How a Product Manager in Japan Is Rethinking Sustainability — One Closed Loop at a Time

In 2016, while living in Ireland, Paul McCrodden and his wife visited a friend in London who volunteered at a community garden. The friend's partner had a permaculture qualification, regularly advised the garden's organizers and was, as McCrodden would later put it, intriguing in a way that stuck.

That encounter planted something. A few years and one international move later, McCrodden — a Product Manager at X-Team for over six years — found himself buying land in Japan, completing a two-year Permaculture Design Certificate and applying the same holistic-thinking muscle he uses at work to the food, energy and waste systems of his family's daily life.

In this story, McCrodden explains what permaculture actually is, how a design philosophy rooted in indigenous land management became a decision-making framework for modern family life and why he believes small, slow changes — not sweeping overnight fixes — are the only path toward a sustainable future.

From Indigenous Land Practices to Holistic Design

Permaculture, McCrodden explains, didn't start with a trend. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term in the mid-1970s as a response to industrialized agriculture — the monoculture model of mass-planting single-species crops. Mollison studied indigenous cultures that had, as McCrodden's own course mentor phrased it, "made a pact with nature," and distilled their land management techniques into a teachable system.

But the word has grown well beyond its agricultural roots. "It now represents not just permanent agriculture but permanent culture as well," McCrodden says. "It's not just about plant crops. It's about creating ecological design systems for sustainable living in general."

At its core, that means two things: growing your own food and living more sustainably, and building spaces and communities designed to sustain and regenerate rather than extract and deplete. McCrodden encountered those ideas in London, deepened them when his wife Miki enrolled in an introductory permaculture and sustainability course in Shalom, Nagano, and formalized them when he read Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden — a practical overview of permaculture at small scale — before enrolling in his own certification program.

The course he chose was a two-year Permaculture Design Certificate offered by the Permaculture Women's Guild, a double certification that bundled in Advanced Social Systems Design. It was delivered entirely online, taught by an all-women faculty of experienced permaculturists. "I put more time into it than I did for my Master's Degree," he says, "but I got more out of it too." His project presentation shows the depth of what he built. His kids, he adds, were the real motivation — the knowledge felt like something that would shape the trajectory of their family for the long haul.

Closing the Loop at Home

The concepts McCrodden absorbed in the classroom are now woven into the texture of everyday life on the property in Japan. His family composts food scraps and garden waste, turning it into the fertilizer that feeds a home-scale farm where they grow perennial plants, annual vegetables and fruit trees. They catch rainwater to irrigate the garden. Scrap wood fuels the woodstove that heats the house in winter.

The home itself makes partial use of passive solar design. The family tracks their "food miles" — the distance their food travels before it reaches the table — and tries to shrink them by growing their own produce and buying local organic goods when they can. They operate around five guiding principles: refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle — though McCrodden is quick to add that pragmatism matters as much as principle.

"Plastic packaging is crazy in Japan, one of the worst countries in the world," he says, "so it can become really draining to be too strict about the 5 Rs. You have to pick your battles in the land of excess packaging."

That tension between ideal and achievable is something McCrodden leans into rather than away from. "It's a lot of small lifestyle changes that aim to reduce the negative impact and increase the positive impact you make to the local and even the global ecosystem," he says. "We're far from perfect; it's always a work in progress."

The certification also influenced his approach to his day job. He drew on permaculture methods to shape holistic product decisions at X-Team — finding that frameworks designed for ecological systems translated surprisingly well to product thinking. He now recommends the one-year course to anyone who can make space for it.

The Hardest Question — and the Most Honest Answer

When the conversation turns to what any one person can do for the planet, McCrodden resists the reflex toward easy prescriptions. The most useful question, he suggests, may not be "What should I do?" but a harder one: "How are we not taking care of the planet right now?"

The journey begins with wanting to make a conscious change — and then learning to ask new questions. "Does that make sense?" "Is that the only way we can do things?" Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares, the three ethics of permaculture, become a lens for evaluating nearly any decision.

McCrodden does hold one conviction firmly. "Personally, what I think matters most is that we work toward ending our connection to industrialized animal agriculture," he says. The overdependence on meat, fish and dairy products from industrialized systems breaks all three permaculture ethics, he argues — it damages the Earth, harms the health of its inhabitants and mortgages the future. His answer is a collective shift toward plant-based diets, with regenerative farming methods available for those who still want to supplement with animal products.

But he holds that view without insisting it be everyone's entry point. Whatever the cause, whatever the change, the permaculture path stays the same. "Permaculture is the path of small, slow solutions that make a real, permanent culture," he says. "So empower yourself and, in the words of X-Team, just Keep Moving Forward."

For McCrodden, the deepest reward isn't any single practice or certification — it's the sense that his family is living in deliberate relationship with their land and their community, building something that the next generation can actually use.

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