Douglas Spurlock

Permaculture Lead

Land steward and living systems designer who leads permaculture at the LAND.

Douglas Spurlock leads permaculture at the LAND. He came to Cañones as a land steward and living systems designer, drawn by the values of the place and by the deep history of the valley it sits in. Doug is a graduate of St. John's College in Santa Fe, where a conversation-based education taught him to listen before he acts. He studied permaculture design through Ecoversity with Penny Livingston and Stephen Brooks, and has worked with arid-land plants at the Desert Botanical Garden in Arizona. His interest lives where land stewardship meets ecological design: places that serve the people who use them and the living systems they belong to. Here that means the orchard and the acequia rows, the chile and saffron trial, the walipini on the south slope of the bowl, and the volunteers and workshops that grow around them. He is happiest doing hard physical work toward a long-term idea, and thinks in decades rather than seasons.