European Permaculture Network – Harmony & Synergy

15/06/201826/06/2018

EuPC 2018 :: Ireland

01Days 17Hours 37Minutes 28Seconds

New Partners for Permaculture: Reaching Beyond Our Edges

We are reaching out to you as a Permaculture Association, Organisation or key person within your country’s Permaculture network, from the organisers of this years European Permaculture Convergence to ask if you would be so kind as to share details of our event with your members, contacts and network of Permaculturalists?

This year the EUPC is coming to the beautiful mountains of County Wicklow just an hour from Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, where we will be extending a thousand welcomes to Permaculturalists from right across Europe. Continue reading “EuPC 2018 :: Ireland”

26/06/201826/06/2018

EuPC Ireland: Two-for-One Tickets

The European Permaculture Convergence will take place 8 – 13 August 2018 in County Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland. Just an hour by public transport from Dublin.

The site is in a beautiful valley in the Wicklow Mountains which gives a unique opportunity for a restorative 5 days total immersion in nature. There is a specially designed and professionally led Children’s Programme centred around the theme Children in Nature, based on nature mentoring and the ethos of Forest Schools.

Attendance tickets are €100 for the 5 days of the programme. Children under 15 can attend for free. With a range of accommodation options from €25 camping to €80 for a hostel bed for the duration. Catering will be a choice of wood fire cooked whole food vegan menu plans and exciting local food trucks.

We are excited to release a limited number of 2-for-1 tickets to this year’s convergence whereby you purchase one ticket and Abundant Earth Foundation will sponsor the other for you! There are only 10 available and they are sure to be popular so do be quick! More details on this here.

There’s much more info about the programme, tickets, fringe events and volunteering on our website at eupc2018.ie

06/05/201806/05/2018

Compas d’Humour: Compagnon Camp Project July 2019

Call for partners

We are a scout team based in France (4 members of 18 years old), belonging to the Rovers’ branch of the Scouts et Guides de France. We would like to build a project based on sustainable agriculture with a partner in Eastern Europe. We want to provide assistance to a small village, or a farmer. Through agriculture and work, we would like to discover a new way of life, new habits, new European culture and to exchange with other people about their way of life, as well as promoting sustainable agriculture.

The project takes place in July of 2019. Continue reading “Compas d’Humour: Compagnon Camp Project July 2019”

15/02/2018

Social Media & Permaculture

Given the strong ethical image that permaculture design philosophy aims to project, the so called Social Media present a fascinating conundrum that we need to address at some point.

Internet: the good news

The roll-out of Internet has transformed our society and empowered anybody with the means to do so to connect with anybody else on the Internet. It’s enabled communities of interest to stay in touch over global geographical and cultural distances. It’s enabled almost instant mobilisation of activist people on any geographical scale to respond to any kind of challenge and gather critical mass to influence government and corporate agencies. Continue reading “Social Media & Permaculture”

13/10/201728/11/2017

New Nordic LAND cooperation

Permaculture is best experienced hands-on, we believe. Demonstration sites and inspiring teachers are one of the keys to adopting permaculture in the general consciousness of societies. Therefore, the Learning, Activity, Network and Demonstration (LAND) project is starting this year in Sweden and Finland, while Estonia will have its first permaculture LAND demonstration site next year. Denmark is helping with training of LAND counselors and assessors. The Nordic LAND network is funded by NordPlus.

22 delegates from five countries met at Koster Islands in Sweden on the border to Norway in August to start the cooperation and assess Kosters Trädgårdar as the first LAND centre in Sweden. It was an enjoyable long weekend with Helena von Bothmer as the very knowledgeable and deep rooted hostess and gardener.

The second meeting in early October at the community centre Koroinen in Turku/Åbo in Finland proved to be encouraging to further the network and cooperation between partners. Dedicated hosts encouraged presentation of designs from around Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Denmark.

A tour around the community centre of Koroinen on protected land next to the river Aura was welcome and took us to a large area of allotments, bicycle repair shop, ceramic workshop, organic shop, a collective of 5 people, the Koroinen café, the sculpture park, bee hives, compost toilets and plant guild systems adapted to the Finnish climate.

13/10/2017

EuPN Web Site News

New working groups on permaculture-network.eu:

Visegrad
European Permaculture Education Network (an evolution of the successful EPT project)
General Circle

Working Group Update

The Resources for Action created a public page.

Security

The EuPN web site now supports and enforces encrypted connections. This means that the information between your web browser and our server is “secure”, as in no third parties can just simply listen in and that you can trust that the information that you read on your device is as we sent it from our server. This is important when you log in as a member: your password is now more protected along the way and any information you share via the member forums and consult from our database is now less likely to leak to unwanted guests. This is however still no protection against being tracked and traced by third party agencies. They just don’t know exactly what you are doing at our web site.

Privacy and personal freedoms are increasingly eroding away in our pursuit of convenience from our communication devices and services. It’s good to be aware of your choices and their consequences. We’ve improved on the ownership and security of the permaculture-network.eu, being aware that it is never going to be 100% spy-proof. Small steps and slow solutions are also the way forward in our data landscape it seems.

House style service

We have a new service for our membership: logos and house style elements available for download from our web site. Log in as a member and find them under the Media menu.

Tip for working groups: public content

If you want to publish information on behalf of your working group, you can do so yourself. All registered members have automatically a login account on our web site. Additional individuals can request an account from the web master. If you have insufficient privileges for your needs you can request and upgrade from the same email address.

Public blog posts will appear on the home page – possibly after an editor has approved. Posts are suitable for current news and announcements.
Pages are more suitable for “permanent content” like reports, mission statements, listings of contact details etc. Public pages from working groups will appear under the Network > Working Groups menu as a sub menu item.
Private, members-only posts and pages can be created in your own working group section and forums. Your working group section is also the preferred location for your group’s shared documents.

30/08/201707/09/2017

Herding Cats and Dogmas

To understand permaculture education and its curriculum, it may be useful to learn a bit more about its roots.

In a way permaculture started with the brief period in the 1970’s when David Holmgren and Bill Mollison met in Tasmania, Australia. The different characters of our founding fathers explain perhaps the divergence in permaculture practice, research and education.

At that time Bill was senior tutor at the Psychology faculty of the University of Tasmania. David was a student at the Environmental Design school of the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. In an essay “Permaculture – A personal history” Holmgren describes it as follows: Continue reading “Herding Cats and Dogmas”

14/08/2017

Outputs of the Visegrad program “Permaculture for Farms”

The program “Permaculture for Farms”, 6 – 14 of July, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, gathered more than 70 participants from 4 central European Visegrad countries and from Ukraine. We have visited 6 sustainable farms and organized the conference about technological, social and economic aspects of permaculture farming. Here you can find recorded conference presentations, and in these Google folder – slides and additional materials. Here are the conference proceedings. We invite you to learn collected experience about farming practices in our countries, WWOOF, CSA, food sovereignty, network of permaculture demonstration sites, planning farming business and much more!

We are open for further cooperation! And we would like to thank to the International Visegrad Fund for supporting large-scale cooperation in our region.

Yours sincerely,

Visegrad Permaculture Parthership:

NGO “Permaculture in Ukraine” (perma.ukraine@gmail.com), Permaculture SK (kancelaria@permakultura.sk), Permakultura (CS), z. s. (hauserova@volny.cz), Deep Democracy Foundation (aquaterapia@gmail.com), and Ecological Institute of Sustainable Development (gyulai@ecolinst.hu).

29/07/201709/08/2017

2 August 2017 – Earth Overshoot Day

-348Days -6Hours -23Minutes -32Seconds

On August 2, 2017, we will have used more from nature than our planet can renew in the whole year.

We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester.

See: http://www.overshootday.org/

Of course borrowing from future labor, like we do in everyday banking, isn’t physically possible. What we have been doing systematically is to consume resources built up over eons in the past, to make up for the escalating deficit.

Time for some regenerative design and practice?