Permaculture, self-sufficiency and a great desire to improve our reality
When I find myself talking to someone about what the future of man will be, I receive the most incredible responses: from those who don’t worry in the slightest about the matter to those who are completely catastrophist, “there’s nothing left to do anyway”.
I like to think that we still have important opportunities and that, despite having committed ourselves deeply in recent decades to destroying our home, our Mother Earth, we can start again from scratch.
I’ve noticed that on Earth many processes are slow and require thousands, sometimes millions of years, whilst others are extremely fast.
I think of Earth as a great living organism, and a bit like we’ve done many times in life, I believe it’s willing to put a stone over it and start again from the beginning, as if we had never mistreated it.
More and more woods in Romagna
One of the fastest and most efficient processes I see every day before my eyes is that of the regeneration of land and its life. In the municipality of Bagno di Romagna, where I live, once all the mountains were cultivated. Looking at photos from 70 years ago, it becomes really difficult to recognise the places that instead were fields and today are totally covered by woods. Much of the Apennines and also the Alps have experienced this process. In the Thirties it was estimated that in Italy there were 4 million hectares of woods compared to 11 today in continuous increase. On the one hand the news is worrying because it means unfortunately that more and more food arrives from abroad. Clearly even in the plains the cultivated lands have decreased due to urbanisation. On the other hand, in the last hundred years, there has never been a development of wild flora and fauna like in recent decades. Every day it seems that the natural world is retaking possession of what it had lost.
And if the woods are so quick to restore balance, we too could do the same. If nature has endowed us with such a sophisticated brain, it’s not to destroy it, but to begin an active path of coevolution with it. We can cooperate with biological processes to create new forms of life and organisation of living matter. In many native cultures men consider themselves guardians of the Earth, custodians who watch so that all natural processes and cycles can unfold at their best.
Think what a beautiful paradigm shift it could be for our lives if every morning we woke up with the intent of having to do something for our Earth rather than only for ourselves.
RE-starting to take care of ourselves
Honestly I don’t think that in Romagna we could ever become like the natives. Our cultures are too distant and it’s very difficult for this step to happen, but we could certainly take many ideas. As much as we consider them savage, in a long-term vision they seem extremely more intelligent and wise than us. For them only a sick animal destroys its home. Our illness seems at a really advanced state, but natural cures already exist, which have no contraindications. They are not the cures that come from governments, large multinationals or universities. As Einstein maintained “You cannot solve a problem with the same type of thinking you used to create it”.
Permaculture: small example, great changes
One of the natural cures I consider most valid is certainly permaculture, an approach based on the observation of nature’s mechanisms: unfortunately still not widespread in Romagna. Natural ecosystems are lasting, independent, resilient. If we manage to deeply understand their functioning, taking these ecosystems as models, we can create more lasting and self-sufficient human settlements. With permaculture it’s possible to design a house, a farm, a village, a city and even an entire region. A few years ago I began to design, according to the rules of permaculture, Autosufficienza Farm, an agricultural business and agritourismo in Bagno di Romagna. The mistakes I’ve made have been many and I still continue to make them, but the constant thought is that I’m on the right path and that permaculture can allow us to restart a new life respectful of nature and rich in the experiences of the past.
Obviously my dream doesn’t end with Autosufficienza Farm because a single project cannot change the fate of our life on Earth, but I think that a small successful example can influence someone else bigger. Perhaps a municipality? And why not, our entire rich region? Enveloping every dwelling, every town, every city in Romagna in a cocoon of intensely inhabited nature, giving back to Earth the mantle of trees that was stolen from it by overly greedy human beings, carefully seeking to limit the exploitation of the resources that biological processes generate every year, providing for our needs through biological rather than mineral resources, only then will we be able to inhabit our Earth sustainably. We will have to renounce our toys and waste, but we will be rich in essential goods that will make life truly beautiful.
Francesco Angelo Rosso
