How Permaculture Can Restore Ecosystems & Communities

Maddy Harland tells the story of the Shona African community who healed their damaged ecosystems. They restored their springs, rebuilt their soil, regenerated their agriculture and alleviated poverty and malnutrition. Permaculture farming has proven effective all over the planet.

In the rural Shona African community in Zimbabwe, five villages of 7,000 people have joined together to form the Chikukwa Project, named after their local chief. Twenty years ago their land was deforested, barren, and nothing would grow there in the summer months. When the rains came, they washed down the slopes taking the soil with them. The springs had dried up and the people were poor, hungry, and suffering from malnutrition.

The Shona decided to do something about it and sought advice from permaculture pioneer, John Wilson. Slowly, a field at a time, they built water retaining landscapes: terracing the slopes and digging swales to hold the water in the soil. They added composted manure to these terrace beds to build soil and grow food. They stopped grazing animals and foraging for firewood in the gullies where the springs rose and planted native trees there to hold the moisture in the soil. They also stopped untethered grazing of goats on the hillsides, allowing trees to regenerate, and they started driving their cattle to agreed grazing areas. They learnt new skills: specifically permaculture training, conflict resolution, women’s empowerment, primary education and HIV management.

Within three years, the springs began to reactivate. They saw that the yields from the plots with swales were bigger than the plots without them. Twenty years later, where there was once eroded soil and over-grazed slopes, there are now reforested gullies with flowing water, terraces full of vegetables, grains and fruit, and high ridges lined with trees for firewood. In the villages, there are home gardens, pens for hens and goats, water tanks to catch rainfall runoff, and a culture of cooperation that values people skills as much as horticultural techniques. The landscape is verdant and biodiverse, and the gardens and farms produce crops for the families and for market, bringing an economic yield back into the region. All this in one generation.

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Simply Home: A tiny cohousing community grows in Portland

It appears that a tiny house boom is well underway, and along with it comes a smattering of emerging tiny house communities. Whether they are tiny or otherwise, it takes a lot of work to keep an intentional community together. Sometimes, despite the best of initial intentions, they can be waylaid by ideological differences, or poor governance. But when it does work, the rewards can be great: a sense of belonging, purpose and togetherness from being part of a community can give life much greater meaning.

Some time ago we visited The Lucky Penny, home to tiny house design consultant Lina Menard. She's part of Simply Home, a tiny house community that recently got off the ground in Portland, Oregon.

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The village and Nature have had the answers all along

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The personal revolution is the realization that the village and Nature have had the answers all along. We must, therefore, turn to our community and the great Earth for sustenance and knowledge.

We must, once again, become fallible and human again by living dangerously and stepping off of the assembly lines of unnatural life before it is too late.

The simple things in life are the greatest gifts. They are all there waiting for us to realize their value and partake in their blessings. We do not need to change anything, except ourselves.

Nature is the supreme cradle of life, and must be protected and treated with the highest respect and care. We must have clean air and water, and beautiful natural foods for everyone, everywhere.

We must cultivate beautiful spaces, where communities and families are free to come together to share and enjoy the bounty of earth. Above all all of us deserve real freedom, but to have real freedom, we must be wild and free yourself.

It means and will mean changing the system of exploitation of man and Planet and reconnect with the Planet and the people around us. We must create working local communities again and manage ourselves, away from government interference. In fact, we must abolish the state altogether and start a fresh, learning from the mistakes of the past.

Democracy – proper participatory democracy – is not possible in large groups or communities, let alone nation states or federation of states, and thus we must return to clan and tribal level, and the village of the size that it used to be in the days of old, before villages became dormitory places for city commuters to live, is a size that just about would have worked, before the advent of the 20th century. Thus, in order to free ourselves from the way things are in this current world, we must return to the village and work everything on a village level.

The village, in times past, was the center of everything. Almost everything was made locally with but a few “essentials” being traded from further afield. Nowadays almost nothing is produced locally, not even in the country, but comes from abroad. Even local produce cannot be sold – legally, in most cases – direct to the local people. It is sent far away to the wholesale markets from where even the local greengrocer has to get his produce instead of from local farmers and growers.

People who have surplus from their own little plots and their own hens and such are not permitted to sell any of this to neighbors without the appropriate government license – which means interference no end to obtain and maintain – and even the bartering of such produce is frowned upon by the powers-that-be and this again points to the need for a change of system.

In fact, everything needs to be brought down to village level for us to be able to live a sustainable life and also a fulfilled life. Life must return to the village level – and village can mean a number of things here and refers more to size of are then anything else – and that includes work also and people will govern themselves and look after themselves and each other and that state must be abolished once and for all.

© 2013