Welcome to
Full Circle Collaborative!
Full Circle Collaborative provides professional consulting and educational services to businesses, government entities, non-profits and individuals who are interested in learning about sustainability and/or incorporating sustainable practices into their operations. We also offer edible landscaping services to clients in the Gunnison Valley area.
The primary disciplines we draw on to teach sustainability concepts, develop sustainable solutions and design edible landscapes are biomimicry and permaculture. Both of these disciplines are rooted in the principles of ecology and provide a systems-approach to design that can deliver innovative and elegant solutions that also foster environmental and social stewardship. We call this Holistic Design.
Why Holistic Design, and Why Now?
Healthy societies depend on healthy ecosystems, and today we are seeing the unprecedented unraveling of both. Economic instability, centralization of power, habitat destruction, polluted waterways, cultural inequity…these factors are interrelated and indicate that the way we have been doing things are no longer serving the greater good.
Holistic Design is a problem solving approach that allows us to craft short- and long-term solutions that meet the needs of the business, community, or individual while simultaneously supporting healthy ecosystems and social systems. These benefits simply become the “by-product” of good design.
This is possible because Holistic Design is based in the principles of ecology, so the elegant, dynamic, emergent properties of living systems serve as a model, measure, and mentor for our own design process. The underlying assumption is that because living systems have been thriving on earth for billions of years, in other words, they are sustainable, that by emulating the patterns, principles, and phenomena of these systems our design and behaviors will likewise be poised be sustainable and thrive on earth.
Who Can Use Holistic Design?
Holistic Design is applicable to
- Business strategy
- Operations and production
- Product design
- Site and/or resource development
- Community development
- Home economics
Architects, engineers, industrial designers, administrators, community organizers, gardeners, educators and families can all find value in using holistic design