On June 2nd, Fotoessa, with a consistent focus on promoting SDGs, hosted sensitized fellow citizens who came to get to know permaculture (permanent culture). Practical botanist, Mania Vranopoulou, shared her recent inspiring experience from an Erasmus+ project in the permaculture community REGEN Habitat in Puglia, Italy and presented the basic principles and applications of permaculture.

Permaculture is an applied science based on many scientific fields and its goal is to design a sustainable lifestyle, i.e. a lifestyle that does not borrow from the future but instead ensures the sustainability of natural resources for future generations. It concerns and deals with all aspects of life, the residential environment, energy, food production, adaptability to the ever-changing conditions of life, human cooperation and the smooth and creative coexistence of all forms of life on the planet. It combines ancient with modern scientific knowledge and technology in order to realize its ethical theoretical basis: we take care of the planet, we take care of people, we put limits on consumption and we share the surplus fairly.

Permaculture design is a system of synthesizing mental, material and strategic elements into a model that works to benefit life in all its forms. The philosophy that governs permaculture is:

• cooperation and not competition with nature
• prolonged and careful observation and not prolonged, irrational action
• approach of living systems for all their functions and not only for the performance of a single product from them
• management of ecosystems in a way that allows them to manifest their own evolution

A sure result of using the knowledge and skills that permaculture gives us will be the liberation of most of the planet from human use to restore natural ecosystems. We have abused the environment and dumped our waste into ecosystems that we didn’t need to disrupt in the slightest if we designed and used our homes and gardens properly. By controlling our greed and taking care to meet our needs close to where we live, we can withdraw from much of the land that is now cultivated by conventional agricultural methods and let that land prosper.