Tag Issue 3 Premium

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.

I see the greatest problem as blindness to the life of the planet; therefore, irresponsible destruction of the planet in every seed, whether it be for food or energy. Food is being produced through a system that is devastating the planet. In fact, what is being produced is not food, it’s not worthy of eating. It’s destroying our health and the health of the planet. Look at energy: why are we relying on coal, when we know there are more efficient alternatives that the earth provides, that won’t harm the planet and don’t violate people’s right in the abusive way that coal does.

What can we do to help challenge this problem?

In terms of ecological threat, at the 1992 Earth Summit the UN identified erosion and extinction of biodiversity, and climate change as the two problems facing our planet. But for both of those problems, that seem to be separate, the answer is ecological, organic agriculture everywhere; in a little pot in your balcony, in your backyard, in your community, on your farm. Why do I say that? Seventyfive per cent of the planetary destruction is coming from industrialised agriculture, whether it is ruination of water or soil, or loss of biodiversity. Forty per cent of all greenhouse gases are coming from a food and agriculture system that is industrialised.

Over 90% of plant species have mycorrhizal relationships with fungi, via their roots. Such relationships tend to be symbiotic, to sustain the relationship: fungi obtain sugars and shelter, and help the plants to obtain minerals, nutrients and water. The mycelia are very fine and spread well beyond the root zone, sometimes several hundred metres, increasing plant access to available nutrients. A few mycorrhizal relationships are parasitic.

Fungi can grow on the inside (endomycorrhizal), or on the outside of roots (ectomycorrhizal). The ‘endos’ are a bit like our gut biome, and can help plants cope with extreme environments; ‘ectos’ are the most familiar, because we can see them without a microscope.

Fungi are at work in permaculture systems everywhere, and we can benefit from understanding the roles they play, and working with those. There are many guilds that we can create which incorporate fungi, and this area of study is evolving rapidly.