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I was bored and looking at popularity of google search terms, and although there was a boost around COVID, it seems that searches for permaculture have actually decreased compared to 20 years ago. Most associated terms didn’t fare much better with the exception of “regenerative agriculture”, which seems to the “hip” term, but didn’t really exist a few years ago.

I thought I saw more permaculture based content on sites like Youtube, but I suspect it’s just that algorithm and my own little bubble.

Is popularity actually decreasing? If so why?

I mean if anything we need it more than ever as the effects of climate change are increasing. Thoughts?

I live in the Netherlands (married Dutch, but American) and we have been looking for years to start a regen/sustainable/permaculture ag project somewhere where land is more affordable. We are just really bad at making decisions and have been oscillating between three countries (Spain, France and Italy) for years. We’ve decided to just move in February because looking for property remotely is too slow, but for that we need to pick a country (I understand how insane this sounds, it’s driving us crazy). All three have huge pros and also huge cons.

We keep landing on Italy being the best option because it’s easier to start a tourism business to make money do you don’t apply too much pressure on developing the land too quickly/unsustainably, but the level of pollution kind of scares me. I also kind of like the idea of moving somewhere that is drying out to really test the limits of dry land farming and to be a positive example in a region that needs it (like much of Spain), but maybe that’s naive. But we just recently had a kid, so suddenly social infrastructure has become more important (here France really shines), but we wouldn’t be able to grow more Mediterranean plants which is the biome we are more interested in.

Basically, we can’t stop going through this cycle And we’re going crazy. Any input from people with experience (positive and negative) is very, very appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.