Category Regulars

I am so happy to bring you issue four of Pip Magazine, with its bee friendly focus.

I have learnt so much about bees and their lives, their needs and their importance to our lives on this planet. A huge thank you to Adrian Iodice, whose infectious passion and enthusiasm about bees has opened my eyes to the wonder of our tiny friends.

My own passion for bees slowly crept in as I began to hear and read about natural beekeeping and the importance of caring for bees. I then got a beehive of my own and did a natural beekeeping course, and now I am hooked.

Putting together this issue I have talked to many dedicated bee advocates and have come to realise that everyone needs to understand how much we need bees, and it is crucial that we make major changes – right now – to help save them.

and opportunities. We in the permaculture community have a key role to play in both mending the present and creating our preferable future.

To be part of this future we need to take stock of where we are as a design system. That’s why Australia’s permaculture community of practitioners is coming together in March on the shores of Bass Strait in beautiful Penguin, Tasmania, for APC12. Here we will reflect, take stock and re-imagine permaculture’s role in a future that can be different from the usual depressing, business as usual scenario, and energise ourselves for the tasks ahead.

APC12 will be a space for us to meet, re-connect, affirm each other, debate, learn, argue, inspire and re-energise ourselves for the hard work we all do to make the world a better place.

David Holmgren’s book Permaculture: principles & pathways beyond sustainability (2002) is still in demand around the world. With editions now in ten languages, it is reaching more people than ever. The new e-book format allows people to carry it with them anywhere. Another advantage of this format is that the website links (and there are many) have been updated; with a web connected device you can look up the references instantly. And the footnotes are linked throughout the text. This e-book will enable people in countries where postage costs are prohibitive to finally get hold of David’s book at an affordable price.

The e-book is available in e-pub format for $19 from www.holmgren.com.au

We are also selling printed copies in our shop at www.pipmagazine.com.au

Not far from the north-western coast of Italy, near the French border, is a beautiful and fascinating ecovillage created out of a crumbling medieval village. The Torri Superiore Cultural Association was founded in 1989 to restore and re-inhabit the abandoned village and create a cultural centre.

Torri was an early adopter of permaculture in Italy, and continues to lead permaculture education programs. The restored stone village is surrounded by farming terraces, many of which the Association manages as permaculture gardens and orchards. It also tends free range chickens and produces many homemade products such as bread, pasta, olive oil, honey, jam, yogurt, ice-cream, culinary herbs and herbal teas. To produce the olive oil, the Association worked with neighbours and the local community to restore the old water-powered olive press in a nearby town.

Issue three, here we are. Pip Magazine is now into its second year of publishing and it is growing strong. What began as a crazy, out-there idea is now well and truly a happening thing. As they say, it takes a community to raise a child, well it takes a community, a permaculture community, to raise a Pip Magazine. Yes, there are few key people that pull it together and make it happen but it is the whole permaculture community that support it and help it grow.

If you the reader didn’t buy the magazine we wouldn’t be here. If all the people that gave to our crowdfunding campaign didn’t do their bit, we never would have printed the first issue, if all the newsagents and stockists didn’t have Pip on their shelves people wouldn’t stumble across us and if you didn’t tell your friends, families and colleagues about us, people wouldn’t know we existed.

Then there are all the amazing people who give their time, knowledge and ideas to help create the magazine. Pip is really just a big collection of shared information from the permaculture community. Each article is a contribution to our community to help us all live more sustainably and more self-reliantly and these articles are there to inform and inspire us.

Claire Dunn, a burnt-out forest campaigner with an ever-growing to-do list, is in danger of becoming a ‘pale-faced greenocrat’ – all media savvy and no soul. To reconnect with nature, she signs up for a year-long wilderness survival program, where she learns to build a shelter, gather bush tucker, trap animals, tan hides and – hence the book’s title – make fire without matches.

However, it’s the psychological aspects of her time in the wild that make this book such a fascinating read. Over the year, Dunn burrows into deep solitude, where she’s shaken by tremors of conflicting emotions: grief then ecstasy, self-flagellation then idle contentedness. The prose style keeps step with her journey, becoming more figurative and descriptive as she explores her blossoming eco-spirituality.

Her introspection bears insights into the inescapability of violence, the tyranny of the ego, our cultural indoctrination to be continually busy, and our need to let go of pointless striving so that we can exist in the moment. Male readers might feel alienated by passages on returning to the feminine, but will still appreciate the author’s extraordinary quest, told with honesty and the courage to be herself. To quote the epilogue: ‘What a beautiful, crazy thing to do’.

Botanical name: Cytisus proliferus

Common names: tagasaste, tree lucerne

Origin: Canary Islands

Description: a fast growing, deep rooted, evergreen leguminous shrub or small tree with prolific white flowers in late winter and early spring.

NW Tasmania hosts the next Australasian Permacullture Convergence [APC 12] in March 2015. The town of Penguin is home to the RESEED Permaculture Centre and the NW Environment Centre who will host the event from 9–12 March, with a festival before and tours afterwards. It’s 40 years since permaculture conversations began between Mollison and Holmgren in Tasmania and so the theme is ‘Honouring the past– transforming the future’ – the challenge to permaculture.

Visit: www.apc12tas.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/apc12tas

The Chikukwa project is an amazing story of African villagers who turned their lives around. This film made by brother and sister team; Gillian and Terry Leahy is a feel good story about an incredible permaculture project that has been growing in Zimbabwe for the last twenty years.

Where once the people of the Chikukwa villages suffered hunger, malnutrition and high rates of disease, this community has turned its fortunes around using permaculture farming techniques. Complementing these strategies for food security, they have built their community strength through locally controlled and initiated programs for permaculture training, conflict resolution, women’s empowerment, primary education and HIV management.

Now they have a surplus of food and the people in these villages are healthy and proud of their achievements. Their degraded landscape has been turned into a lush paradise. www.thechikukwaproject.com $12.99 digital download or $20 for the DVD