Subject: Re: [permaculture] Content of posts from an old Permaculture forum - some may be interested in this - goes way back
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 23:11:12 -0400
An unusual collection of posts in a thread. Show how far and wide the practice of Permaculture has gotten
and this was in July, August and September of 2003.
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Greetings all: I need some advice & assistance from the world Permacultural Community.
I'm currently negotiating with the Mayor of Pitcairn Island - Steve Christian - to transform Pitcairn Island (my ancestral homeland) into the world's first totally 'permaculturally-designed' Island.
Pitcairn is still a British Colony, but the UK basically wants to shut the Island down (ie. the colony is "not economically viable") & sell the Pitcairn Islands (Pitcairn, Henderson, Oeno, Ducie) along with their accompanying 200 nm. exclusive economic zones to the French* (presumably so that the latter can test nuclear devices on a volcanic Island rather than an atoll).
One possible way to save the Island & it's unique heritage, would be to transform it into the only 'holistic-permaculture-nation-state' on the Planet; not only to make it completely independent of the British Exchequer, but also to lay the foundations for a limited ecotourism industry which could possibly enable the Island to become totally self-sufficient at a relatively comfortable standard of living.
Steve Christian is warm on the idea, but - being one of the most remote places on earth - "Permaculture", is a complete unknown to the Island community.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So, what I need is some advice on the best way to introduce the key principles & concepts of Permaculture to the Pitcairn Islander community. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All & any advice or suggestions on moving this Project (tentatively titled 'Biosphere3') forward, will be graciously appreciated.
* there are substantial deposits of manganese, iron, copper, gold, silver, and zinc, which have recently been discovered within the 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone surrounding the Pitcairn Islands (Pitcairn, Henderson, Oeno, Ducie).
cf: 'Convention on Maritime Boundaries between the Government of the French Republic and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'
Don't Mennonite, Bruderhof and Amish have traditions of land stewardship and of forming colonies? I think Mennonites have started quite a few tropical communities, although perhaps in highlands.
Gaviotas is a recent colony in highland Columbia that just might want to move or split, with recent violence there. They seem like really neat folk who have done amazing ecological transformations that any permaculturalist must respect, if not stagger in awe of, if reports prove true. Alan Weisman wrote about them. I heard one of the Canary Islands has a tradition of excellent, pre-permaculture gathering and storing rare rain there, which has transformed the isle.(which might be Fuerteventura.) I heard it was a rocky, barren low island that didn't get much rain, and now its full of gardens and people living their lives. (Some Canary islands are high and catch rain, some are low and dry. Maybe also there are refugee communities seeking sanctuary, with whom Pitcairn islanders would feel a cultural or empathetic bond with.
Maybe inviting a variety of lifestyle/belief gropus could help eventually form. On the other hand, maybe the women of Pitcairn could select from among a world-full of men through online personals, those that would suit them and the island's opportunities. I actually once stumbled across a translated Japanese analysis of which churches had most successfully colonized Hokkaido, which had, and has, an indigenous gropu very unrelated to most japanese. This colonization was actualy not that long ago. Southern Japanese colonist farmers in Brazil, I have heard, have been very successful and responsible farmers there. Is this a similar climate?
I'm interested in going to an island for good, but think of Tristan de Cunha, with its climate more suited to my western european gene set. I have messed around in small boats every summer as a kid, racing sailing dinghies in choppy, but swell-less Buzzards Bay in Southern New England, and crewing with my family aboard my fathers' cruising sloops. I previously trained in Re-evaluation Counseling, a peer-to-peer counceling method focusing on recovery form any traumas, with some great strengths and a few weaknesses, but I'm quite rusty.
What's news?
Brian Cady
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Damn clever Japanese. Unfortunately there are no rivers or sizeable streams on the Islands, so salmon farming is probably not an option.
However, as the Pitcairner's religion - SDA - prohibits the consumption of many types of seafood (in Seventh Day Adventist communities, only finfish are consumed, due to religious prohibitions on the consumption of anything without fins and scales; so effective a conservation measure has this prohibition been, that there is great abundance of invertebrates, especially crustaceans and holothurians around the Pitcairn Islands) there would probably be some scope for limited commercial harvesting within the 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone surrounding the Pitcairn Islands (Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie, Oeno & Sandy).
I imagine any deal struck with the Japanese would need to be in accord with:
'Convention on Maritime Boundaries between the Government of the French Republic and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'