Category Featured

Whether you’re thinking of becoming an owner-builder or retrofitting your home, you might be wondering which building materials will ensure an effective, beautiful and natural home. Some important factors to consider are: which resources are available to you locally (both on your property and in your area); cost of materials; thermal properties sought – passive solar design, thermal mass and insulation – and how these interact with each other; embodied energy involved; and the ease of material construction. With an introduction to these factors, you will be better equipped to begin choosing the materials that best suit your climate and house design.

If you’ve studied, read or participated in any permaculture- related activities in Australia (or far beyond), then you’ll be aware of Melliodora, the outstanding domestic-scale permaculture demonstration site situated in the village of Hepburn, Victoria.

Melliodora is perhaps one of the best known sites in the world which demonstrates permaculture design on a household scale. But it just feels like a happy and healthy place, with: a garden full of nut, fruit and forage trees, berries, vegetables, geese and goats; mudbrick homes; and lives worth living.

Founded by David Holmgren (co-originator of permaculture) and Su Dennett and their family in 1985, this site has progressed from a blackberry-covered hillside to a one hectare settlement of self-reliance and low-energy living at its best.

On 25 April 2015 a massive earthquake struck Nepal, affecting the country and its people deeply. There was a series of earthquakes over several days, with the most devastating one reaching 7.8 on the Richter scale. As well as numerous small tremors, a further large earthquake of 7.3 magnitude hit on 12 May.

These earthquakes caused serious damage to many parts of the capital, Kathmandu; however, the worst of the damage was seen in the rural villages in fourteen districts surrounding the city. Over 9000 people were killed, and nearly a million homes were destroyed. Infrastructure, farms and businesses were also destroyed, and years of small growth and development wiped out.

Sunrise Farm in Rani Patati village, near Kathmandu, is a community farm owned and managed by Mr Shyam Shrestha and his family. It is a working farm, established in 1995, offering demonstration, training, and seed and seedling distribution facilities. It also runs a program committed to demonstration of, and training about, sustainable agriculture and community development techniques and approaches. A diversity of foods and resources is grown, including: roots; grain; leaf, fruit and flower crops from trees, shrubs, grasses and herbs; firewood; animal fodder; and mulch. Crops are protected by integrated pest management strategies, encouraged by created microclimates.

We were inspired to build a tiny house out of necessity, to have our own space. We’d left the city in search of a more sustainable lifestyle, and for about a year we lived between a tent, the back of our car and in a borrowed caravan: it was time to build something of our own!

We started to investigate what could be possible for us at Agari Permaculture Farm (Victoria) the intentional community we were living at. We spoke to the council and the landowner about what could meet our needs. We wanted to build a home quickly, where: we didn’t need a mortgage, could have privacy, be warm, store our things, cook in and be able to move with our changing circumstances.

Adam was working with Rob Scott, from Hollyburton Park (Macedon Ranges, Vic), building house-trucks at the time, so that seemed like the obvious solution.

Bees are under threat worldwide. As we urbanise our environments we remove bees’ natural habitat – we create flowerless landscapes when we substitute concrete and lawn for flowering trees and shrubs. And agricultural practices, such as monoculture, remove the variety of floral resources bees need for good health. Add to these the increasing use of pesticides in crop management and domestic landscapes, and the future for bees looks bleak.

Mention bees and people invariably think of honey bees. Humans have had an important relationship with honey bees for millennia, managing them for honey and pollination services. The social European honey bee Apis mellifera can be found in most parts of the world, and was introduced into Australia in 1822; however, this species is only one of 20 000 species of bees worldwide. Australia is home to almost 2000 species of native bees, and most of them are very important plant pollinators.

Outside the small village of Bethel, in the remote mountains of Lesotho, southern Africa, is a remarkable community. Surrounded by degraded land, characterised by heavily eroded washouts, is a verdant forest of food.

Tiny and landlocked by South Africa, Lesotho is a mountainous country where most people rely on subsistence agriculture, and around fifty-seven per cent live below the poverty line of US$1.25 per day (World Bank 2010 data).

In the past, Lesotho produced enough wheat and corn to feed its people and export grain. However, soil erosion, land degradation and a decline in soil fertility, combined with a HIV/AIDS epidemic, contributed to a steady decline in production. And agriculture is also vulnerable to climate variability.

Many people speak of our current era as the time of the Great Turning, or the Great Transition. We are at a point in our journey as humanity where, as the philosopher Thomas Berry puts it, we must move from a ‘period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner’. The ways in which we produce, distribute and consume food lie at the heart of this transition. Many of us in Australia’s emerging food movement speak of this as a transition to a ‘Fair Food’ system.

WHAT IS FAIR FOOD?

Fair Food is food produced, distributed and consumed in ways that are ecologically sustainable, ethically sound and socially just. Fair Food is the Australian interpretation of the international concept of food sovereignty, which was launched in the mid-1990s by leaders of the global family farmers’ movement, La Via Campesina (or the farmers’ way).

Over the last two decades I have explored permaculture as a set of thinking tools for the energy-descent future and outlined a nuanced and over-the-horizon view of the diverse ways in which that energy-descent future might unfold. Since then ‘resilience’ has displaced ‘sustainability’ as the buzzword about the future, while ‘energy-descent’ still lurks on the conceptual fringe.

My soon to be released book– ‘RetroSuburbia’ (due to be published late 2016) – focuses on residential landscapes, backyards and behaviours in suburbia, where most Australians live or were raised. Less theoretical and dense than some of my previous work, ‘RetroSuburbia’ builds on my ‘Aussie Street’ presentations, showing how ordinary Australians can downshift and retrofit their houses, gardens and lifestyles to be more sustainable and resilient; to survive and thrive.

With this energy-descent future looming, the ‘lucky country’ is likely to get a big shake-up, with: the bursting of the property bubble; the ongoing collapse of prices for Australian exports; more extreme weather events; and geopolitical crises. We don’t have time – decades – to redesign and rebuild our cities, so we have to retrofit our suburbs to cope with a future where we might have more time, but far less capital and fewer resources.

Buena Vista Farm is a small family farm growing food (primarily pastured meat chickens, and a market garden with laying hens, bees, ducks, pigs and cattle), making delicious fermented foods, and teaching homesteading skills, in particular ‘from-scratch’ cooking (e.g. sourdough and sauerkraut).

We’re on eighteen acres of what was dairy farm that’s been in my family since the 1850s; I grew up here. Our plan was to grow coffee, and maybe put in a café, but we got excited about Joel Salatin’s ideas for stacked agriculture, self-sufficient (or inter-sufficient) and economically viable small farming.

It’s a tiny space to make an agricultural living, but with additional enterprises it’s possible. Our best investment was a commercial kitchen. We spend a fair bit of time running around after our three small children, but we love living and working here.

A fair food system begins with you. These three contributors walk their talk. They are actively raising public awareness of things you can do to make our food system fairer. Here are their top tips.

1. Learn to cook. It changes everything: you can make what you want, and avoid packaging and food miles.

2. Spend most of your money outside of the big supermarkets. This is a direct snub to the monopolisation of corporate control over the supply chain. For a guide for people starting out, see ‘7 steps to quit supermarkets’ at the Beyond The Trolley website (see www.beyondthetrolley.com).