Greetings and bright tidings for the New Year, and if there has ever been a time to realize our highest dreams and visions this is it!  We are writing to update progress behind the scenes at (IM)PERMANENCE film project, embarking now in 10 weeks!

Our busy year teaching Permaculture across the globe has given way to some rest and recuperation and a chance to really turn our focus back to the impending (IM)PERMANENCE film trip!  Its now so soon that we begin our journey down the UK and out onto the continent for the beginning of our epic global quest.

This project has been designed to produce a wide array of outputs and serve many functions and it is this aspect of the trip we wish to share a little about as we build up to departure.

With a strong desire and commitment to be of benefit through our work, Michelle and I have designed this trip primarily to create an engaging and exciting documentary series detailing clearly successful and replicable regenerative design solutions in all climate zones across cultures.  With a focus on regenerative agriculture, Permaculture design, community reliance and resilience we are seeking out the best examples that we can find to share with everyone interested in a brighter and more fulfilling future based upon ethics and values that transcend particular cultural ideologies and belief systems.

As regenerative designers we desire to have this powerful systems thinking approach touch all areas of our lives.  We decided to run a crowd source campaign to fund both the basic travel costs and camera equipment, and in a return will release regular feature length documentaries online, as well as a host of other resources.  These will include full- length interviews with the pioneering folks we meet, photography, articles and resources developed to empower individuals and communities to integrate holistic design approaches to farms, businesses, projects, communities and households.

The trip is a designed vision, a quest to find the place to start our own community farm based project integrating the best of what we discover along the way, serving to further the realization of a stable future through strong emphasis on high quality accredited education and action learning embedded deeply in the local community.  It’s a chance to really assess what is at the cutting edge of useful and replicable solutions, sifting out ideas and ideologies that hamper true innovation and appropriate application.  There will be an amazing opportunity to develop networks and support to cross-pollinate the incredible work that is already happening.  We have also been developing a range of short regenerative agriculture courses and workshops to compliment the Permaculture education we have been focused on to be able to respond to communities we find along our travels with positive and proven solutions.   We will be releasing news on this soon as we build up to leaving.  We aim to complete the project by recruiting a dedicated editing team to revamp the vast footage into television potential material, benefitting from new “eyes” on what we have captured.

What has been one of the most joyful aspects of the preparations has been the crowd sourcing campaign.  We have set a goal of raising $22000 and have achieved 61% at the time of writing.  That’s the bare minimum to ensure we can go ahead with the plans.  Its been amazing to receive support both fiscally and in writing from all over the globe.  We are touched how generous people are and how common the shared desire for clear and positive solutions for meeting our universal needs.   Hoping people will direct us both in content and who to visit next, we will be tapping into hidden networks to eek out unheard of projects and solutions in all corners of the globe.  By accumulating and synthesizing what we find we hope this can really become a powerful open source learning experience for a huge amount of people.  That’s what makes regenerative agriculture and Permaculture so appealing, its focused on civilizations most fundamental resource bases upon which we can all clearly acknowledge full reliance.  Crowdsourcing is a very useful model, asking a lot of people if they are willing to contribute $1 or more in return for various incentives.  It is informal yet engaged and cyclical, and most importantly it’s a quick and effective way to get creative projects running without turning to banks or asking friends or relatives for a potentially awkward loan.  Its been so successful we have encouraged others to use the model, a so far 6 friends have successfully run campaigns for their own projects.  Its an empowered response to collaboratively create things that there is a shared desire to see manifest.   There is so much more value created when money is kept moving and treated like an energy flow as opposed to something static.  If money is taken out of circulation or out of a system then collective value cannot continue building in the same way.

We are inspired by the notion of Right Livelihood, and investing money both in and like ecosystems.  Tangible assets such as food, materials for clothing and shelter seem to have lost some of their intrinsic value in the abstract economic world we currently inhabit.  But considering other forms of “capital” has been pivotal both in how we interact with our community and how we envisage designing an abundant and resilient future for our young daughter.  Financial Permaculture is something we have been very engaged with through our teaching activities and lifestyle, and something we will be exploring deeply through these travels.  We feel clear that there is a lot of work to do in both getting through personal distress around money and finding creative ways to engage fruitfully in ways that include all forms of true capital.

We would love to welcome you to follow our epic journey, to really participate in the rich un/learning we shall uncover!  If you feel moved to contribute please visit our Donate page at www.impermanencefilm.org and help pass the site across your social networks as we make final preparations.  For the Earth!

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