Experiments in Creating Regenerative Futures
In the context of the climate and ecological emergency, ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ approaches don’t go nearly far enough, often involving maintaining an impoverished and degraded landscape and/or community. Permaculture’s ethics, principles, tools and practices can be applied to every area of life, inspiring us to move in the direction of restoration and regeneration, looking for ways to restore a landscape and build a culture that is healthy, resilient and adaptive, that cares for the planet and for life, aware that it is the most effective way to create the abundant future that can be so difficult to imagine for the whole community of living beings. We are working in three main areas to build this future.
Regenerative
Agriculture
Permaculture offers a rich framework of ethics and principles for regenerating our landscapes. By creating a water retention landscape with zero runoff, we are on the way to restoring the functionality of our ecosystem. Capturing rain recharges the groundwater, providing fertile soil for the many thousands of trees we’ve planted, accelerating the succession to a closed canopy forest which produces abundant food, and varied habitat for the wider community of living beings.
Regenerative
Community
As a community we can face the climate and biodiversity emergencies with resilience, so we experiment with different ways of supporting each other. We work with local networks, distributed community and ephemeral communities, as well as with our own intentional community, using tools from social permaculture and sociocracy to facilitate participatory decision-making processes. We include non-human voices through tools from deep ecology and other practices.
Regenerative
Activism
We use art and activism to accelerate the cultural paradigm shift we urgently need. Practices drawn from deep ecology and the Work That Reconnects help us deeply experience our interdependence with nature and process our shared pain at the damage we humans are causing. We seek deeper conversations around the uncertain future, raising awareness and curiosity through art works like Almenara – Memorial a la Vida and symbolic, poetic actions with the XR La Janda Red Rebels.
VISION AND MISSION
We created Almenara to awaken awareness and action towards a regenerative life inspired by nature.
Our mission is to explore and share our experiments in permaculture-based models of living that regenerate Catalina, the land we care for, and our interpersonal relationships, while experimenting with creative and innovative ways to make Catalina a sustainable permaculture project, and to share our tools with the wider world.
EVENTS
We love receiving visitors, but Catalina is a private community and so we ask that visits are arranged in advance. We hold several public events during the year, and the best way to find out about these is to sign up for our occasional newsletter. To find out about what we’ve been up to and what sort of visits we organise, click below.
