Graham Burnett and Spiralseed are honoured and excited to be teaming up with the Vegan Organic Network to speak about  Permaculture and Veganism at London Vegfest this year! With the current rise in popularity of the vegan diet it is important to rethink approaches to both food and culture. Reducing your intake of animal products is a powerful and positive step towards a more compassionate lifestyle, and greatly reduces your environmental impacts. Yet even a vegan diet can have a high carbon footprint if still reliant on processed foods from industrialised agricultural systems. These often remove trees and forests from land in order to grow fossil fuel dependent annual crops, or rely heavily on imported products, cash crops and exploited labour. The Vegan way combined with permaculture design systems can create a world that is not just ‘sustainable’ but truly REGENERATIVE, restoring forests, repairing ecosystems, building soils, increasing biodiversity, developing local economies and addressing issues of social justice and animal liberation We are very excited that the need for more regenerative approaches.

An activist for social and environmental justice since leaving school in the late 1970s, Graham Burnett has taught permaculture workshops and courses for over 20 years, working with projects and organisations including Comic Relief, Bioregional, Capital Growth, One Love Foundation, Naturewise, OrganicLea, Birmingham Decoy, Trust Links, Green Adventure, the Vegan Organic Network, Empty Cages Design, Thrive, Metal, Ars Terra (Los Angeles), Ekosense Eco Village (Croatia), NuArc (Puglia), Wild Earth (Kentucky), as well as a number of Transition Town initiatives.

He founded Spiralseed in 2001, and is a regular contributor to publications as diverse as Positive News, The Sunday Times, Permaculture Magazine, Permaculture Activist, New Leaves, The Raven, Growing Green, Funky Raw, The Vegan and The Idler. He the author of The Vegan Book of Permaculture and Permaculture A Beginners Guide, and is currently writing ‘The Regenerative Allotment and Garden’ for Permanent Publications.

Learn more about the event below;

“One of the benefits of following a vegan way of life is that it leads to more sustainable and environment-friendly food production. Permaculture – the development of food ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient – has been hailed as one of the many solutions to food sustainability, especially for local communities who want to take back control of their own food production and be fully responsible for what goes into their bodies for their daily nutritional needs, in addition to being as self-sustainable as possible.

This year’s vegan festival VegfestUK London at Olympia London on the weekend October 27-28 will look closer at this subject, with a newly branded Permaculture talks room aiming to give visitors pointers on growing their own organic plant-based food and potentially creating their own sustainable organic food systems, using no animal products or by-products in the process – which is also known in the literature as vegan organic, or veganic, gardening and farming.

Kindly hosted by Vegan Organic Network, one of the main campaign groups for Plant-Based Permaculture, Farming and Growing, this new area is suited to complete beginners to food growing as well as seasoned campaigners and growers, and will cover areas such as how you can grow some of your own food at home in an ethical, organic and vegan way, growing veganic in allotments, the needs of various types of crops, the challenges with smallholding, and some of the initiatives run by community organisations and charities in encouraging everyone to grow their own fruits and veg.

The talk titles in the Permaculture area are outlined below, with exact times, full biographies and talk descriptions available on this page here.

Saturday

Iona Meadows – Vegan Organic Allotments

Piers Warren & Ella Bee Glendining – Don’t Just Eat Vegan – Grow Vegan!

Matthew Appleby – The Super Organic Gardener

Helen Woodcock and Chris Walsh – Food for All. The Kindling Trust; pioneering UK vegan organic projects

Will Gildea (The Vegan Society) – Grow Green Initiative of The Vegan Society

Sunday

Tony Martin – Mud and Mole Hills, the Reality of a Welsh Small Holding

Graham Burnett – Grow Beyond Vegan – An Introduction to Plant Based Permaculture

Helen Woodcock and Chris Walsh – Food for All. The Kindling Trust; pioneering UK vegan organic projects

Mark Banahan (The Vegan Society) – Grow Green Initiative of The Vegan Society

Other activities at VegfestUK London 2018

The talks on Permaculture complement nicely an amazing array of other features, including:

• Vegan Food Village with 25 caterers serving a mouthwatering selection of vegan street food
• Shopping from over 275 exhibitors with one-off show specials available,
• talks on Health, Environment, Fitness, Wellness, Justice, Radical Veganism, Activism, alongside Yoga and Qi Gong sessions,
• a Cinema,
• a Living Raw Zone,
• Cookery Demos,
• Comedy,
• a Kids Area,
• an Art Exhibition dedicated to veganism and animal rights,
• a 450-seater Auditorium hosting panels and entertainment,
• Live Music

and more!

Advance tickets are now on sale at www.london.vegfest.co.uk/tickets with special offers (BUY ONE GET FREE and BUY ONE GET ONE HALF PRICE) running for limited periods only.

Join the Facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/2005218553101007/ and invite your friends!