Permaculture in Norway: Coming up with creative Solutions!

by Benjamin Vidmar

Entrepreneur and Permaculture Ambassador

Longyearbyen, Norway (Svalbard) is the "northern most" town in the world
(78.2200° N, 15.6500° E) and has been my home since 2008. It is a very unique place and a bit of a no man's land  - even though Norway has sovereignty over the island. Longyearbyen is the largest city on the island of Spitsbergen, has 2000 inhabitants. Moreover, there are over 3000 polar bears living on the islands!

Spitsbergen is over 65% protected parks, and there are special regulations in place to preserve the nature here. As a result of being an island, everything is either shipped or flown up, and all waste must also be shipped or flown out. This is a process that uses a lot of fossil fuels and is very vunerable to price increases as the price of fuel goes up. Furthermore, after the waste is shipped down to mainland Norway, it is put on trucks and then shipped over land to Sweden where the waste is sold in order to make energy.

Lost Theory Festival in Croatia: Living our Dream

by  Stéphanie De Caluwé

This year is the fourth edition of Lost Theory Festival up in the mountains of Croatia. It's am adventure brought us experiences and lessons we never imagined before. The Lost Theory team grew towards being a family and fell in love with the area.

We would like to spend our future here and buy a piece of land in an area we already have in mind. It would be a perfect place to live sustainably with all its beautiful elements in a mountain climate. One of the main goals of this festival is to create a place of sharing experience, connecting with positive people and creating communities that set realistic and achievable goals for sustaining happiness, healthy living, thinking, feeling, breathing and dancing. The first steps growing towards this future eco-village demonstrates itself in our permaculture design course during the build-up of the festival and the eco-management during the event, which will transform Lost Theory into an activation zone.

Permaculture in South Africa

by Jason Hanslo

grade 4 teacher and Permaculture Ambassador

The Sunrays in flowers project was defined not too long ago on a popular South African television show as being a vehicle of change for an impoverished community of Delft South, just outside Cape Town. The project, born was born out of my concern for the learners of Sunray Primary school's nutritional well- being. Amidst the community's socio-economic ills, I managed to create an oasis; a permaculture garden.

Impoverished areas usually showcase the best examples of reusing of recyclables. Children use spent tyres instead of a ball to play catch.

Permaculture (and) Religion

by Chris Marsh

Lifetime member of the Permaculture Association

This article is a contribution to the often contentious discussion about whether or not religion (and/or spirituality, metaphysics, mysticism, god(s) or goddess(es) and associated writings, rituals and images) is/are – or should be – part of permaculture. My own position, during twenty years of being interested in permaculture as a movement for radical world change, has tended to be that attention being given to all this spirituality stuff does more harm than good.1 I now think there may be a case for seeing permaculture as religious, even as a religion, in the original sense of a shared understanding that binds a community together.

Permanent Agriculture: Past, Present and Future

by Chris Marsh

Member of the Permaculture Association

The story of how agriculture began seems very familiar. We know about the Neolithic Revolution,1 a profound change which took place when prehistoric people were already skilled at making stone tools, but before they discovered how to work metals or even fire pottery. They domesticated plants and animals, and domesticated themselves too by making permanent settlements, with the social structures and cultural practices which sustained living closely together. This revolution became possible because of the amelioration of the climate around 12,000 years ago, after the peak of the last glaciation, in the early Holocene, with its relatively stable warm conditions. Agriculture was discovered between 11000 bp and 3000 bp. There were probably multiple primary origins, in the Middle East, central Africa, China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes, and then the farming way of life dispersed to cover and dominate more and more of the world.

The old agricultural revolution involved the domestication of remarkably few species of plants and animals: some large-seeded annual grass species, several important legumes, and the major meat sources: cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. These all originated in western Asia, the area which has the world’s earliest evidence for food production. Other regions where agriculture began contributed fewer domesticated species of such importance to the world today (Bellwood 2013 127). Given that agriculture today depends very largely on these same species, domesticated thousands of years ago, we must surely agree that the old revolution brought in a ‘permanent agriculture’.

Hull Greenshare Conference: Organising the Hull Permaculture Network

by Lausanne Tranter

 Member of the Permaculture Association

The Hull Greenshare Conference  was held on the 19th of March at the Guildhall in Hull. An impressive 90 people attended to listen to a varied array of speakers, including Joe Atkinson who gave a presentation on the principles of Permaculture and their relevance today.

Other speakers were:

Cllr. Mancey (Portfolio holder): Energy City
Simon Bowens (FoE): Energy in UK
Kate Macdonald, Lisa Bovill: Timebanks & Alternative exchange mechanisms
Joanna Bevan (City University New York): Community Resilience
Mick Marston (UK Fed. City farms & Community gardens)

Stainless Steel, a Permaculture Material?

by Tony Martin

Permaculture Association member

It has to be mined, processed, melted and - shipped all of which causes environmental damage and requires lots of energy.

So how can such a material be considered acceptable to permaculturists? The answer is of course in the “perma” part of permaculture. Stainless steel is a lot like Captain Scarlet, nearly indestructible (unless you are using particularly strong chemicals or high temperatures)

There are a number of different grades of stainless which are made from iron with varying amounts of other metals, including chromium, nickel, manganese and molybdenum.

Type 316 which is more expensive but has good resistance to corrosion and heat and is often used in making insulated twin wall flues for wood burners. Cheaper grades such as type 304 (AKA type 18-8) are used for items like sinks where heat and corrosion resistance is not so important.