European Permaculture Network – Harmony & Synergy

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

-262Days -13Hours -14Minutes -27Seconds

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?

11/06/2017

Spread the Good News

Organising courses and Events?

We regularly receive requests from members of our network to spread announcements of courses, workshops and other events. Obviously that is an important function that the network can perform.

We have a website that enables us to bring news to the attention of a huge audience. It’s a great tool, provided we use it properly. One of the advantages over printed media is that we can use the computers that make up a big part of the system to help us in gathering, processing and republishing the information about events. There’s even a name for that: syndication or in computer-speak: RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Recently a special version of RSS was developed: ESS or Event Standard Syndication. As you can guess from this name: it’s specifically for spreading information about events.

The idea is that the organiser of an event publishes all the information about their event on their own website and then ESS takes care of spreading that information to other websites – automatically. This also means that the organiser is in full control of what information is spread and when. It enables automatic updates, when things change, like a change in date or venue or speakers.
It makes the information automatically complete, correct and timely. And is saves a lot of work and effort for everybody, while exposing the announcements to the largest possible audience. Everybody wins!

Now, this system is relatively new and it’s not in use much, but that could change quickly and decisively when a couple of coders pick up our challenge.

Calling all Coders!

We’d like to invite coders in our European permaculture community to help with this project. We want to build on the ESS standard and make it easy for all organisations in our network to publish events on their own websites using ESS. We can then configure our website to automatically check the list of those websites for events and compile a comprehensive and accurate calendar of European courses, workshops and other events. This can then serve to generate traffic to the websites of our members and expose a wide audience (of millions of people in Europe) to their wonderful events.

The ESS website provides detailed information for coders to work with. There is an example application for WordPress. So we don’t start from scratch.

Please send us an email if you are interested and able to help us this summer.

Warm regards from your EuPN Communications & Image Team

03/05/2017

International Permaculture Day 2017

International Permaculture Day on the first Sunday in May is a day of celebration and action for permaculture around the world. It is a day when visitors can see these myriad initiatives, ask questions of their developers and decide for themselves whether the permaculture design system has relevance to the challenges we face and to creating communities that are resilient in the face of undesirable and unforeseeable impacts.

Now in its 7th year, International Permaculture Day has grown rapidly from its roots as a local Australian initiative to a global day of permaculture celebrated in over 35 countries.

07/04/201707/04/2017

Host chosen for EUPC 2018

News from the EUPC-EUPN working group

The working group ‘EUPC’ was formed at the EUPC in Bolsena 2016 with the domain to design and implement the process for the decision on the future host of the bi-annual gathering of the European Permaculture Network (EUPC).

A group of former council members and new people have met regularly since and together created a new version of the application form plus additional questions and pattern for interviews with the applicants.

We now want to give thanks to the three organizations who stepped up and were willing to host the next EUPC, which we all know is a big task! For 2018 there were applications from organizations in the Netherlands, France and Ireland. Based on the criteria collected within the working group the new host was chosen. The EUPC 2018 will be held in:

Ireland from 8th to 13th August 2018 in Wicklow, the host is the “All Ireland Permaculture Gathering/Team”

One aspect of the decision was the geographic and climatic setting, wanting to give accessibility to people in the north, after the last two EUPC having been held in the south of Europe. The organization appling has experience with hosting big events. The application form provided clear information and sketched their plan for 2018. The communication during the process was active and quick.

The information on the application process in general (like the application form, list of criteria etc.) will be provided on the website soon.

EUPC-EUPN-Working group: Margreth, Monika, Pavlo, Petra, Valerie

Contact address: eupn-eupc@googlegroups.com

And here is an appetizer from Ireland for EUPC 18

An Oige, Knockree hostel and camping site will be our venue for EUPC 18 where the team from all over the Island of Ireland is getting ready to extend a very warm welcome to Permi’s from all over Europe. High in the stunning Wicklow Hills on a renowned walking route called the Wicklow Way, it is possible to walk to the site in a few hours from Dublin City Centre. It’s also on a regular Dublin Bus route to facilitate as car free an event as possible. Our strong traditions of story, music and friendly folk will make this an event to remember. We will weave it all together to contribute to the new permaculture story sharing and deepening our practice together.

There will be a selection of accommodation options and lots of amazing local food some grown on site especially for the EUPC 18.

Suzie Cahn Team coordinator/convener for EUPC 18 Wicklow, Ireland