Land Law Change

We petition you to change national planning law to allow Low Impact Developments(LIDs) and Eco-villages to be established to enable people to conduct productive and regenerative land stewardship and create carbon negative energy and food security. Eco-villages are a global phenomenon with people from every continent forming sustainable communities with ever increasing resilience.

It is possible to develop communities which are self sufficient, low impact and carbon negative,with the objective of reforesting/replanting with perennial polyculture edible forest garden, as we believe that regrowing the Earths biomass is the essential starting point to solving the problems facing humanity. This can only be effectively and sustainably achieved by allowing people to move onto the land to re-grow productive closed loop ecosystems.

The efficacy and value of this system of food production is supported in numerous papers including the Rand Corporation occasional paper "Perennial Polyculture Farming - Seeds of Another Agricultural Revolution?"
http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2007/RAND_OP179.pdf
This is also supported Worldwatch Institute and the Post Carbon Institute amongst many other respected bodies. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6126

The three or four generations alive at this crossroads in the path of humankind have a responsibility to ensure that future generations inherit an Earth that can be lived on. We believe that it is possible to achieve this by allowing the planet to literally grow more. Reforesting half of the worlds depleted agricultural land would mitigate all human green house gas emissions. Its exactly what would happen anyway if the worst did happen for humanity and 99\% of the species was lost. Without mankind to continually control the land, natural succession would occur and the biome would regrow. Within a relatively short time the Earths biomass would increase removing CO2 from the atmosphere and re-establishing stasis. With this in mind, surely it makes sense to start replanting now to try and mitigate the multiple systems collapse that we are currently rushing into.


By replanting following permaculture principles and utilizing biochar/gasification, we can address the problems of global warming, peak oil, soil depletion and water security, whist providing a source of fuel, food and material for shelter which would allow people to create low impact homes and small communities and to provide for their needs locally and organically. Also, by creating forest gardens to provide for our food/fuel supply, we will increase biodiversity and reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; retain more water in the soil and re establish natures way of controlling the water cycle through an increased overall biomass; increase the fertility of the soil and stop soil erosion, along with secondary benefits such as increased housing provision, more jobs and strengthened inter-reliant communities. The list of benefits that development in this manner achieves goes on and on.

The value of Biochar as a method of CO2 sequestration and also for its yield improving and soil amending qualities is well documented by The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, The Royal Society, many scientific papers from across the globe as well as publications such as The Economist, National Geographic and Time Magazine. http://www.unccd.int/publicinfo/poznanclimatetalks/docs/Submission_by_UNCCD_to_AWG-LCA_on_Biochar.pdf

Micro-generation of electricity from gasification of biomass with biochar co-product is an existing technology available from Ankur Scientific Ltd in India with micro-sized units producing from 4kWh at an efficiency of 1kWh per 1.3 Kilos of biomass. The value of this type of electricity generation is documented in this report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations "Woodgas as an Engine Fuel" ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/t0512e/T0512E00.pdf


It is possible to achieve benefits to individuals, communities, society and the ecosystem itself with a simple change in planning law to enable this holistic solution to develop and thrive.

Its been done in Wales with Policy 52 and we demand the right for individuals and groups to exercise their duty of care to ourselves and future generations by living low impact or carbon negative lives whilst restoring soils with forest gardening and biochar production/use. Its our watch!

We hereby petition you to change planning law and enable people and communities to take responsibility for the urgent and fundamental problems we are all facing.