Editorial
Welcome
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Welcome! As we put together this new issue, we held a very clear intention about what we want to say during our ongoing permaculture adventure. Some of you may remember early issues of this magazine and their focus on practical, land-based projects, often centred around the garden. Every subscriber, paper and digital, can take a trip down memory lane and check out each back issue,
even the ones in the magazine’s infancy when climate chaos was a concern on the distant horizon. The whole archive is available free online.
Since we began publishing in 1992, there has been a revolution in our understanding of permaculture design all over the world, and love our gardens though we may, we are also keen to demonstrate that permaculture can be applied to designing healthy human relationships, communities, enterprises, and organisational structures, as well as greening cities, and regenerating healthy wild ecosystems. Its ethics, principles and techniques work well in these contexts, as does using permaculture to think creatively, frame solutions and discover ways of adapting to the many challenges that face us all. If you are experimenting with applying regenerative principles to any project and want to write about it here, please get in touch. We would love to hear from you.
Our aim is to explore what politics, economics, rewilding, finance, work, health, belief systems, purpose and more… will look like in a regenerative, balanced, thriving world. What examples already exist and are being tested? What bridges do we need to build to a better world? What do we need to hear more about? What do we need to learn? Learning never stops and we want to embrace opportunities with the enthusiasm they deserve.
Tucked between the botany of therapeutic plants, tips on compost, wildflower meadows, book and film reviews and wholesome land-based subjects is a gentle stretching of the muscles of conscious facilitation, an exploration of experiments in building community, and an imagining of the coalescence of a gathering of people who are truly seeking other, more creative, peaceful and wholesome ways of living, turning away from the constant erosive drip of a destructive culture that will be the end of the Earth as well as all of us. There really is no Planet B. What sustains us is the tenacious sense of possibility –
that things can be different, better – and that within the ruins of anything lies the potency of the seed to germinate.
Land and transformation are not mutually exclusive, of course. Reading Dave Mountjoy’s experience of rewilding cattle in south-west France is layered not only by the transformation of a landscape, but also of deepening inner experience. As the cattle browse the woodland, self-medicate and knocked back areas of scrub, they not only veteranise the trees, creating more habitat, they make room for nectar producing plants, feeding the insect populations that in turn feed the birds. Dave and his family too are nurtured by the cattle, forming close bonds with the herds. There is a sense of deep restoration and peace when we allow a species to re-enter a state of balance and reclaim their natural behaviour within a landscape.
In my own small way, I have been working to do this in the woodland where I live. Pied flycatchers visit here all the way from Africa to breed, but the breeding rate was low. With the help of friends, I cleaned out and moved nest boxes, strategically placed new ones (the tits tend to grab the best spots early in the season), and then monitored these handsome little songbirds with the expert help of Chris Dee, a British Trust for Ornithology volunteer, this year. The population has risen from one to five breeding pairs (in the boxes) despite a cold and wet spring/summer that took many young before they could fledge. I know that this is a small act in the face of plummeting biodiversity and mass extinction but my immersion in the wellbeing of this and other species in the wood has taken me outside every day. I have spent time listening, observing, learning… and breathing in the healing energy of the woodland. I have become a part of its biome.
Maddy and the Permaculture team
Permaculture is... an innovative framework for creating regenerative ways of living;
a practical method for developing ecologically harmonious,
ethical, human-scale and productive systems that can be used by anyone, anywhere.
Read more at www.permaculture.co.uk/what-is-permaculture issue 121 autumn 2024
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