Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss

Hello all! I have a (hopefully) fun thought experiment for you. Imagine you were going to start a permaculture project and the way by which you were choosing your site was just biodiversity conservation. In other words, if selecting your site didn't depend on climate, water availability, growing zone, zoning laws, etc... You were just focusing on having the most impact on biodiversity conservation for that region. What things would you be looking for? I for one thought it would be good to consider:

-places with high biodiversity and high risk (I'm in Europe, so I immediately zone in on the Med)
-places with many migratory birds
-places with endangered insect populations
-places with endemic species

Are there other considerations I'm missing? Are there particular locations you would be focusing on? Have you started a project like that already? I want to hear about it, please!

I have thought a lot about Sardinia because it's a large island in the middle of many migration routes, with lots of endemic species, a relatively robust natural environment, and sizeable climatological pressures/risks (fires, drought, desertification, and the like).

Hi all! This is an open call for people to tell their stories and share their triumphs and woes in different countries in Europe. I know there are some amazing storytellers here, and more knowledge than I can even imagine. I am still in the process of finalizing where I want to buy some land (so far Sardinia), but before I'm boxed in I thought "why not see what did and didn't work for other folks?". So here we are, let 'er rip!

Some topics could include:

-Renovating property (a ruin even)
-Affordability
-Immigrating and integrating (if you moved to another country)
-Beurocracy (hisss hisss, stay away!)
-Giving up (if, when and why?)
-Wish you did it differently?

Looking forward to reading it all!

Thanks all for these thoughtful responses. As far as I know, the prevailing winds are coming from the north, so that should help. We would also be a bit upstream from them as our land would come with a hill at the top of it at the furthest point from the other farm.

To answer the question about what we would be doing: we are hoping to develop a syntropic system as a teaching site for a Mediterranean climate, focusing most of our attention on rebuilding the water cycle and biodiversity in flora and fauna. We would live off of tourism/campsite income and eventually teaching/workshops once the system becomes proof of concept. There are a few other examples of this kind of setup in Spain and Portugal, but not so much in Sardinia where we are looking.

Our plan is full of principles and ideals (aka naive as hell, we know), which is why the presence of the big spray zone was an immediate concern. I see both sides of the argument: go for the good fight vs don't make an already difficult career/life choice more difficult. It's weird that I didn't notice it at all when I was there, but maybe I wasn't looking well enough. I only found out through satellite images.

Hi all! My first post here, so hopefully I'm not doing this in the wrong place. My husband and I are looking to buy a farm but we noticed that it's less than a kilometer from a large industrial ag farm that is obviously spraying all kinds of stuff. Is that too close for us to be able to have a healthy insect and soil life population? What are some considerations when living close to that kind of ag? Is there anything defensive we could do if we did buy the land? Thank you in advance for your wonderful insight!

I'm interested! I'll echo Jeff's questions and add: how do people get visas to stay long-term in Fiji?