Permaculture in Croatia

Check this out! From the International Permaculture Listserv...

Dear friends,


yesterday the national Croatian television showed a documentary about

permaculture and Fukuoka, where also the place where i live now was

included. We started a new ecovillage initiative with 3 grown ups and 2 kids

in an abandoned village named Furuli in Istria, Croatia. The video can be

seen on http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=53795486100&h=NJHmv as the

first part, and the second part on
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=51353174895&h=8QMky. we have also

a web page www.sensemanufacture.com, where Armano's artistic work is

presented. He use natural materials and waste for his work. The ecovillage

concept is to combine art, permaculture and spirituality, which we already

live here, as a natural and easy sustainable lifestyle. There is a lot of

work which is going on, we want to broaden the garden, secure water supply,

and bring more people here to join. Any volonteering, advice and other

support is warmly welcome.


I wish you all the best for the New Year, just keep on going and never

stop...



Marijana

Re-Generation US

Yeehaw! More AppleSeed Permaculture students rocking out in the world. The Common Sense Regeneration Project, is emerging from Eden Vardy, who took the Permaculture Design Course with me in Thailand (same course as Hugo, blogged below!) and is now an associate at Gaia University.

naTerra - AppleSeed Permaculture students in action!

Check out my student Hugo's new project naTerra -- Permaculture land & community development in East Timor and beyond!




The organizations tagline:
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"

Hugo took the 2007 Panya Project Permaculture Design Certification course with me, Christian Shearer, and friends. I'm teaching another one there in January...

Intro to Permaculture

Thanks to KrisCan for putting this video together! View more interviews here: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=kriscanshow&view=videos

Rudolf Steiner - The World Economy

A discussion with Seth Jordan from ThinkOutward has alerted me to Rudolf Steiner's lectures on the 'World Economy'. Seth thinks there may be some solid connections between this text and Financial Permaculture -- head on over and check it out!

Rudolf Steiner was an incredible visionary -- the founder of Anthroposophy, Biodynamic Agriculture, Waldorf education, and more.

Here are the Steiner Archives: http://www.rsarchive.org/index.php
The home of the Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association: http://www.biodynamics.com/
Wikipedia on Anthroposophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy

WOW. LocallyGrown.net ROCKS.

Seriously. This is one of the most awesome presentations I've seen yet at the Financial Permaculture Course.

In a Nutshell: Eric Waldrop of www.locallygrown.net has solved the major challenges of Traditional Farmer's Market's, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), & Buying Clubs with an easy-to-use piece of internet software. (No nerds required! - Did I saw "wow?")

The virtual farmer's market he runs in Athens, Georgia has 60 growers, 1500 customers, and does over $10,000 of sales every week. By Eric's reckoning, that makes it the largest Farmer's Market in Georgia and the One of the largest in the Southeast USA. (Did I say "wow?")

I almost can't believe the ease and grace with which Eric has used the permaculture principle "the problem is the solution" to transform the challenges of small-scale ecological farming into stunningly simple solutions.

The Food & Agriculture business design group is in complete awe. I'm not even sure if we need investment capital to get this business started! Eric has made this so easy that half the participants (myself included!) are running home to start up their own local virtual farmers markets.

Watch a video explaining locallygrown.net: Click Here

One word descriptions of Eric's presentation by Financial Permaculture Course participants:
Awesome, fantastic, connective, wow, congratulations, nouveau, hopeful, excited, hunky dory, impatient to do, inspired, valuable, do it, possibilities, resourceful, cool, great, brilliant, cutting edge!!!

WOW.

Chaordic Permaculture Institute picks up Financial Permaculture discussion

The Financial Permaculture Course is stirring up some discussion in the international permaculture community!

Stella of the Chaordic Permaculture Institute writes on the international permaculture list: (edited for relevance)

It's great that the term [Financial Permaculture] seems to have gotten all sexy, perhaps also thanks to this initiative, http://www.financialpermaculture.org (crashed servers with the traffic etc.)...

I've attempted to get my head round all the links (is anyone else confused?) and tried to 'map' some sort of wider scenario this might fit into ... and need help! please let me know how you would edit this brief panorama here:

http://permacultureinstitute.pbwiki.com/FinancialPermaculture

which you can edit yourself (as any of the rest of the site). just ask
me or any of the design team for the password. ...

thanks
Stella

"The Number One Cause of Environmental Damage"

"The number one cause of environmental damage on the planet is Fiat Currency." - Catherine Fitts

What? Huh? What is Fiat Currency? I don't know, but I'm about to find out.

Catherine Fitts just introduced the Finance Team - a humble and experienced team of attorneys, financial advisors, precious metal dealers, and more. Here's a very quick and incomplete overview of some of the team and some of their resources:


Franklin Sanders - precious metals
• http://the-moneychanger.com/


Phil Cubeta
• http://www.gifthub.org: how can we get our society and economy working for us?
(also look for the slightly more colorful Wealth Bondage archives...)


Anais Star
Operations Manager at Solari


Jason Eaton
Financial Advisor and calculated risk taker

"We can make a very substantial difference very fast."

Lunchtime at the Financial Permaculture Course. Catherine Fitts of Solari explains,

"I've been waiting for 57 years for this... I moved to a small town in TN, because it is small towns like this that will be able to decentralize and sustain themselves. This is the first time in my life that all the right people in all the right positions of influence are in the same room -- we don't know all the answers, but we're here, and we're going to figure them out together.

Andy Langford, Co-founder of Gaia University and Long-standing permaculture designer, sums up the potential power of this event:

"We're about to come to something. The people who have been doing sustainability projects for the last 40 years are now going to be able to go to the finance folks with their projects and all the sudden we see that we can make a very substantial difference very fast."

"God's Got to Be Proud of Y'all"

"God's got to be proud of y'all working to save the planet,"

Says Hohenwald City Mayor Don Jones to the gathered group of citizens and green business designers as the Financial Permaculture Course gets underway at the Blondy Church of God.

With 34 States represented, the next 5 days are bound to be full of creative collaborative design for local economic resilience. Stay tuned!

Financial Permaculture Wireless IS UP

Howdy All -

We're on site at the Blondy Church of God in Hohenwald, TN, meeting with Catherine Austin Fitts, Jennifer English, and the other core design members of the Financial Permaculture Course.

Our expert Gaia U ace IT team has been working with Pastor Marcus Webb and the rest of the generous folks at Blondy Church, and our wireless is up and running -- The network is "Financial Permaculture", no password required.

LET THE BLOGGING BEGIN.

Blogging Directives for Regenerative Learning Events

Patrick, Greg, and I sat down earlier this week to talk about how we
could best make information-rich blogs that are accessible to a wide
range of people. This meeting comes on the cusp of the financial
permaculture course, which we will be real-time blogging in order to
tell the story of a small-town gathering to explore solutions for a
resilient local economy.

Our Gaia University blogging team will use the following guidelines (as a
mindmap and a list) for creating quality real-time blog the
Financial Permaculture Course in Hohenwald, TN.



Blogging Directives

what...
- TELL participants' stories -- use their words and perceptions.
- HARVEST useful information and resources (ideas, people, theories, businesses, organizations, websites) for later distillation.

how...
- BLOG in the first person. Personalize the story you tell.
- ENLIVEN your posts -- use anecdotes, humor, and metaphor.
- WRITE clearly and accessibly -- short sentences
- LINK the crap out of your blog posts.
Aim for at least 3 links per post. At a minimum, link to
www.financialpermaculture.com
www.gaiauniversity.org
www.centerforaholisticecology.org

Other bloggers:
- www.permaculturedesigns.blogspot.com
- www.solari.com/blog
- www.gaiaemerging.com
- www.thinkingjamz.blogspot.com

- www.gifthub.org
- www.peaksurfer.blogspot.com

- CONNECT your posts to big IESD ideas: Permaculture, Peak Oil, Patrix-Busting, Slow Food, Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, Art of Mentoring, Collaboration
- DEMONSTRATE your content with images, live photos, and graphics.


- So, whenever any participant...
- ...echoes or resonates with the FPC meta-story, BLOG IT.
- ...tells a personal story that moves you, BLOG IT.
- ...shares a piece of juicy information that's new to you, BLOG IT.


Digiphon: This post was written with OmniOutliner Pro on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 (Leopard). The mindmap was made with VUE, an excellent, cross-platform, free concept-mapping and ontology software program.

Well done team -- crashed the website!

Thanks to Albert and Catherine for their appearance on Coast to Coast last night! They generated enough traffic to overload the financialpermaculture.com website for a few hours.

It's now up and running again -- head on over and take a look!

Holistic Management for Financial Permaculture

Fresh from Darren Doherty, visionary permaculture + Keyline designer at www.permaculture.biz, we would do well to take a look at Holistic Management for the financial side of Permaculture & Ecological Agriculture.

http://www.holisticmanagement.org/

Holistic
Management^® Works.

On 30 million acres worldwide.

HMI works with people around the world to heal damaged land and increase the productivity of working lands.

By
healing the earth’s desertified lands, and by managing healthy land in
concert with natural processes, we can repair our malfunctioning
ecosystem while achieving a “triple bottom line” of economic,
environmental and social sustainability.

Darren says: "What permaculture lacks is a decision-making framework. What holistic management lacks is a design framework. Let's put together a dowry."

Farmer's Market Report for the FPC

Here's the link to a Winrock report on Farmers' markets in the mid-atlantic:

http://www.winrock.org/agriculture/files/wallacemktrpt.pdf

Should be useful for the farmer's market folks...

Permaculture Agriculture Search Terms

Here are the most useful search terms I've found for the current phase of Permaculture Agriculture research I'm doing:

"small farm enterprise budget"
"organic enterprise budget"
"organic crop budget"
"small farm crop budget"


Basically I'm developing an excel-based  ecological agriculture design tool to provide, in phases:
1. basic economic information & budgets for new eco-ag projects
2. detailed sensitivity analyses and a decision-making tool for eco-ag elements
3. triple-bottom line accounting for eco-ag projects

anyone else doing this sort of work?

FPC Ethanol Resources

Some great stuff here for the Ethanol team at the Financial Permaculture Course::

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/reethanol.html

Processing Kitchen - Product Budgets

Financial Permaculture Course -- Green Business Research --

Here are some budgets for individual products that meet be processed in a Community Kitchen. From the INCREDIBLE British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture and Lands...

Value Added
& Food Processing: (pdf format)

ENTERPRISE	LOCATION	DATE
Apple Juice	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Apple Juice	Fraser Valley	Fall 1996
Salsa	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Pie Production	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Pie Production	Fraser Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Leather	Cottage Industry	Spring 1996
Jam Production	Cottage Industry	Spring 1996

http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/busmgmt/budgets/value_added.htm

Agile Development

Some fascinating stuff on Agile Development, Agile Project Management, Extreme Programming, and Scrum.

Extreme Programming Explained describes Extreme Programming as being:

• An attempt to reconcile humanity and productivity
• A mechanism for social change
• A path to improvement
• A style of development
• A software development discipline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming

the Agile Manifesto (as read from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) includes many elements similar to the Principles of Collaboration that are developing:

Some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto^[6] are:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
• Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (Co-location)
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organizing teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)

Patterns of Regeneration

Permaculture Designs -- whole systems solutions to the complexity of challenges facing our planet. Designs that harmoniously integrate humans into the landscape to produce food, water, energy, shelter, and all other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

First up: Financial Permaculture. A lower-right approach to local economic resilience.