Permaculture Design Certificate / Curso de Diseño en Permacultura

Posted on Apr 23, 2014

So i’m half way through my Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course here in Barcelona. It is organised by a team of facilitators who got together via Permacultura Barcelona and it is very awesome.

We have so far studied (quite intensively at times) the theory and principles of permaculture, how to organise your house and vegetable garden, how to build efficiently and sustainably using natural materials, some techniques for observing nature so you can imitate the best bits and, my personal favourite; food forests. Of course each of these is a giant subject in itself, but the PDC gives you a base covering all the elements of sustainable/self-reliant/resilient living – that’s why it’s such an important qualification for me to have. And no, it’s not completely hippy (you get comfortable quite quickly and start to enjoy moments like “I think a couple of om’s before we start would be a good idea”)

It leaves me in a bit a quandry, to be honest, about how I am going to transform the Boodaville site into a permaculturally functional space, but i know stopping to plan the site carefully now is going to save me a huge amount of energy in the future. A problem I have already spotted, for example, is that a fairly steadfast rule of permaculture design is to have your veg garden less that 50m from the house, but at the moment in Boodaville parts of the “house” are already more than 50m away from other parts of the “house”… (ooh – maybe i put the veg garden in between and solve that one…. we’ll see later on how the actual plan develops)

14th December 2014

20th April 2015

Sadly, on Sunday sitting behind the yurt, I found myself doing an activity which could be considered meditative, but that actually only serves to guide your thoughts to the depressing reality of plastic pollution. Did you know that plastic never biodegrades, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces? So when you leave a tarpaulin over a sand pile, in an attempt to “save your sand” from the wind and 6 months later find that half of the cover has gone, you know that the tiny plastic ribbons it has disintegrated into are now littered around an otherwise unpolluted valley.

The task I quietly undertook while chastising myself for allowing this to happen, was picking the tiny blue ribbons out of the grass bit by bit. On one hand knowing that every piece I pick out means less traces of plastic in the soil, and on the other hand wondering how many people in the world have left tarpaulins to completely disintegrate. The plastic which I saw as a solution to what was essentially a financial problem (I paid for the sand and didn’t want to lose it) has caused pollution, wasted my time in trying to clear that pollution up, and didn’t even really work as for most of the last six months since the sand was mostly open to the air.

In the future I will think more, everyone needs to think more, about whether the solution is really a solution…

Dec 2016

Far away from Boodaville we’ve seen the world rocked by “post-truth” politics in 2016. I can’t write a summary of the year without recognising changes in the global political landscape. The effects of these surprise election and referendum results will start to be seen in 2017, but from our perspective they reinforce the idea that “democracy is not just a ballot box “.  As well as being aware of global issues and ticking boxes / supporting campaigns, we must focus on the longer-term; start engaging in the deep work of co-creating our own communities and find new forms of direct democracy to shape our collective future. 2017 will be the year that Boodaville publishes a prospectus outlining the present situation and future plans as we start seriously looking for people who want to buy-in and join and shape our eco-community.

The geodesic dome is the big change on site this year and for me this beautiful structure symbolises the connections that have been made between volunteers, participants and facilitators and fills me with energy to carry on with this project. Thank you so much to each and every one of you who has been part of Boodaville this year, let’s all stay on the path of people care, earth care and fair share and leave the world a little (or a lot) better than we find it.

Anna