Current Board Members
Lee Barnes (Ph.D., Environmental Horticulture) is an experienced naturalist and dedicated environmental and bioregional activist. Lee is a co-founder and current President of ARC. Lee is passionate about linking broader picture Bioregional organization with practical and local Permaculture solutions. Dr. Barnes has wide interests and writes about bioregional awareness; old growth forests; useful plants; regional seed saving; regional agriculture and gardening; and dowsing.
Lee has remained active in supporting Permaculture education since his 1993 PDC graduation. He was a co-founding member of the Eastern Permaculture Teachers Association; editor and publisher of the Permaculture Connection (1993-95); has contributed numerous articles on permaculture useful plants, local weather and microclimate, and subtle site energies revealed by dowsing; and was co-founder of the annual Permaculture Gathering (now in 17th year) in the cool shadow of Mt. Mitchell, Western NC mountains.
Lee is a well-known regional heirloom and medicinal seed saving teacher and advocate, coordinating seed saving exchanges in the Carolinas for the last 15 years. Lee received the Southern Seed Legacy Award in 2001 for his commitment to saving Southern heirloom plants. He is also a strong advocate for the controversial “rewilding” of the critically endangered plant Torreya taxifolia.
Dr. Barnes was a co-editor of the Bioregional Newsletter Katuah Journal, focusing on protection and appreciation of the Southern Appalachian Mountains Bioregion. Lee continues to support bioregional education and was co-facilitator of the 9th Continental Bioregional Congress in 2005 at Earthaven Ecovillage.
Lee “Runs with Rods” has a special interest in Sacred Sites and Earth Energies and remained active in leading and teaching dowsing locally and at the recent national convention of the American Society of Dowsers. He is an experienced professional water well dowser.
Lee visualizes that ARC can assist Permaculture education by supporting practitioners by continuing to empower and enthuse advocates, and promoting more public demonstration sites.
Ann Kreilkamp received her doctorate in philosophy from Boston University in 1972; one year later, she was fired from an experimental college in California as “too experimental.” This launched her peripatetic career.
A student and consultant in astrology for over three decades, Ann also founded and published three experimental magazines, including Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging (1989-2001) and Crone Magazine: Women Coming of Age (2009 — ).
Her award-winning 2007 book, This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation (www.tendrepress.com), documents the exquisite multidimensional process of conscious grieving during her first year as a widow.
After nearly two decades in a 20-foot diameter yurt in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Ann now lives in a small ranch house in Bloomington, Indiana, to which she added a screened front porch, a greenhouse, and an inviting little bench for people who walk her street. She is a co-founder of Transition Bloomington and works with others to transform her Green Acres Neighborhood into a sustainable village.
In December 2008, Ann bought the property next door. Together with neighbors, Indiana University partners, permaculturists, and one of her two sons, they have transformed its sunny side lawn into the award-winning Green Acres Neighborhood Garden (GANG) which functions not only to grow, harvest, and preserve food, but to teach permaculture, to inspire community, and to model the seeds of a gift economy.
Ann’s work to invoke and promote various aspects of permaculture is balanced by continuing philosophical exploration of her own unfolding nature. Her blogs and essays offer rich food for thought in an increasingly paradoxical world that has literally gone mad with unprocessed grief while simultaneously glimpsing the quantum field of eternal presence and infinite possibility.
Viewing this crone phase of her life as that of witness and midwife, Ann asks that she may help to tenderly assist the birth of the new, fragile, inclusive, and joyfully regenerative culture springing up from within the collapse of the old industrial civilization that so tragically separated us from our inner lives, from one another, from the natural world, and from our larger cosmic home.
In early 2011, she started a new website, www.exopermaculture.com : Bridging Above and Below.
Rhonda Baird is a seventh generation Hoosier with particular roots in the forested hills of southern Indiana. Throughout her childhood and early adulthood, Rhonda searched out opportunities to commune with the natural world—and did so as a forager and creative person. Inspired in undergraduate courses such as “Utopian Dreams and Radical Realities” and “1960’s Counter-Culture and Protest,” she took up the work of organizing for change. Her 20’s were a mix of advocacy in a wide variety of contexts: labor, poor urban neighborhoods, forest protection, domestic violence, housing and homelessness with stints in graduate school and raising a family mixed in liberally.
In the next decade she has anchored herself in permaculture work. Today she is a permaculture teacher, principal of Sheltering Hills Design, on the editorial staff for the Permaculture Activist, has served for two years as Director Indiana Forest Alliance, has been involved in Heartwood, has been the originator and lead facilitator of the Bloomington Permaculture Guild, participating in Transition Bloomington, a coordinator of the Simply Living Fair and Midwest Permaculture Convergence, and a teacher in many venues introducing people to permaculture and skills associated with it.
Chronology:
Born in Seymour, IN
Attended Indiana State University on full scholarship and began organizing around environmental and social justice issues.
Worked as a field organizer for the AFL-CIO
Worked as a field organizer for ACORN
Returned to Indiana State University as a Eugene V. Debs Fellow.
Helped to found Indiana Forest Alliance as a formal organization
Worked for six years in the Domestic Violence field-with a focus on community disaster preparedness and housing issues.
Returned to graduate school as a fellow (Indiana University-Religious Studies)
2005 Permaculture Course; began a teaching apprenticeship with Peter Bane
2006 originated the Permaculture Guild
Heartwood/IFA
Editing and Fiber Arts
Children’s permaculture
2010 Simply Living Fair and Midwest Permaculture Convergence
Board Member: D. Andrew "Goodheart" Brown
Chronology and Facts:
MSc UW-SP 2005 Natural Resources; BA Warren Wilson Environmental Studies 1987
Innoculation into Permaculture from Peter Bane & Chuck Marsh @ The Farm in 1994, began teaching as part of their team in 1995. To date, have taught somewhere in the vicinity of 18 - 20 PDC's:
International Consultant (since 1994) for a variety of small plot, sustainable agriculture projects;
Endangered Species Observer (since '91) on sea-turtle and right whale projects; Field Biologist for five seasons in Alaska: Naturalist;
Natural foods teacher & chef;
Broom-maker in the Southern Highland Craft Guild; Home Brewer, Fermenter, and Artisanal Bread baker; and all around Biophile...