Week 4 MTSE

This week, I have begun my family travels to Hawaii for a destination wedding. With a time difference of six hours, it has been challenging to maintain consistent contact with the other team members, but we have been very active in communicating updates and progress reports on a day-to-day basis. Despite being away, I have been able to progress in some time intensive virtual work that will benefit the project. To learn more about the progress of the team, read here. 

While away, I have been reading heavy literature on all-things permaculture. Sepp Holzer, a very established permaculturist who has made the practice profitable, has a guidebook to how he scaled up his farm and how others can do so. Thus far, I have read through a lot of scientifically heavy informational content that will be helpful to practice at our park space and also to write about on our professional page. The content I am reading will hopefully help to enhance our website and media content and also be good tools for the development of our park. 

I am also in contact with two website designers that are strong-suited in using the WordPress platform. I will be working with them to learn about how to enhance our site aesthetically and also make it much more accessible via search engine platforms through improving our SEO. We will also be working with them to make the page much more user-friendly and readable, since a lot of the content is currently messy and dense for the common reader. 

Last week, we began discussing plans for writing a case study. After speaking with professor Jackson, she sent us several large case studies to learn from and use as models for our own. While I am away, I will continue to read and dissect these, as well as other content I am finding on local policy, community gardens, permaculture, etc. 

Lastly, during midweek the team received a disheartening email from Risk Management mentioning that the future of the Permaculture Park will be demolished. There is no definitive plan or date, but the property will be developed for further use by Lehigh. This is beyond frustrating, especially that Lehigh will be demolishing a student-led initiative that is for learning and community-building. To take away the park it is taking away an educational playground. I am horribly disappointed by hearing this and now we are so uncertain about the future steps we were envisioning to take to enhance the park space. We have been planning for a major redesign by including a pathway. This will require a lot of time, energy, and financial resources in order. However, if the future of the space will be no more, I am sincerely questioning if it is even worth investing all of these resources into the park space. This will be an uphill battle of figuring out the next steps of how we want to further progress with the space and the future of the project as a whole. Perhaps some form of action to petition development of the park can help to preserve the landscape, but the team is uncertain about how we will be progressing with this new information.