Alex Penn is an evolutionary ecologist and complexity scientist specialising in integrating scientific and permaculture thinking. She’s also a tutor for our Permaculture design course: Building sustainable communities.
Alex is passionate about taking permaculture design into new fields and has worked on this in areas from enhancing mycorrhizal ecosystems in degraded soil to developing new approaches to managing bacterial infections.
She is currently working on industrial ecology, enhancing sustainability in “ecosystems” of companies exchanging waste products, energy and expertise. She also runs “Community Microbes”, a participatory science project engaging members of the public in experiments to track changes in the soil ecosystems in their own gardens.
In the video below, filmed at TedX Southampton, Alex discusses expanding permaculture to ecosystems of microorganisms.
The next video demonstrates a participatory science project on soil microbiology and our interaction with soil ecosystems.