About Joel Glanzberg
Playing and working in the farms and forests of Southeastern Pennsylvania and the houses his father built, Joel was steeped early on in natural systems and people working and living in them. The rigors of a self-directed education at St. John’s College honed his thinking and communication skills as well as the ability to work with groups of people. He has been a builder, farmer, teacher, writer, storyteller, naturalist, and permaculturalist for over 30 years.
His early work establishing the site and research behind Flowering Tree Permaculture www.floweringtreepermaculture.org is featured in both Gaia’s Garden and Our Home “Our Home Book”. as well as Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond Vol. 1, and A People’s Ecology, Greg Cajete ed..
Joel is a founding partner of Regenesis Collaborative, www.regenesisgroup.com which came together as an integration between permaculture and Living Systems Thinking technologies. Its founding was a response to the realization that so many of the blocks to implementing Living Systems Design work were not physical, but in people’s understanding and thinking.
Joel’s work with the Tracking Project www.thetrackingproject.org provides another approach to understanding and working with patterns and the natural world, as well as techniques for accessing the minds required. Integrating these three ways of looking, thinking, and working has been the focus of Joel’s work over the last 10 years. The result is the unique approach he calls Pattern Mind.
The importance of bridging disciplines and ways of thinking has led to working with the integration of natural systems and the arts. This has included collaborations with ecological artists Helen and Newton Harrison www.theharrisonstudio.net, Little Globe www.littleglobe.org , and the UMN Land Arts program landarts.unm.edu.
Joel has found that Pattern Based Design requires us to shift our minds to a pattern way of thinking and seeing. Tracking and Living Systems Thinking provide the “mind” needed to see, think, and work in patterns. The triangulation provided by these three perspectives has become his passion. His deep experience in these three realms has fed the development of ways of working with these understandings with diverse groups of people. Joel has come to believe that each of these approaches is powerful in itself. However, the holistic experience of understanding natural patterns viscerally as well as intellectually and intuitively helps to integrate them into our lives and work in an even more powerful and effective way.
