Permaculture, a nature-based solution to restore our planet

Ny Antsa and Nancia are member of the Malagasy Youth Biodiversity Network. To contribute to raise awareness on the biodiversity week “Our Solutions are in Nature”. They choose to introduce you to permaculture.

For May 19 is a day to show that Biodiversity contributes greatly to our food security and health. If you are questioning what are then the relation to permaculture? And we hear so much about it but what does it mean?

Basically, permaculture is a systemic design to achieve sustainable human settlements. To simplify it,

permaculture can be categorized as an agriculture practice to achieve sustainable production with fewer resources and less maintenance. This approach makes it so relevant to achieve a sustainable society in which we are using our environment but in sustainable way. In the health crisis, we are living today because of the coronavirus, we see how relevant we have to promote local production and circular economy. And these set of principles are at the core of permaculture.

In fact, permaculture is about taking care of nature and humans so both thrive and live together in balanced way. Putting these values together, permaculture is about design your environment to achieve self-sufficient and environment friendly. Permaculture is not something new it is inspired from the traditional function of ecosystems before everything was changed through all conventional production that we are using today. The use of our ecosystem has shown that we need to get back to how ecosystem is working naturally to ensure we live in a sustainable and productive planet. Humankind has modified so much our planet that we have to redesign and get back to how normally it works before all changes we made and permaculture is way to do it.

Briefly, the core value of permaculture is: Care of people : provision for people to access those

resources necessary to their existence; Fair share, or share the surplus : by managing our own needs and designing for abundance, there will be enough for all people and species on the Earth; and Care of the Earth : provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.

Practically, there are so many benefits we can get through adopting permaculture. It is respectful of existing nature and ecosystems to make sure we live a better place for present and coming generation. It uses sustainable production and consumption making it energy-efficient. It is easy to adopt and can adapt to any scale even at your balcony or small garden at home or your large farming field.

If you wish to expand your knowledge on permaculture, here is useful link: http://permacultureonline.com/. You can also be a member focused in UK but no worries they are expanding to worldwide their activities: https://www.permaculture.org.uk/. If you are a booklover, we advise you to get One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka (1978). If you want to follow a personality that promotes greatly permaculture, we can follow: Geoff Lawson.