Alex Penn

Alex is an evoluionary ecologist and complexity scientist specialising in integrating scientific and permaculture thinking. She has been teaching on the permaculture design course since 2002. Specialties include soil ecology and regeneration; ecological principles; woodland ecology and urban design. She 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.