O Eco Lodge Salve Floresta está abrindo o caminho para um futuro sustentável, apresentando a permacultura por meio de jardinagem orgânica
by Laurin Soares & Micayla Dennis
5 min read
What is permaculture?
Permaculture focuses on understanding how elements and systems affect each other in nature. With this information, we can transform the way we farm, focus on building green, encourage small-scale technology for local use, and educate people about sustainability. A great example of permaculture would be harvesting fruits and vegetables from an organic garden, which has the ability to reproduce itself like a natural ecosystem.
As we begin this journey towards sustainability, we have the opportunity to gain valuable skills, competence and resilience both at the lodge and in our local communities, helping us prepare for whatever outcome awaits us in an uncertain future. By applying these permaculture principles to our daily lives, we can move from dependent consumers to responsible producers.
Permaculture promotes a wide range of techniques and strategies, which vary significantly depending on location, climate, and available resources. While the methods may differ, the fundamentals of this holistic approach remain constant. By focusing on these principles, we can gain new insight that will help us become more adaptable in an ever-changing time.
The 12 Principles of Permaculture Design
The twelve principles of Permaculture articulated by David Holmgren in his book, “Permaculture: Principles and Paths Beyond Sustainability”
1. Observe and interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
2. Capture and store energy: By developing systems that harvest resources in peak abundance, we can use them in times of need.
3. Get a return: Make sure you are getting genuinely useful rewards as part of the work you are doing.
4. Enforce self-regulation and embrace feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activities to ensure systems can continue to function well.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services: make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumption behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources.
6. Don’t produce waste: by evaluating and making use of all available resources, nothing is wasted.
7. Design from patterns to details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.
8. Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between them and they work together to support each other.
9. Use small, slow solutions: Small, slow systems are easier to maintain than large ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable results.
10. Diversity of use and value: Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.
11. Use edges and value the marginal: The interface between things is where the most interesting events occur. These are often the most valuable, diverse, and productive elements of the system.
12. Use and respond creatively to change: We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing and then intervening at the right time.
Save the Forest meets Permaculture
At Eco Lodge Salve Floresta, we have been practicing organic gardening for 25 years. Our garden has a wide variety of organic vegetables, such as: kale, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, beet root, lettuce, scarlet eggplant, corn, cassava, leeks, chives and some herbs such as rosemary, basil and parsley. We collect all the organic matter from the kitchen and, after the decomposition process, we nourish the soil with the organic compost itself.
We grow banana trees on one hectare of land on our property to provide an abundant supply of fruit to feed the exotic birds of this region every morning. Guava trees produce sweet fruits when they are in season. If we are lucky, we have seen tapirs feeding on both bananas and guavas. Several other fruit trees make up our orchard, such as the Rangpur lime, which is widely used in cooking and in the preparation of our famous caipirinha. We are constantly learning and developing our own gardening system, adapting to the unique climate and local resources.
As permaculture became more widely known, we were pleased to see that our way of working was already aligned with the philosophy and ethics of the practice and followed the same principles. For us, one of the most important principles is to keep the natural ecosystem alive and thriving, while protecting our Atlantic Forest, teaching guests about the importance of producing food sustainably, without interfering with or destroying the natural environment. Our guests have the opportunity to experience this union with nature and understand how to change their lives to preserve nature and their surroundings now and in the years to come.
We work today for tomorrow
We are committed to improving the supply of organic fruits and vegetables, thus always adding new varieties of both vegetables and fruits to those we already grow, with the aim of providing our guests with more fresh food from our garden. We are always concerned about planning new educational activities to offer more interesting possibilities for our visitors.
Our ultimate goal has always been to raise awareness about nature conservation, sustainability and protection, so that we can all enjoy a better quality of life. We hope to one day be a bridge between ordinary people and a growing community of permaculture practitioners, offering unique and engaging educational opportunities.
We hope that visitors who come here will take away with them a motivation to become more aware and change their behavior towards natural resources and environmental preservation. We know that nothing changes overnight, but the examples, the walks in the woods, the birds in the gardens, all of this will help in this new perspective on life. They will gain a greater understanding of nature and, with this knowledge, they will love it even more than before. It is more important now than ever to stay connected with nature and live a sustainable, healthy and fulfilling life.