On my way on my permaculture Journey

What is permaculture? April 7, 2021

Hi everyone,

Welcome all, I hope you will have fun reading my first blog. On this website I am going to take you with me on my permaculture journey. In January I started my permaculture diploma with the British permaculture association. I will share with you how I will apply permaculture in my own life as well.

Often when people think about permaculture they think about gardening or agricultural practices but permaculture is much more than that but how does one describe permaculture?

There are many ways in how you can describe permaculture. I like how Rakesh Rootsman Rak describes it “Permaculture is common sense in a world where sense is no longer common”

If I would describe it with my own words I would say the following:

Permaculture looks at nature, how she creates richness and abundance and how we can use patterns in nature to design sustainable and holistic environments, which are good for the earth and everything that is living on it.

Permaculture is based on the permaculture ethics, earth care, people care and fair share. It uses design principles to create sustainable environments. Originally permaculture started with gardening and agricultural practices but it developed to a culture that is ethical, permanent and regenerative. It is not only used for designing gardens but it can also be used for your personal growth, community functioning and decision making processes. Permaculture can address different subject as you can see at the permaculture flower. When you follow the link you can click on the petals of the flower to get more information about the different subjects. The spiral in the permaculture flower states to start small with yourself and the way you live and build this out to community level, neighborhood, your city and finally the world.

As an ecologist I learned that everything is connected in this world from the smallest bacteria to the tallest trees. It is really interesting to understand how these complex systems work and how they create richness and abundance. Biodiversity loss has a big impact on the world, maybe you think that it is not so bad when some organisms are disappearing but if you look at the bigger picture where they are all interconnected and more and more links are missing your system gets way more vulnerable. Diversity is the key to a resilient system.

I think permaculture has the right tools and solutions to create such systems and I think it is important to spread permaculture around the world to switch from a capitalist environment to a more sustainable environment where people work together, support each other and build towards a more sustainable environment together.

This doesn’t mean that we are going back in time where people used horses to work on the land but we should also use the inventions and knowledge that we have nowadays and implement those in a sustainable way and so we can sustain human activities for many more generations.

During this journey I am also going to work on starting my own business in permaculture where I teach and inspire people about permaculture, where I will make designs for people and where I bring people closer to nature because I believe in the healing power of plants and nature.

I would likte to have my own homestead where I can have gatherings and workshops about different topics in permaculture. I would like to make permaculture more visible in Northern Sweden and show people that we can also do Nordic permaculture which is maybe a bit different from other places since we have a quite harsh climate here but with some adaptations we can do it even in the boreal region.

As I am writing this blog I finished my first non-land based design, which is my action learning pathway that gives me the structure, deadlines and evaluation on my permaculture diploma journey. I am working now on my teacher design and I followed the permaculture teacher course with Graham Bell and Rakesh Rootsman Rak. In May I will start my first land-based designs. I am going to design two homesteads in Jämtland and I am very excited to start with this. Later I will show and tell you more about this design.

If you would like to follow my journey please follow me on Instagram, Facebook or Linkedin where I keep you updated with nice permaculture stuff.