Current MSc student James Taylor is spreading the beauty of permaculture -- the philosophy of working with nature to create sustainable abundance -- through an online photo gallery.

James writes: About a year ago I set up a site on the photo sharing service Flickr to store and share images of permaculture and other sustainability focused activity around London that I was photographing and engaged in:  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/
 
It has now moved slightly away from its initial remit, and I have been taking pictures outside London and have also featured photographs taken by friends. So there are currently images from Essex, Glasgow, Manchester, Reading, the Big Green Gathering festival in Devon and photographs from “holding actions”, protests and demonstrations, as well as the “alternative structures” it was already depicting. There are now about 1,800 photos in total.

Almost all the photographs on the site are made available for free non-commercial use under a creative commons licence. I am keen to encourage and assist in the reuse of the photographs and I am very open to discuss commercial or other uses which do not fit the bill of the licence. The images are extensively indexed with keywords and geographically tagged in order to make searching easier and are also filed into collections on various topics. Photos from the site have been reused in The Guardian, The Friend (the weekly Quaker journal), Permaculture Works, in material promoting Permaculture courses and on several websites.

Recent statistics showed that the site has just passed 40,000 views in the last 11 months! – so I am hoping that this is helping in some small part to get a sustainability message out to the world and provide a resource activists and other can draw on for their work. I am eager to keep improving the utility and scope of the site, so please feel free to contact me with any content or structuring suggestions: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it