An Open Letter and Plea to the Permaculture Community. First of all, I want to thank you, not only for your good efforts, time, and energy but for your caring…your caring not only for this living earth but for the people and the beauty of life.
Thank you. Many of you may know of my work from the example of Flowering Tree in Toby Hemenway’s excellent book Gaia’s Garden and the video 30 Years of Greening the Desert, others from my regenerative community development work with Regenesis. In any case I know that you share my concerns for the degrading condition of the ecological and human communities of our biosphere and I am writing to you to ask for your help. We are at a crisis point, a crossroads and if we are to turn the corner we need to use everything at our disposal to its greatest effect. How to Eat a Wild Rose: Roses for food and medicine. The rose is the 2012 Herb of the Year!
Western Canada is the land of wild roses. If you have a homestead in B.C., you probably have wild roses growing nearby. There are over 100 different varieties of wild roses in North America and BC has 6 of them. Paradigm Shift Urgently Needed In Agriculture - UN Agencies Call for an End to Industrial Agriculture & Food System. A rising chorus from UN agencies on how food security, poverty, gender inequality and climate change can all be addressed by a radical transformation of our agriculture and food system. by Dr Mae-Wan Ho A fully referenced version of this article is posted on ISIS members’ website and is otherwise available for download here.
Agriculture the problem and the solution to climate change Record breaking heat waves sweeping over both hemispheres this summer have put global warming back into the headlines, and with it, the problem of survival under climate change. The most urgent item on the agenda is how to produce food without adding even more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which can also withstand the increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Figure 1: Agriculture & food system contribute 50% of ghg emissions Why small farmers?
Calculus: celebrating the year of the mathematics of planet Earth. Ruth and Liz’s design of our Introduction to Permaculture design courses – 2012. Having completed our PDC we decided that through providing IPD courses we could both embed our own permaculture knowledge, grow a business and teach others (stacking functions).
Coppicing - A Lost Art Revisited - Verge Permaculture. Coppicing has always been interesting to me as a wood production system (fuel, timber) because it uses trees that can be cut perpetually.
In other words, the tree is cut and grows back. This is quite different from the type of forestry we practice here in Canada with spruce, fir, and pine trees. These conifers are cut once and then die. As mentioned in my wood gasification article, if we all moved over to burning wood for heat and power, we would deforest the planet in a matter of years.
Geoff Lawton presents The Permaculture Designers’ Manual (PVP075) Podcast: Play in new window | Download “Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”
Bill Mollison There’s a book… a book that is 576 pages long. It was first published in 1988. The Sun Hive: experimental Natural Beekeeping. Sun Hives are a hive design coming out of Germany and now gathering interest in Britain.
They’re part of the world-wide movement towards ‘apicentric’ beekeeping – beekeeping that prioritizes honeybees firstly as pollinators, with honey production being a secondary goal. The Sun Hive is modeled in part on the traditional European skep hive, and is aimed at creating a hive that maximises colony health. The main thing I love about this hive and the enthusiasm surrounding it is not the hive itself, but the philosophy behind it, that of apicentric beekeeping.
Praxis: Bold as Love: My Guilty Travel Secret. I have a guilty secret.
I recently wrote about one my travel decisions: the decision not to fly. As I explained then, my decision to no longer use air transport was made because I found the environmental impact of aeroplane use to be too high. When I shared that post with friends on Facebook it drew some support, some admiration, some critique and a need in many to justify their own use of aeroplanes. I didn't seek to criticise others, as Bill Mollison wrote 'The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Mark Shepherd's 106 acre permaculture farm in Viola, Wisconsin. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mark Shepard ‘s family permaculture farm in Viola, Wisconsin.
Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees over the last 15 years on his 106 acre farm. Forest Agriculture Enterprises is known for its hazelnut, chestnut, butternut, nut pine and apple produce, scion-wood and value added products. Mark has a lot of wisdom on not only farm operation but also community and staff and intern economics. Permacultureglobal. How we made a garden of edible delights: monoculture to permaculture. Years ago, before our children were born and after two years of searching, my husband Tim and I found a dilapidated flint cottage up a lane on the edge of a semi-rural village in Hampshire.
Its hideous ‘60s back half extension with no foundations was capped by a flat roof in dire need of repair … and the garden was the size of a handkerchief. But it overlooked fields and was near a footpath that led to semi-ancient beech woods and the South Downs Way. Its advantages meant we were in a beautiful location, and its disadvantages meant we could afford to buy it. Our dream of having a bit of the adjoining field at the back of the house to extend the garden soon materialised in 1990 when we were offered the opportunity to buy a part of it. We begged and scraped together the cash and became proud owners of a third of an acre of bare, flinty subsoil that had been degraded by intensive farming and regular exposure to the elements.
EMERSON - ESSAYS - NATURE TEXT. A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. IntroductionChapter I NATUREChapter II COMMODITYChapter III BEAUTYChapter IV LANGUAGEChapter V DISCIPLINEChapter VI IDEALISMChapter VII SPIRITChapter VIII PROSPECTS Introduction Our age is retrospective.
It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Chapter I NATURE To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. 1. 2. 3. TT PermaGarden. Year 1 – 2011 – Phase 1. An Online Reader for the Permaculture Community. Seeds of Permaculture - Tropical Permaculture. Regenerative design. Regenerative design is a process-oriented systems theory based approach to design.
The term "regenerative" describes processes that restore, renew or revitalize their own sources of energy and materials, creating sustainable systems that integrate the needs of society with the integrity of nature. The basis is derived from systems ecology with a closed loop input–output model or a model in which the output is greater than or equal to the input with all outputs viable and all inputs accounted for.
Regenerative design is the biomimicry of ecosystems that provide for all human systems to function as a closed viable ecological economics system for all industry. It parallels ecosystems in that organic (biotic) and synthetic (abiotic) material is not just metabolized but metamorphosed into new viable materials. Ecosystems and regeneratively designed systems are holistic frameworks that seek to create systems that are absolutely waste free. History[edit] During the late 1970s, John T. The Principles of Natural Systems - Birch and Mollison.