In addition to academic and professional credentials, Mr. Zook has spent more than 25 years living in nature, including long-term residencies in California’s Yosemite National Park, the demanding Sangria de Cristo Mountains of Northern New Mexico, and as a homesteader in Northern California wilderness. For more than a decade as Land Manager for the Lama Foundation, a spiritual community and retreat center North of Taos, NM, Mr. Zook designed and transformed the rugged, semiarid high-altitude site that had been decimated by wildfire into one of beauty and productivity. Using permaculture practices and a lifetime of observation and interpretation of the natural world and how to create human harmony with it, he has built a visible and successful permaculture demonstration and teaching site. It is a model of design integrating the needs, resources and yields of community and nature in proactive and abundant ways with respectful and restorative impacts on the environment.

While at Lama, Mr. Zook implemented large- and small-scale systems including water catchment and storage, food production, orchards, trails, spring water delivery, greywater treatment, natural building siting and integration, and other projects. He was lead permaculture designer and instructor for internationally recognized Build Here Now and Grow Here Now colloquia that brought together hundreds of permaculturists and natural builders from around the world.

In recent years, Mr. Zook has concentrated more than half of each year on building bridges, exchanges and relationships with NGOs and communities in India using permaculture as common language and solutions-oriented methodology. In November of 2004 he taught at the Resilient Villages workshop in Nasik, India, as well as presenting permaculture design in Darjeeling and Rajastan. His continuing work in India has expanded to encompass nearly a dozen workshops and courses plus design and community consulting in Kalimpong, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Darjeeling, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. As a result, there are now ongoing and lasting relationships that support community-directed development of infrastructure, agriculture, and education.

In the winter of 2007/8, as part of the international Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund project to protect endangered plant and animal species as well as critical habitiat, DLR Prerna and Mr. Zook will intiate the creation of a jungle garden cropping system with five villages in the buffer zone of Singalila National Park. This process will involve training villagers about concepts and techniques in creating this cropping pattern and than over the next three years Prerna and Mr. Zook will provide technical and material support as the villagers themselves design and create the jungle garden. Through this project these human settlements will become more fully integrate with their natural environment and ecosystem in such a way to support threatened and endangered species while also providing fuel, food, fodder, medicine, craft material, and income for these communities.

Another on going project is quality of life improvement for tea workers. Tea Producers of India has contracted with DLR Prerna and Mr Zook to provide trainings and support for workers on their six tea estates. Through these trainings workers will learn about, and implement in their home villages, water cycling and treatment, integrating human waste into the environment, compact productive cropping patterns, appropriate technologies, and general, functional understandings of life systems and how to sustainably interact with them. From this the villagers will improve their quality of life with healthier food, a cleaner environment, lower disease rates (especially malaria), etc.

In summer of 2008 the design process for a 16 acre demonstration site was initiated. This site, located southeast of kalimpong in the darjeeling district, will have several focuses, from education and training to preservation of traditional knowledge and systems. It will both serve and support the local communities, as well as investigate and create sustainable models relevant to our changing global situations. Mr Zook is project director and lead designer on this project.,

Currently Mr. Zook accepts one or two apprentices a year.

Mr. Zook is a graduate of Sonoma State University, from which he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies focused on land restoration, with minors in Biology and Philosophy.

LINKS TO WEB VIDEOS OF RICO:

http://blip.tv/file/264758
http://dharmadogpictures.blip.tv/file/166600/
http://www.current.tv/watch/1829502?list=newVidsByProducer&filterone=5751&fi
ltertwo=-1&sid=1829502&fr=13
http://www.current.tv/watch/1983882?s1=newVids&list=newVidsByProducer&filter
one=0&filtertwo=0&sid=1983882&fr=12