Scott Horton is a permaculturist, eco-artist and writer living in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California. He is editor of the Permaculture Activist, the oldest periodical on the topic with the largest circulation in the Americas. He teaches annually at The Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, TN, and through the Permaculture Institute of Northern California, Portland Community Colleges, Pacific Northwest College of Art, advanced permaculture at Lama Foundation in Taos, NM, and in Mexico under the auspices of Organi-K and Tierra Viva community. Scott travels to Tlaxcala State in Mexico each year where he is a designer and partner renovating the 16th century Hacienda Santa Barbara Chapultepec to become a rustic eco-inn, permaculture and cultural center for the region.
He has taught permaculture workshops to groups ranging from pre-school students to MBA candidates at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School and from advanced design workshops to natural building with the Punks in the Iztapalapa district of Mexico City. He has studied permaculture, natural building and eco-village design with Penny Livingston-Stark, Alejandra Caballero and the Zopilote Foundation in Mexico and elsewhere. His writings on permaculture, ecology, nature and the arts have been published in recent issues of Ripples Magazine, Britegreen.com, Hopedance, Chamber Music Magazine and others, and he was guest editor of Communities Magazine’s Spring 2005 Art in Community issue.
In his artwork, Scott uses natural materials, patterns and systems in nature to bring human attention to the environment in unusual ways while restoring or creating habitat. His works with seeds, living plants, soil, natural fibers, honey, water, resins, smoke and the interaction/intervention of animals and climate over time prompted Ripples Magazine to call him the “Handyman of the Unseen”. He was a 2003-2004 Artist-in-Residence at Caldera Art and Ecology Center in Sisters, OR, where he created the Center’s first site-specific works and was one of five artists invited to participate in a Caldera group exhibition at Wieden/Kennedy in Portland, OR. He has created site-specific works in California, Oregon and North Carolina and for the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, Telluride Mountain Film Festival, CO; The Farm in Tennessee and in Mexico. His works on paper and fiber are included in private collections in California, Oregon, New Mexico, Wyoming, New York and Mexico. He currently is working on a large-scale, site-specific work in Topanga, CA, integrating indigenous land management practices and sculpture to boost oak trees’ immunity to sudden oak death to be installed in September.
Scott studied musicology at the University of Southern California, where he specialized in medieval polyphonic music, and is a 25-year veteran public relations and marketing consultant to non-profit organizations. He recently closed his consulting practice and moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to the mountains in Southern California to devote full time to walking the talk of practicing permaculture and making art.