oliver Kellhammer (Permaculture Institute of North America Diplomate and Practicing Member) is an ecological artist, activist and writer who has been a permaculture instructor since the early 1990s. After moving to the west coast from his native Toronto, he founded Cottonwood Gardens in Vancouver, one of Canada’s largest community gardens and public permaculture demonstration facilities as well as the Means of Production biomaterials garden, which produces plant-based materials for the use of artists and craftspeople in an East Vancouver park. Oliver co-taught the permaculture component of the Linnaea Farm Ecological Gardening Program for many years and has lectured worldwide on topics of permaculture, urban ecology, biomaterials and climate change resiliency. Through his botanical interventions and public art projects, he seeks to demonstrate nature’s surprising ability to recover from damage. His work facilitates the processes of environmental regeneration by engaging the botanical and socio-political underpinnings of the landscape and continues to evolve into new forms. Recent projects have focused on cleaning up contaminated soils, reintroducing prehistoric trees onto landscapes damaged by industrial forestry and cataloging the biodiversity of brownfield ecologies. Dividing his time between Cortes Island and New York’s East Village, he lectures on Sustainable Systems at Parsons The New School for Design. His web archive can be found at www.oliverk.org.
