Permaculture - PacificEdge

Submission: Victorian Greens Animal Policy Review 2015

Following is a submission to the Victorian Greens Animals policy review as invited by email circulated in February 2015.

Small and slow solutions: a principle too little, too late?

SMALL AND SLOW SOLUTIONS… permaculture principle or shibboleth? A bit of both, I think. A good idea some of the time, but what about other times? Small of slow solutions might work when we’re establishing an ordhard, but in these days of the Great Acceleration it might be too little too late. Let me explain. […]

The household economy: time for reimagining?

I KNEW WHAT WAS HAPPENING when she got the big drum out from the back of the cupboard. “I”m going to bottle those cherries we got yesterday”, Fiona said. “So I’m cleaning up the kitchen first to make space. Let’s get that stuff out of the drying rack and those utensils off the stove”. I […]

The household solution — too small to push change?

I RECEIVED an email from Permaculture Australia recently promoting online videos of Nicole Foss and David Holmgren. So I took a look. The email made reference to their recent Sydney event that I missed, so I don’t know whether the videos fully represent what they spoke about there. NICOLE’s VIDEO was about a purported coming […]

Time to ensure permaculture internships not exploitative

IF THERE IS A TIME for permaculture people who offer internships on their properties to ensure that their arrangements with unpaid workers are fair and not exploitative, that time is now.

Internships in permaculture — exploitation or opportunity?

A RECENT POSTING on the Permaculture Australia-New Zealand and Permaculture Victoria Facebooks by Melbourne-based permaculture practitioner, Miriam Bakst, raises an important question for permaculture’s reputation. WHAT’S LEGAL? Miriam asks whether permaculture practitioners engaging interns could be breaking the law. It is the arrangement of those internships that are core to her question. I wonder if […]

A literature of past possibilites

THE BOOKS YOU SEE in the composite illustration accompanying this story link past and present. They link what was a pioneering social experiment with its refined, socially safer version developed initially by permaculture people. I’m talking about people leaving the cities for a rural life. It’s been a feature of permaculture over its more-than 35 […]

Council takes initiative in education for local growing

JENNIFER ALDEN, the Victorian food consultant, gave me the book just a few weeks ago — a little A5-size publication with a photo of a bright red strawberry on the cover and the logo of the City of Greater Bendigo below. That was at the national gathering of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens […]

A distant voice calls from permaculture’s dawn time

SOMETIMES, the best discoveries are made by accident. I was rummaging through the library of an international development organisation I was working for at the time — that time being the latter half of the 1990s — when I discovered them, a couple journals published by what must have been one of the very first […]

Booklets a waypoint in permaculture history

SOMETIMES, useful things come at small scale. So it was with the 'Useful' series of booklets produced for those establishing permaculture systems ...

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