• Home
  • About
  • Resources
  • Contact

Findhorn New Story Hub

Change the Story, Change the World

  • Blog
  • New Story Film
You are here: Home / Ecology & sustainability / Permaculture Climate Statement | Findhorn Fellow Albert Bates

Permaculture Climate Statement | Findhorn Fellow Albert Bates

22 November 2015 Leave a Comment

Permaculture is a system of ecological design as well as a global movement of practitioners, educators, researchers and organizers, bound by three core ethics: care for the earth, care for the people and care for the future. Permaculture integrates knowledge and practices that draw from many disciplines and links them into solutions to meet human needs while ensuring a resilient future. With little funding or institutional support, this movement has spread over the past forty years and now represents projects on every inhabited continent.

The permaculture movement offers vital perspectives and tools to address catastrophic climate change.

Human-caused climate change is a crisis of systems — ecosystems and social system — and must be addressed systemically. No single new technology or blanket solution will solve the problem. Permaculture employs systems thinking, looking at patterns, relationships and flows, linking solutions together into synergistic strategies that work with nature and fit local conditions, terrain, and cultures.

Efforts to address the climate crisis must be rooted in social, economic, and ecological justice. The barriers to solutions are political and social, not technical, and the impacts of climate change fall most heavily on frontline communities, who have done the least to cause it. Indigenous communities hold worldviews and perspectives that are vitally needed to help us come back into balance with the natural world. We must build and repair relationships across cultures and communities on a basis of respect, and the voices, leadership and needs of frontline and indigenous communities must be given prominence in all efforts to address the problem.

Permaculture ethics direct us to create abundance, share it fairly, and limit overconsumption in order to benefit the whole. Healthy, just, truly democratic communities are a potent antidote to climate change.

Both the use of fossil fuels and the mismanagement of land and resources are driving the climate crisis. We must shift from fire to flow: from burning oil, gas, coal and uranium to capturing flows of energy from sun, wind, and water in safe and renewable ways.

Soil is the key to sequestering excess carbon. By restoring the world’s degraded soils, we can store carbon as soil fertility, heal degraded land, improve water cycles and quality, and produce healthy food and true abundance. Protection, restoration and regeneration of ecosystems and communities are the keys to both mitigation and adaptation.

Permaculture integrates knowledge, experience, research and practices from many disciplines to restore landscapes and communities on a large scale. These strategies include:

• A spectrum of safe, renewable energy technologies.
• Scientific research and exchange of knowledge, information and innovations.
• Water harvesting, retention and restoration of functional water systems.
• Forest conservation, reforestation and sustainable forestry.
• Regenerative agricultural practices—organic, no-till and low-till, polycultures, small-scale intensive systems and agroecology.
• Planned rotational grazing, grasslands restoration, and silvopasture systems.
• Agroforestry, food forests and perennial systems.
• Bioremediation and mycoremediation.
• Increasing soil organic carbon using biological methods: compost, compost teas, mulch, fungi, worms and beneficial micro-organisms.
• Sustainably produced biochar for carbon capture and soil-building.
• Protection and restoration of oceanic ecosystems.
• Community-based economic models, incorporating strategies such as co-operatives, local currencies, gift economies, and horizontal economic networks.
• Relocalization of food systems and economic enterprises to serve communities.
• Conservation, energy efficiency, re-use, recycling and full cost accounting.
• A shift to healthier, climate-friendly diets.
• Demonstration sites, model systems, ecovillages and intentional communities.
• Conflict transformation, trauma counseling and personal and spiritual healing.
• Transition Towns and other local movements to create community resilience.
• And many more!

None of these tools function alone. Each unique place on earth will require its own mosaic of techniques and practices to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

To deepen our knowledge of these approaches and refine our ability to apply and combine them, we need to fund and support unbiased, independent scientific research.

Each one of us has a unique and vital role to play in meeting this greatest of global challenges. The crisis is grave, but if together we meet it with hope and action, we have the tools we need to create a world that is healthy, balanced, vibrant, just, abundant and beautiful.

Related

Filed Under: Ecology & sustainability Tagged With: climate action, permaculture, permaculture climate statement

  • Sign up to receive weekly notifications of blog posts and other New Story Hub news. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Post a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About the Findhorn New Story Hub

The Findhorn Foundation's New Story Hub is a resource centre for anyone engaged in the cocreation of a new evolutionary paradigm. We invite you to join us to accelerate our collective understanding of what might be, what is emerging and what must change, both in us and in the human story. read more

In the blog

Your Exclusive Preview of The Great Turning at Findhorn!

As you will know from our previous update, we have wound down the New Story Initiative to open to a deeper calling in service at this time. Many of you had asked to be kept informed of what emerges … [More]

  • Mind and Heart ~ Charles Bukowski
  • I tell you this ~ Mary Oliver
  • Do What You Love
  • Charles Eisenstein in Conversation with Interspecies Communicator, Anna Breytenbach
  • Watch the New Story Film
  • Rise Up Again
  • Reverence for All Life ~ Chief Luther Standing Bear
  • Conscious Life ~ Gangaji
  • The Ancient Woods Trailer
  • The slow circles of Nature ~ May Sarton

Tags

activism awakening change clean energy climate climate action climate change community consciousness culture shift documentaries ecology economy ecovillage living education energy environment evolution of humanity films Findhorn Findhorn Foundation and Community future for humanity global change humanity's evolution inspiration movements nature new story New Story Summit New Story Summit Anniversary Stories peace renewable energy social change social justice spirituality story Summit Reflections Summit Stories One Year On Summit video clips sustainability sustainable living transformation videos world change youth

About the Findhorn New Story Hub

The Findhorn Foundation’s New Story Hub is a resource centre for anyone engaged in the cocreation of a new evolutionary paradigm. We invite you to participate and to help us accelerate our collective understanding of what might be, what is emerging and what must change, both in us and in the human story. read more

The Findhorn New Story Hub is an initiative of the Findhorn Foundation: Scotland, UK, IV36 3TZ. Registered charity number: SC007233

Get Notified

Join our Findhorn New Story mailing list. We won't give your email address to third parties & you can unsubscribe at any time.
    See our Privacy and Data Protection Policy here.
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Search the Findhorn New Story Hub

  • Sitemap
  • Terms & Privacy Policy
  • Copyright
  • Credits
  • Contact