permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Subscribe to show your support of the permEzone pilot project Hugh Kelly a 
premie in Santa Barbara has shepherded this great project for a number of 
years 
http://www.permezone.org/why-subscribe.html

Why Subscribe?
It seems scandalous that so many small family farmers around the world 
experience poverty and hunger. This is not the natural order!
permEzone aims to support farming communities in co-creating their own local 
solutions to improve yields, with the focus on achieving better livelihoods 
without resorting to unsustainable practices that bring short-term benefits 
at the expense of long-term costs. Problems that typically result from 
following conventional farming advice include, for example, degraded soil and 
water resources, and growing debt to meet the escalating costs of expensive 
inputs.
A credible body of research shows that small farmers can achieve equivalent 
improvements in yields and livelihoods through agroecological farming methods 
without incurring these long-term problems. Many thousands of permaculture 
projects around the world are demonstrating the practical application of 
systems thinking to the design of sustainable and regenerative food systems. 
These skills can help to build resilient communities that can survive and 
prosper despite the shocks of disease, pestilence and adverse climate events. 
There are permaculture training centers actively teaching these skills all 
over the world. 
The starting point for permEzone is a two-year pilot, which is now in the 
initiation phase. During this pilot we will develop the means to facilitate 
the sharing of information and experience about regenerative farming – ways 
to grow abundant food crops while improving biodiversity and the health of 
natural resources. The pilot will work with the existing network of 
permaculture training centers to test and develop the idea of sponsoring and 
supporting family farmers in less-developed countries to learn about the 
design of sustainable and regenerative food systems. The sponsored farmers 
will also learn how to share knowledge and experience with other members of 
their community through workshops and using their mobile phones.
The evidence of wide-scale land degradation and freshwater depletion and 
pollution all over the world, which is mostly associated with the adoption of 
intensive monoculture farming, tells us that changing the way we grow food is 
one of the fundamental imperatives of our time. To meet the challenge of 
feeding current and future generations without further destroying 
biodiversity, we need to re-evaluate our relationship to the natural world. 
Permaculture is one way of doing this, of moving away from agriculture as a 
war on nature, towards farming that learns from nature and integrates with 
and regenerates complex ecosystems. 
As with so many of the complex and interconnected problems associated with 
the breaching of planetary boundaries, it has become abundantly clear that 
grassroots action is the only effective option available to slow down and 
reverse the steady degradation of these natural resources; resources that 
current and future generations will depend on.
Please help us to build the momentum to turn permEzone into a reality. Let us 
know that you are out there offering your support to our efforts to take 
action on these urgent issues. Let us know you are with us by pressing the 
subscribe button now. 
http://www.permezone.org/why-subscribe.html