2013.05

Interview by Emma De Masi

Stella is a permaculture designer and social activist working and living in La Palma, Spain. She recently organized the EcoNova Conferences that united experts and activists in the sustainable economy to talk about solutions and new models for creating a more just and sustainable world.

The Econova group chose Wiser.org for the interactive parts of their conference because as Stella says,“What I love about Wiser is that it starts from the “WE” picture. It is about collaboration and creating together, and we share the same values and the same ethics.”

Stella was born in Italy and her father was an engineer. With her family, she traveled and lived all over the globe. She says that living among people from different countries and cultures gave her an awareness of social injustice and prejudice. Moved by this early consciousness, she started volunteering as a teenager, working toward poverty relief and environmental justice in the UK where she then stayed and lived for 21 years.

Passionate about science and the arts, she found the perfect way to combine them throughpermaculture design, which models sustainable man-made environments after natural ecosystems. She says, “At school and at university, I was passionate about science and the arts but I could not do both because our system separated them so much. Design, especially permaculture design, is a brilliant unification of many things. It’s just so rational, and I love it because it is about building a new world by building the alternative instead of just protesting.”

She started studying permaculture design in London while working in education and in public schools. In 1993, she and a group of girlfriends created Green Adventure, an NGO dedicated to urban regeneration using permaculture design.

She moved to Spain almost by chance, and it was there she realized that a more structured method for permaculture education was needed. Since then, she has been working on two big projects: setting up an innovative node of the Nodo Espiral Permaculture Academy through teaching and writing the Integral Permaculture Designers Manual and setting up an EcoVillage on the land she has been living on since 2006. As she says: “The Integral Permaculture Designers Manual is a project big in purpose because it aims to give a much more holistic base for permaculture practice by studying and sharing tested permaculture models that have been shown to work well in the real world. The manual provides both a wider and more detailed account of the science of permaculture.”

Stella is a person who makes things happen. Her EcoVillage in Spain aims to be a place where the local community can create a sustainable system inspired by the conscious application of all the models outlined in the Integral Permaculture Manual: “The system that we have designed together is an unjust one designed to perpetuate injustice. We need to redesign it starting from ourselves by testing different alternatives and by detoxifying ourselves of a destructive pattern that pushes us to look at the problem instead of at the solution. We get very negative about problems instead of thinking, ‘This is an interesting problem—how do we solve it in the best possible way?’ I see this destructive pattern coming in at a personal level in my community, which is identical to the one that causes damage on the global scale.”

Many women inspired Stella in her work and mission: “I am inspired by so many women that I cannot name just one. For example, Donella Meadows is a big inspiration, and we honor her as the mother of Integral Permaculture. As well as her decades of work as a very talented educator of systems thinking, she is the lead author of “Limits to Growth,” a milestone report that alerted the world to the unsustainable course of Western development back in 1972. It went on to inspire Rio and the international sustainability agenda, as well as the birth of permaculture design.”

She continued, “There is a brilliance that I see often in women who have the ability to see a more holistic picture, who display huge compassion combined with a great intelligence in terms of really understanding how complex systems work. The Integral Permaculture Designers Manual is full of amazing women like this—we honor and give a voice to women who did amazing things but often were not given due credit for their brilliance, like Hazel Henderson who we’re thrilled to have in the EcoNova Conference, whom we honor as the Mother of EcoEconomics.”

Stella is an active member of our Women Empowered group. When asked if she had a message to share with other women, she commented: “Feminism has always been about social justice first and foremost, but the system really beat it down. Propaganda made it all about being against men, and it seems like they managed to get away with it because now most young women are ashamed to say that they are feminists. So I think for any woman to keep her integrity and her spirits, we need to know our history and we need to support each other. Every time you support another woman you are supporting yourself and living in a more balanced way.”

Photo credits: 8thlife.net

Want to learn more about Stella and her work with permaculture? Connect with her on Wiser.org and visit her website.

The team that brought you the EcoNova Conferences is running the “live” online events for International Permaculture Day. Check it out!

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