Silvina Miguel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1970, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she realized she had no idea about what was going on in the world she had been living in.
Having been a mainstream journalist for most of her life, except for the undeniable reality of climate change and the water crisis, she had been buying and selling what the system was feeding her. Oblivious to the reality that she finally discovered when she left everything behind to start a journey that led her to Permaculture.
She left Argentina for Indonesia. She left Buenos Aires for Bali. She left the newsroom for the rice paddies. She left journalism for Permaculture. It was May 2015.
She started volunteering for Sawah Bali, an NGO that was teaching permaculture principles to Balinese farmers. Then, she became a permaculture trainee at Earthbound Permaculture, a regenerative agriculture garden designed by permaculture principles. While learning, Silvina was blown away by the philosophy she discovered in David Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.
After a few months volunteering in Bali, she started collaborating with Emas Hitam Indonesia, a local NGO operating on permaculture and agroecology principles, providing ecological solutions to poverty and development in SE Asia.
Recently, she went back to Argentina and took the opportunity to visit El Manzano and get her PDC certification.
She’s been taking workshops about soil and urban permaculture and she’s been attending lectures about agroecology, like the ones Ms Vandana Shiva delivered last June, at the International Environmental Film Festival that took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since 2016, she has been training farmers around Indonesia with her Balinese partner at Emas Hitam Indonesia and together, along with his family, they have been developing Emas Hitam Site names Ancut Garden, Recently Emas Hitam Indonesia has created a COVID19 response program named "Mari Bekebun" (let's garden in Bahasa Indonesia) that distributed more than 12.000 seedlings to 370 families in Desa Petulu and Petulu Gunung villages North of Ubud, Bali. In November 2020 all the families that collected the seedlings will be given the opportunity for training as EHI has been awarded a grant from Australian Volunteers Impact Fund program to do so.