21-30th October: “Build a small wind turbine” construction course in Nea Makri, Greece
1 August 2016
OpenAFPM: An open source software tool for designing small wind turbines
20 January 2018
This part of the Mediterranean we call home, full of intense landscapes and diverse local traditions, is a really special place. Five thousand years of human activity have left behind a rich history and culture, but also a mosaic of degraded watersheds and highly eroded landscapes… Water scarcity and soil depletion has always been a primal concern for most part of the country. Lack of knowledge and wrong policies have been pushing people towards wrong solutions, aggravating the problem further. More recently, changing rain patterns and frequent – extensive wildfires are speeding up the desertification process, bringing up issues of water and food security.
Our story is the local manifestation of a global phenomena of environmental degradation that takes place in every single region of the planet at different speed and intensity, and calls for local action, adapted to the abilities and the particularities of local communities and ecosystems. In order to ensure our survival and well being as a species we have to actively engage in restoring our local ecosystems, bringing them back to their natural state of lush and abundance. We need sets of conceptual tools and effective techniques for integrating human activity into natural ecosystems, converting it into a revitalizing and stabilizing factor that can promote complexity and diversity.
Recognizing the urge to act in this direction, we have designed the Mediterranean Permaschool, that consists of a new set of educational activities aiming at conveying Permaculture design methods and practices, with a special focus on applications relevant to the Mediterranean climate. Permaschool will take place on Nea Guinea’s Farm, in Attica and the educational activities will be running on a weekly basis for a 3 months period. These educational activities aims at offering solutions to sustainability issues related to the arrangement of human activity and the management of natural resources on a farm scale, in order to meet a wide range of basic daily needs in food, water, energy and housing. They cover the core modules of a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) and have the aim to empower participants to make positive changes that will benefit both their communities and the natural ecosystems that surround them. As our target group mostly consists of people with great enthusiasm but limited financial resources we decided to give all the Permaschool courses for free, in order to make it really open and accessible.
We ask your support to give 40 young people the opportunity to acquire this knowledge and to use it in existing and future land based projects that will reinforce the development of the Greek Permaculture network. The money that will be gathered will cover teaching fees and transport as well as material costs.
https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/school-of-mediterranean-permaculture-in-greece
