Geoff Lawton

Who is Geoff Lawton?

Geoff Lawton is one of the people who carried permaculture into the hardest places: into deserts, onto salty soils and into regions where water is scarce and every tree counts. A student of Bill Mollison, he became known worldwide through a small patch of land in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea, where he showed that even barren, salty ground can become a living garden again. His work speaks directly to anyone farming in a dry climate.

What sets him apart is his belief in the power of example. A working demonstration site, he holds, convinces more people than any lecture, because those who see it working go home and build their own.

His path

Lawton was born on 10 December 1954 in Stoke-on-Trent in England and later became an Australian citizen. In the early 1980s he took a Permaculture Design Course with Bill Mollison, and from 1985 he worked as a permaculture consultant, designer and teacher, in the following decades in many countries around the world.

In October 1997 Mollison, who was retiring, asked him to set up and direct a new institute on his Tagari Farm in New South Wales. Over three years Lawton built up the Permaculture Research Institute Australia as a not-for-profit organisation. The institute later moved to Zaytuna Farm in The Channon, New South Wales, where it still teaches and demonstrates permaculture today.

The idea

At the heart of Lawton's work is the conviction that degraded land can be restored by design, even in the driest climates. His tools are those of permaculture, applied with great consistency: harvest every drop of rain, guide water with channels and swales, cover the soil with thick mulch, plant trees and shrubs that give shade and build biomass, and bring animals into the cycle. Step by step a living soil layer forms, the microclimate becomes milder and the land begins to hold water again.

The second part of the idea is teaching. Lawton wants demonstration sites that multiply: places where people can see, touch and learn how it works, and then take the knowledge home to their own villages and farms. That is why his projects always combine practice with courses.

The work

His best-known work is Greening the Desert in Jordan. In 2000 Geoff Lawton and his wife Nadia Lawton began working in the Jordan Valley, in a project funded by a Japanese aid organisation, on dry, salty land. After funding ended, Nadia Lawton founded a Jordanian environmental association and in 2008 started a second site in the Jordan Valley, which became the centre of the project. According to the project, the first site continued to regenerate on its own after it was left.

The results became widely known through films such as Greening the Desert II (2009) and through reporting such as Al Jazeera's in 2011, which described how Lawton was reclaiming about 3,000 square metres of salty land with mulch and irrigation channels, and how people came from Afghanistan, Peru and Ghana to learn there. In 2010 the Permaculture Research Institute received the Humanitarian Water and Food Award in Copenhagen for Greening the Desert; according to the project, it also received the national Energy Globe Award for Jordan in 2015.

Lawton also took part in other dryland projects, among them the Al Baydha project for land restoration in western Saudi Arabia, and since 2019 he has taught a long online version of the Permaculture Design Course.

What became of it

Greening the Desert has become one of the best-known images of permaculture worldwide: a green garden in a brown landscape, not far from the Dead Sea, the lowest point on land. For many people it was their first encounter with the idea that desertification is not a fate but a process that can be reversed. The number of people he has trained is not independently counted; figures of more than 15,000 students are quoted. What is certain is that his courses and films have carried the methods of dryland permaculture into many countries.

What we learn from Geoff Lawton

From Geoff Lawton we learn that dry land is not lost land. Sa Medada is far less extreme than the Jordan Valley, but the long dry summers set the same task: keep every drop of winter rain in the soil and protect the ground from the sun. His order of work, first mulch, ground cover and rainwater harvesting, and only then large plantings, is one we take to heart.

We also learn from his idea of the demonstration site. A place that shows how it works convinces more than any text. That is why we document Project Eden openly, as a place where others can see what we try, what succeeds and what does not yet, and so take something home for their own land.