
Food waste reduction: cooking with scraps
Unleash your creativity with “cooking with food scraps”. Tips and recipes to make a positive impact on our planet by reducing food waste.
Have you heard the word “Permaculture” but aren’t quite sure what it means? Or perhaps you’re aware of the movement but aren’t sure how it can be applied to everyday life. In this guest post, Dr Charlie Brennan and Bridget O’Brien explain the key principles of Permaculture, along with some suggestions for how to bring its practices into your life.
Permaculture is the design and practice of living sustainably. It’s a set of principles and a guide to action. It is most effective when seen as a reflective practice rather than a rigid doctrine.
We live in the most challenging of times. Earth’s self-regulating and self-making life systems are being increasingly challenged and compromised each and every day. Permaculture offers one of the few wide-ranging, realistic, intelligent, holistic and practical responses to this unprecedented scenario.
There is great beauty in this. Permaculture works with community and living systems. It is an enduring movement that motivates, brings people together, inspires, and offers a ‘to do’ approach to sustainability and the healing of people, communities, and ecosystems. What could be more important and beautiful than this?
Permaculture is a guide to living a regenerative life; designing and living life using and respecting principles of ecology, design, ethics, community, and cultivating healthy relationships.
We are Garden Juju Collective – a team of designers, educators, and practitioners dedicated to sustainability, regeneration, and healing of people, communities, places, and ecosystems.
Our motto is ‘Design. Heal. Grow’ and one of our main inspirations is Permaculture which we weave together with design, facilitation, gardening, conservation, rewilding, ecopsychology, traditional land stewardship, as well as a sense of place, and the design of perennial food systems and community gardens.
Permaculture, as a movement, originated in the 1970s in Australia, drawing from a range of sources and inspirations including Masanobu Fukuoka’s ‘One Straw Revolution’, Robert Hart’s amazing food forest project in the UK, and PA Yeoman’s work on water, vegetation and soil in Australia.
The original magical texts by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren were a response to those times of 1970s protest and civil disobedience, counterculture, and ‘returning to the land’. Permaculture offered a guide to action at the intersections of design, ecology, and agriculture.
Of course, sustainable and regenerative practices were not invented in the 1970s. Many of the ideas, practices, and inspirations of Permaculture have Indigenous and multicultural roots. It has become increasingly clear that an essential part of the Permaculture movement must be social inclusiveness, social justice, and acknowledging where ideas, practices, tools, plants, and materials have come from.
This means that prescribing practical actions alone is not enough. This also applies to ideas, ideals and inspirations – these alone are also not enough. All our decisions and actions take place in complex social, ethical, economic and environmental situations. So it’s vital that we take action, but for those actions to be effective we need to constantly review and reflect upon these actions. Some of these reflective questions that can be asked include:
This is reflective practice or ‘Praxis’ in which actions and ideas feed each other in a continuous positive feedback loop. This is how to cultivate an abundant and just permaculture approach to life. Below are some daily and weekly actions that can be taken and some of the underpinning principles.
It is generally agreed that changes in lifestyles are most effective and sustainable when they are modest, incremental and realistic. If we set our targets too high there is a danger of ending up disappointed, depressed, or morally paralysed.
Below are eight ways to practically apply Permaculture to our everyday and weekly lives:
Dr. Charlie Brennan and Bridget O’Brien are explorers, designers, and educators offering in-person and online consultations, design, project management and workshops worldwide through our design collaboration Garden Juju Collective.
Bridget & Charlie are the creative developers of ‘Adapt’ design game. ‘Adapt’ stimulates, supports and challenges you to think and act differently. It’s an exciting game, a teaching tool and a designer’s assistant all in one. ‘Adapt’s creative process can be, and has been, applied to anything and everything from the design of a garden, to how to live sustainably, to business ideas, to ways of caring for community and self. There are over 12 ways to use the 60 card deck to help you design the life of your dreams. To purchase a game or for more information visit www.playadapt.com
Unleash your creativity with “cooking with food scraps”. Tips and recipes to make a positive impact on our planet by reducing food waste.
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