Permacultureworks
www.permaculture.org.uk
Special International Edition – May 2015
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Helena Norberg-Hodge • Satish Kumar Joel Salatin • Allan Savory • Vandana Shiva Darren Doherty • Charles Eisenstein John D Liu • Ron Finley • Maddy Harland
DESIGNING THE WORLD WE WANTPermaculture Day 2015: In Support of Soil
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DESIGNING THE WORLD WE WANT: IPCUK
PERMACULTURE DAY 2015: IN SUPPORT OF SOIL!
We have everything we need to create a sustainable world and future. There is a wide range of proven practice: from home to community, farm to watershed.The Permaculture Association is working in Britain and around the world to make a better world for all using nature as our inspiration. There are over 100 LAND demonstration network sites, coordinated research and education including the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design, and a thriving membership of people using permaculture in their everyday lives.Later this year, we are hosting IPCUK: the 12th International Permaculture Convergence and Conference in London, which will bring together leading experts and practitioners from around the world. Together we want to create a vision of a near future society that is caring, sustainable and fair, and explore how we can collectively design strategies and pathways to make it happen.
Before then, we’re collaborating with International Permaculture Day on Sunday 3rd May for a global day of celebration and action in Support of Soil! Healthy soil is vital for life but soils everywhere are under threat. Millennia of mistreating the land has caused huge soil damage and loss, and to raise awareness the United Nations has declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. The good news is that we can restore our soils and, at the same time, solve other global challenges. Read more about the threats to soil and permaculture solutions here.So join us in the call to restore our soils on the 3rd May and become a Soil Supporter! Check out Permaculture Day events near you: www.permacultureday.org
LONDON 2015
InternationalPermaculture
ipcuk.events
Helena Norberg-Hodge localfutures.org
Joel Salatin polyfacefarms.com
Permaculture as a global movement is one of the most important in terms of showing us how we can design the world we want, and for me one of the most important reasons for that is that permaculture is about diversity... We need to be spelling out more clearly the essential, absolutely life essential, importance of diversity and the importance of building design systems that encourage that, that nourish it and that allow basically life to flower.
Watch Helena’s Designing the World We Want video
A group recently touring the farm stood mesmerized by our pigaearators. When we feed hay in the winter, we bed the cattle with a carbonaceous diaper to absorb the 50 pounds of goodies each animal drops per day. As the tour group stood mesmerized watching the pigaearators happily oxygenating the bedding pack, I asked them to meditate on one what if: “What if all the money currently spent in Virginia on chemical fertilizer were instead spent on carbon?” Think of it. The ramifications are profoundly healing. It would stop the stupidity of putting decomposable material in landfills. A carbon-centric economy would build soil at unprecedented rates, which would hold more water, decreasing droughts and floods. Healthier soil would grow more luxuriant plants, which would capture more solar energy, which would require inhaling more carbon dioxide, which would sequester more carbon, which would clean the atmosphere.All that would happen as surely as night follows day if our culture actually acted on what we know about ecology, solar cycles, and healthy soil. Right now we don’t need more research. We just need to do the most simple things, the most basic, obvious, uncontested things. Most of the problems would work themselves out once we did the simplest thing: build the soil with carbon. My, what a novel idea.
Pioneer of the new economy movement
“The world’s most innovative farmer” Time magazine
In this special international edition of Permaculture Works we invite leading voices from the worlds of permaculture, ecology and regenerative culture to share their thoughts on designing the world they want and why they are soil supporters.
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Vandana Shiva navdanya.org
Allan Savory savory.global
I am a supporter of soil because the soil is our supporter. As the ancient Vedas say: “In this handful of soil rests the future of humanity”. If we care for it we have a future and if we destroy it we destroy our own existence. The future is in our hands, it’s in our little bit of soil, let’s take care of it and we could have the biggest revolution the earth has ever witnessed.
Watch Vandana’s Soil Supporter video
Fossil fuel use and agriculture are causing climate change producing carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon and desertification. Roughly half of the pollutants stem from fossil fuels, with the rest and desertification due to agriculture. My fellow scientists believe we have thousands of tools with which to address climate change but we do not. We have technology in its many forms, fire or the concept of resting the land. Only technology enabling us to develop alternative mass energy can end fossil fuel use.Oceans are said to be acidifying. Soil is both the best hope for long-term storage and from which most of agriculture’s contribution to climate change is coming. The global massive soil destruction and desertification occurring today will ensure continuation of climate change even in a post-fossil fuel world. We cannot stop the present soil destruction, regenerate the world’s soils and reverse global desertification, by resting the land, using fire or using any technology even imaginable in science fiction. Only by ending today’s ignorance-based vilification of livestock, rather than the way they are managed, have we any hope of regenerating the world’s soils and reversing desertification. It is no exaggeration to state that the future of civilization as we know it hangs on soil and livestock properly managed.
Eco activist and founder of Navdanya
Holistic Management grasslands pioneer
Charles Eisenstein charleseisenstein.netWhy am I a soil supporter? What an odd question. Only from a profound cultural illness would we even need to ask why we should venerate and protect soil as other cultures do. Thankfully, that illness is healing. We are emerging from a story that said soil is a mere repository of chemicals, an inert medium for growth that might be replaced by technology. We are emerging from a story that held soil, and the professions associated with it, as lowly or dirty. We are emerging from a story that glorified the transcendence of nature. The reasons why I am a soil supporter are becoming obvious to all: that it is the foundation of civilization, that it is a living being, that its health and ours are intimately connected. I am a soil supporter because I am made of soil. I am of the earth. The time has come for us to embrace the truth that we are the soil, and the soil is us.
Watch Charles’ Soil Supporter video produced by Over Grow The System
Author of Sacred Economics
Satish Kumar resurgence.orgThe soil is not a resource for the economy, it is the source of life. Everything comes from the soil and returns to the soil. If we take care of the soil, the soil will take care of us and all our needs. Soil will give us food, wood and water. The soil will hold us and our dwellings on her back yet she is so humble that she always remains under our feet and never on our head. The soil is also called humus, from the same root we get the word human, what a wonderful connection.Humans need to be respectful of humus and practice humility which is also derived from same root. Humility is humidity of the soul. Through humidity our soul is moistened. These are magical words; human, humus, human and humidity.The industrial civilisation tends to consider soil as lifeless and therefore uses chemicals and fertilizers to give it fertility. This shows our lack of wisdom and appreciation of the living quality of the soil. I hope that on Permaculture Day and every day thereafter we can be humble and celebrate the magic of mother soil.
Editor-in-Chief, Resurgence & Ecologist magazine
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Maddy Harland permaculture.co.uk
John D Liu eempc.org
We need to redesign agriculture. Last year the Special Rapporteur presented Agro-ecology and the right to food before the United Nations Human Rights Council. Based on an extensive review of recent scientific literature, the report demonstrates that agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty.Secondly, energy generation (and conservation): There is no scientific or economic proof that decentralised renewable energy systems aren’t a safe and viable alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear. The argument is political. With escalating climate change we must urgently switch away from dirty power.We also need to move away from the passive health systems promoted by Blue Chip pharmaceutical companies and integrate medicinals into our food forests. We need to retrieve the traditional wisdom of our ‘wise men and women’ and stop peddling pills as health solutions.Lastly, whilst sexism and racism are the order of the day, we will never solve our global problems. Permaculture needs to be brave and start to model the ethics of earth care, people care and fair shares in all of our designs. Permaculture isn’t just about principles and techniques.The last 25 years of my life has been about exploring how all these elements can come together: as a permaculture designer, publisher, mother and a wife.
At this moment there is nothing more important than restoring ecological function on a planetary scale. We all have a role to play in this. By increasing organic matter in the soil and increasing the height of the vegetative canopy we can absorb carbon and restore natural regulation to the hydrological cycle and the climate. We can do this in our backyards and we can do this on a planetary scale. It starts with our being aware of this but it happens when we act by growing soils and plants.We are at a turning point in human consciousness. This is the knowledge that shows us wealth comes from functioning natural systems and that wealth does not come from manufacturing and trade. Manufacturing and trade in a consumption economy are manifestations of valuing scarcity over abundance. We are creating poverty for billions of people by accepting the obscene accumulation of a few.Understanding that wealth comes from clean air, clean water, fertile soils, allowing climax vegetation systems to mature and biodiversity, means we must actually do less to be wealthy. We need to produce only what we need. This leads us away from overproduction, waste and pollution. It means we don’t need to buy and sell things to grow the economy. This change gives our lives meaning. We are required to heal the Earth and human spirit in order to survive. We are not consumers. We are becoming human beings.
Editor Permaculture Magazine
Environmental film maker and director of Green Gold
Ron Finley ronfinley.com For me it all starts in the soil. You’re not what you eat, like they’ve taught us. You are what you eat eats. Plants eat soil. Period. They don’t grow in it; they eat it. That’s why it has to be nurtured and that’s why there has to be nutrients in the soil and not added nutrients.
Guerilla gardener
Darren Doherty regrarians.org Our primary responsibility is to the regenerative enhancement of the biosphere’s ecosystem processes. Our secondary responsibility is to provide the potential for people to be informed about the regenerative economy, whether it involves their work in agriculture, land management, corporate life, domestic services, manufacturing or other activities that are within the reasonable domain of humans.
21st Century Regrarian
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