Permaculture and Climate Change Adaptation
Inspiring Ecological, Social, Economic and Cultural Responses for Resilience and Transformation
I didn’t attend the 2013 International Permaculture Conference in Cuba, but several colleagues from Lisbon University’s Climate Change Impacts and Management research group did. At a workshop on climate change adaptation that shared findings from the BASE Research Project, a proposal arose for a book about permaculture-based approaches to climate change, which the Lisbon team agreed to take forward.
Eventually, I took the lead, with support from Gil Penha-Lopes and input from permaculture practitioners around the world who contributed chapter drafts, case studies and photos; photographic artist Carolyn Monastra generously provided photos from her Witness Tree project, and Ruth at Tin Cat Design did a great job on the layout and artwork. By the time of the next International Permaculture Convergence, in London in September 2015, we had a finished book and layout. There we ran into Maddy and Tim Harland from Permanent Publications, who offered to act as publishers, and by December the book was out. Best place to get it is direct from them, or from Chelsea Green in North America, and it’s also been translated into Spanish and German.
After that, things got personal. The very same month the book was released, the house I was living in was destroyed in the floods that devastated the Calder Valley (northern England) on December 26th 2015 (you can see it, coming into the bottom left of the picture from 50 seconds into this video, probably around the same time I waded out). Fortunately, my experience as someone suddenly made homeless by climate change (exacerbated by inappropriate upland land management) was a positive one: I received great support from my local community, and six months later moved onto a boat.
