rico zook permaculture design instructor

Permaculture designer, teacher, consultant, planner and land restoration expert Richard Zook is uniquely equipped and experienced to create designs and projects that engender efficient and productive relationships between people and nature. The results of his more than two decades of work have been empowering to communities on two continents, restorative of natural habitats and ecosystems, and inspiring to environmentalists, his students and colleagues.

In addition to academic and professional credentials, Mr. Zook has spent more than 25 years living in nature, including long-term residencies in California’s Yosemite National Park, the demanding Sangria de Cristo Mountains of Northern New Mexico, and as a homesteader in Northern California wilderness. For more than a decade as Land Manager for the Lama Foundation, a spiritual community and retreat center North of Taos, NM, Mr. Zook designed and transformed the rugged, semiarid high-altitude site that had been decimated by wildfire into one of beauty and productivity. Using permaculture practices and a lifetime of observation and interpretation of the natural world and how to create human harmony with it, he has built one of the most visible and successful permaculture demonstration and teaching sites in North America. It is a model of design integrating the needs, resources and yields of community and nature in proactive and abundant ways with respectful and restorative impacts on the environment.

While at Lama, Mr. Zook implemented large- and small-scale systems including water catchment and storage, food production, orchards, trails, spring water delivery, greywater treatment, natural building siting and integration, and other projects. He was lead permaculture designer and instructor for internationally recognized Build Here Now and Grow Here Now colloquia that brought together hundreds of permaculturists and natural builders from around the world.

In recent years, Mr. Zook has concentrated half of each year on building bridges, exchange and relationships with NGOs and communities in India using permaculture as common language and solutions-oriented methodology. In November of 2004 he taught at the Resilient Villages workshop in Nasik, India, as well as presenting permaculture design in Darjeeling and Rajastan. His continuing work in India has expanded to encompass nearly a dozen workshops and courses plus design and community consulting in Kalimpong, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Darjeeling, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, and Bangalore. As a result, there are now ongoing and lasting relationships that support community-directed development of infrastructure, agriculture, and education. 2006-07 saw the expansion of this process with the inauguration of two permaculture demonstration sites; one near Darjeeling at Mineral Springs, a small farmer organic tea cooperative, and the other in south Karnataka state.

In the winter of 2007 Mr. Zook joined the design group Pro.Design, an component of the NGO Pro.Darjeeling.   Currently, in collaboration with DLR Prerna (a Darjeeling NGO) and a private client, he is working to create the first commercially based, market oriented permaculture farm in Western Bengal. In consulting with Pro.Darjeeling he is helping them realize their multi-faceted goals of a sustainable Darjeeling that integrates youth, the arts, societal empowerment, and a healthy, vibrant environment and culture.

Currently Mr. Zook accepts one or two apprentices a year.

Mr. Zook is a graduate of Sonoma State University, from which he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies focused on land restoration, with minors in Biology and Philosophy.

For more information or to contact Mr. Zook please visit his website