Sinking the Lifeboats: Reflections on a Visit to Herbaiet A Nabi, South Hebron Hills
Aid Projects, Building, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops, Energy Systems, Land, Society, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Alice Gray July 28, 2012
It was on the second week of the PermaNegev course that I arranged a visit to the small village of Herbaiet a Nabi in the south Hebron Hills. We were going to inspect the renewable energy installations put in place there by the Israeli NGO Comet-ME (www.comet-me.org), and to gain a better understanding of the politics of dispossession that form the ever-present background to the lives of the rural Arab communities of the Palestinian West Bank and the Israeli Negev. Since our focus for the week was ‘sustainable living: harvesting resources and managing wastes’, this fitted in well with the program, and was a great opportunity for students to see permaculture principles being applied on a number of levels, in a very challenging situation. As it turned out, the trip worked even better than I had originally planned, and gave much food for thought, some of which I am still digesting!
Comments (5)Six Week Intensive Permaculture Courses in the Negev
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops — by Alice Gray
We will be offering another Permaculture Course at the Bustan EcoKhan this summer. Sign up now to study permaculture in the Negev Desert!
Intensive Permaculture, Arabic and Middle Eastern program at the Bedouin village of Qasr A-Sir.
The 6-week intensive permaculture course allows participants to work closely with the indigenous Bedouin community of Qasr A-Sir in a merging of ancient traditional practices with cutting-edge permaculture design. Practice natural building and organic agriculture, while learning Arabic, taking Middle Eastern studies, going on field trips throughout Israel, immersing in the Bedouin way of life. Come together with international participants in a collaborative effort that bridges cultural and religious schisms.
72-Hour Permaculture Design Certificate Course: Permaculture for the Rural African Environment, Konso, Ethiopia
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres — by Alex McCausland July 17, 2012
This 13-day practical and demonstrative PDC will take place in Konso, south Ethiopia, from September 10th – 22nd 2012, at Strawberry Fields Eco Lodge. It will have a special focus on the application of permaculture to communities in the developing world. It will involve practical demonstrations both from Strawberry Fields’ own model permaculture site and from schools sites in the area which are participating in the Permaculture in Konso Schools Project. There will also be the chance to do field trips into other climate zones in the Ethiopian highlands.
Comments (0)A Permaculture Consultancy in Ethiopia
Aid Projects, Building, Community Projects, Land, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Alex McCausland
Two hundred kilometers south of Addis we turn left at a little town called Achamo, and dive off the tarmac into a dusty, bumpy adventure somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the green rolling steppes of the south Ethiopian countryside. This is my first foray into Hadiyya country. We’ve just passed Siltie, my own tribe (by marriage). We’re en route into the deep south, but this little foray off the usual 14 hour slog down to Konso is going to be something different. The countryside is all populated. Open farmland, mostly beans and maize, dotted with little settlements. Donkeys, gangs of skinny cattle and groups of bearded men out on a Sunday morning stroll punctuate the forty minutes of grinding along the rough climes of the roadway, till we pull into the dusty market town of Bonosha. I call our contact, Tegene, and tell him we’ve arrived. He sends a couple of local lads to show us the way. They jump into the back of the car and direct us out of town. As it turns out, I’m off to do my very first commercial consultancy as a permaculturalist. It’s quite exciting really.
Comments (8)Upcoming Jordan Courses with Geoff and Nadia Lawton (October/November, 2012)
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Urban Projects — by Bonnie Freibergs July 12, 2012
If you live in the northern hemisphere and want to take a course with Geoff and Nadia Lawton, but don’t want the expense and carbon footprint of travelling to Australia to do so, then consider heading to Jordan, site of the last International Permaculture Conference (IPC10), instead. Here you’ll get world class permaculture instruction, a taste of permaculture project aid work experience, whilst also gaining valuable cultural immersion experiences — all at the same time!
Upcoming courses in Jordan — click the links to find out more and to book:
- 27 October — 10 November, 2012: Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course
- 10 November – 7 December, 2012: The Dead Sea Valley Permaculture Project (aka Greening the Desert – the Sequel) Internship
Further Watching/Reading:
- Solving All the Problems of the World – in a Garden
- Letters from Jordan: ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’ Site Contrasts Against Jordan Insanities
- Greening the Desert II
Pietro Zucchetti Interviews Chris Evans
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Podcasts — by Pietro Zucchetti July 11, 2012
Chris Evans, who co-created the invaluable Farmers’ Handbook, has lived and worked in Nepal since 1985, co-founding the Jajarkot Permaculture Project, which successfully spread new ideas in line with existing cultural traditions. Chris started his career as a VSO volunteer in a community forestry programme in Nepal after graduating in Forestry in the UK.
Based in the remote western district of Jajarkot, he quickly realised the shortfalls of international development and so in 1988, when he came across the concept of permaculture, he embarked on an ambitious alternative. Starting with a local friend, £500 and an acre of degraded farmland in the district centre of Jajarkot he founded a demonstration and training centre which grew organically into the Jajarkot Permaculture Programme (JPP) — a diverse array of projects spanning 4 districts, 65 villages, 8 resource centres (working farms), 120 staff and volunteers, and a membership of 12,000 farmers.
Click play to hear the interview!
Interview with Chris Evans Comments (0)Permaculture: A Call for Diversity
Aid Projects, Development & Property Trusts, Education, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Stephanie Blennerhassett June 28, 2012
Sri Lankan tea plantation worker
Photograph © copyright Craig Mackintosh
For the past year, I have been circumnavigating the world as a curious observer, student, and wwoofer. After undergraduate studies, I wanted to balance the Darwinian culture of academia with a paradigm that encouraged humility and knowledge sharing within a global civil society. I took my first PDC at Occidental Arts and Ecology in California and continued on to Strawberry Fields Eco-lodge in Ethiopia (PDC with Rhamis Kent), the PRI of Australia (soil biology and aid worker course), Thailand (interned at Rak Tamachat and studied with Sangob, Fair Earth Farm, Pun Pun, and Tacomepai), and returned back to Quail Springs Permaculture in California (natural building apprenticeship and an International Development Professionals PDC).
As giving and receiving are one in the same, I want to give back to the permaculture movement by suggesting how permaculture can improve its theoretical diversity in order to be transparent and accountable to its tenet of fair share. Although the permaculture movement has inspired me, I am still grappling with its legitimacy within the world order. To promote the agency of its students and nurture the development of a global civil society, PDC curricula needs to increase its diversity.
Comments (4)Hope for a New Era: Before/After Examples of Permaculture Earth Restoration – Solving Our Problems From the Ground Up
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Conferences, Consumerism, Deforestation, Demonstration Sites, Food Forests, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Plant Systems, Population, Society, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Trees, Urban Projects, Water Contaminaton & Loss, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor
If you aren’t in a reading mood, and/or just came to look at the before/after photographs, click here to jump down the page.
Loess Plateau, Early September, 1995
Loess Plateau, Early September, 2009
Rio+20 has been and gone, and, in the big scheme of things, has achieved little, or worse. With this post I’d like to take the opportunity to jot down some thoughts, and images, that might help us shake off disappointment, disillusionment and despair, and give us something we can all consider, adjust and rally around. Our ‘leaders’ are taking us ‘down the garden path’, but, unfortunately, in the proverbial, rather than literal, sense. It’s truly time to forge new beginnings, create new economies, and to prioritise natural and social capital with the goal of restoring ecological and social health.
Comments (15)PRI Networking, the Value of Collaboration, and the Development of More PRI Education/Demonstration Projects
Aid Projects, Commercial Farm Projects, Community Projects, Consumerism, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Networking Sites, People Systems, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor June 12, 2012
Do we segregate…?
Photos © Craig Mackintosh
Most of us are by now wholly cognizant of the fact that the global response to long-brewing trouble has been well short of timely or appropriate. The world as a whole, if I were to be brutally honest, is taking three steps backwards for every few inches it moves forwards. Wonderful moves towards sustainability are daily dwarfed by industrial and individualistic efforts in the opposite direction. There are, indeed, wondrous examples and tantalisingly positive suggestions and ambitions shining like little beacons of hope from various quarters worldwide, but most of the world’s population experience these as mere pleasant, but out of reach, distractions from their daily quest to survive. Whether it’s ’survival’ in the very real sense, scratching for food, water and firewood, or in the modernist sense of retaining some degree of sanity after too many hours at an unsatisfying and unnatural job (that’s only endured due to previous purchases ‘the system’ has pressured us into), either way there are too few people either willing or able to venture out of their very real personal worlds to run with concepts far removed from their daily lives.
In the permaculture camp, however, a great deal of positive work is being trialled and actioned, often independently, and, as such, painfully unnoticed.
Getting it noticed is a central part of the PRI’s work….
Comments (12)Julious Piti from the Hugely Successful Chikukwa Project (Zimbabwe, Africa) to Give Talk in Santa Barbara (July 1, 2012)
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Demonstration Sites, Presentations/Demonstrations — by Margie Bushman June 11, 2012
When: Sunday July 1, 6:30-9pm, 2012
Where: Fe Bland Auditorium, Santa Barbara City College, West Campus
Cost: $10-$5 SBCC Students
Please join the Santa Barbara City College Center for Sustainability on Sunday, July 1, as we host Julious Piti, founding member of the Chikukwa Ecological Land Use Community Trust (CELUCT) in Zimbabwe, whose ecological design work in Tanzania has recently been featured in the award winning film From the Mara Soil.
Comments (0)Jordan PDC and Jordan Internship (October, November, 2012)
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops — by Tracey Buckley June 9, 2012
The triangular shaped ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’ site,
a two-year comparison.
Photographs © Craig Mackintosh
The next Jordan PDC course run by the PRI starts on October 27, 2012 and runs for 14 days.
The next Jordan Internship starts 10 November, 2012 and runs for 27 days.
These courses run concurrently and are very special events as Geoff and Nadia Lawton will be teaching at the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project (aka ‘Greening the Desert, the sequel’ site) for two weeks and directly following that the internship is an action packed 27 days.
Comments (2)Permaculture: a Path Toward a More Sustainable Amazon?
Aid Projects, Commercial Farm Projects, Community Projects, Deforestation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Soil Conservation, Trees — by Mongabay
Originally published on Mongabay.com
An Eco-Ola permaculture plot with yuca, beans, sacha inchi, bananas, charapitas,
herba luisa, and moringa in the Peruvian Amazon.
Communities living in and around tropical forests remain highly dependent on forest products, including nuts, resins, fruit and vegetables, oils, and medicinal plants. But relatively few of these products have been successfully commercialized in ways that generates sustained local benefits. When commercialization does happen, outsiders or a few well-placed insiders usually see the biggest windfall. Large-scale exploitation can also lead to resource depletion or conversion of forests for monoculture-based production. The ecosystem and local people lose.
Comments (0)John D. Liu’s Green Gold Documentary – How the West (and East, North and South!) Could Be Won
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Conservation, Consumerism, Dams, Deforestation, Demonstration Sites, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Irrigation, Land, Plant Systems, Population, Potable Water, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Society, Soil Biology, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Swales, Terraces, Trees, Village Development, Water Contaminaton & Loss, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor May 24, 2012
As most of our readers will know, John D. Liu caught a vision years ago, and, thankfully, he ran with it. We’ve shared John’s excellent media work before (see here and here), and today have the pleasure of doing so again….
This new video, Green Gold, was first aired last month on Dutch TV, and will be shared at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (to a captive audience of influential representative delegates during their dinner!), which is being held next month in Brazil (20-22 June 2012).
The video takes you to China, Jordan (more background on the PRI Jordan project here), Ethiopia, Rwanda and Bolivia, and features the PRI’s own Geoff Lawton (and a cameo appearance from Nadia!), who adds impetus and technical know-how to John’s impressive toolbox, as well as the ‘Permaculture Princess‘ (Princess Basma bint Ali of Jordan), and others.
It’s the story of healing landscapes at scale, and, with it, restoring life, livelihoods, security and a future.
Comments (6)APC11 Presentation: Permaculture Disaster Response to Japan’s 2011 Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster, by Toru Sakawa
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Conferences, Food Shortages, Nuclear — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor May 17, 2012
At the recent Australasian Permaculture Conference (APC11) held in Turangi, New Zealand, one of the highlights for me was hearing Toru Sakawa’s tale of permaculture aid work in very unusual circumstances. I say unusual, as the triple woes of having an earthquake and tsunami followed by a nuclear disaster is somewhat unprecedented. Some parts of Japan were suddenly left without food, fuel, water and many other supports that we generally take (a little too much) for granted, and efforts to help oneself were restricted for many by the need to stay inside, out of radioactive harms way.
It was inspiring to hear Toru share how he and his peers did their best to help people in coastal areas, and how permaculture played some part in enabling them to do so. Toru and his friends, with fuel supplies cut, made their own biofuels from waste oil, and used it to transport their permaculture produce, and other supplies, to the people who needed it. They also brought people back to care for them, and to give them time away from the more radioactive areas.
It should help remind us what permaculture is really about; that being to not only create permanence, but also resiliency against abrupt shocks to the system, and the compassionate care of the people around us.
Comments (0)Tyre Tank Stands
Aid Projects, Building, Conservation, Irrigation, Waste Systems & Recycling, Water Harvesting — by Robert Cork May 14, 2012
A finished tyre tank stand
You may remember reading about the work of FoodWaterShelter to develop a sustainable home for vulnerable women and children in Tanzania. And you may recall their innovative approach to water storage. Well here’s another innovative use for old tyres — and one that may alleviate some potential concerns of unwittingly contaminating the environment through alternative uses of tyres.
Comments (1)
