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GAIA Host Collective
Learn Permaculture in the Catskills. Get certified by the Permaculture Institute of USA.
August 16-29, 2008 in Woodbourne, New York
http://green-phoenix.org/08-08-pdc.html
A Certificate Course for Urban and Rural Residents, Planners, Land Managers & Design Professionals. This training covers the fundamentals of ecological design, given by two of the country's most experienced permaculture instructors, and many local guests. Join us at a rural retreat center near Woodbourne, New York. Upon completion, course attendees will receive a Permaculture Design Trainee Certificate from the Permaculture Institute.
Who Should Take This Course: The Permaculture Design Course has transformed the lives and enhanced the careers of thousands of people around the world, including architects, landscapers, community developers, social workers, city planners, teachers, students, farmers, gardeners, homeowners, Yoga teachers, business owners and others. It's for anyone serious about creating a sustainable future! The principles of permaculture apply to any scale of design, to highly urbanized areas, suburbs, and rural communities and properties. The permaculture approach crosses between disciplines and creates links between them.
Hi,
does anyone know if something like this exists in the UK?
Regards, Nick.
Yes it does. Permaculture is a global movement. UK has a great magazine: http://www.permaculture-magazine.co.uk/ that will find where this is being offered near you. The dominant magazine here in the USA is http://www.permacultureactivist.net/ . Be careful of anyone treating the concept like it's some sort of gardening technique. Here is a good place to start in the UK: http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/ and his free Beginner's Guide: http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permaculture/
Thanks, Semaley. Good links. Here's a para that made sense to me..
"Putting massive effort into attempting to ‘tame nature’, such as by damming valleys and flood plains or creating and maintaining bare soil by plough, is not only energy consuming, unsustainable and destructive, it is also unnecessary when we can meet the needs of people and the environment by working in harmony with, or even directly utilise, natural systems. Instead of using massive chemical inputs to control pests, why not encourage predators such as ladybirds and hoverflies to do our work for us? Or why not construct homes that utilise passive solar energy and wind power rather than building nuclear power stations?" http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permaculture/ (Item #7, 'Work with nature, not against')
My wife is reading Pollan's 'Omnivore's dilemma', and is very excited by the 'Grass Farmer' Joel Salatin. Another approach to many of these ideas of using Nature's energy to our and it's advantage, not looking on it as an Opponent to Best.
Bob
This is great if like me you are building a home out in the country on 20 acres surrounded by 100-300 acre farms. I can grow most of the food I need, without almost any added fertilizer and the ground water table is still in pretty good shape for small amounts of irrigation, what fertilizer I do need the neighbors cows can provided if I let him harvest 5-10 acres of grass to fed them in the winter. I prefer to use the tractor but could get by without it. I can also trade some of what I grow with my neighbors for things they can more easily grow and I want.
Problem is with the exception of building the house in the country, I don't do any of those other things food is still far too cheap to bother at this point. Modern agricultural techniques fertilizers, pest control, large tractors allow us to pull huge yields per acre 5 and in some cases 10 times as high as natural methods. While you and I may have enough land to sustain ourselves via natural means unless you have a way to give everyone enough land to do this, or are able to get farmers to increase land in production about 5 times, we still need the chemicals and fuel to be able to feed the cities.
This all goes back to Carrying Capacity we as the world are long past the point in population to be able to just live off the land with out massive outside inputs. Sure I can and you can but there are 6+ billion of us on this rock and not everyone can.
I actually live in a small city, and while we have growing potential at our house and at a community garden, we also have farms nearby, several CSA's to choose between. Farmers need customers, as far as that goes, so shipping produce to a city isn't a bad deal.. probably not enough, esp with the fisheries crashing, but it's a concentrated market, so if there's a usable freight link, river, ocean, railway between them, then that exchange will proceed.
I don't deny we are in all probability in population overshoot, but aside from education and availability of birth-control in the third world, it's an aspect that I can do very little to affect, while lifestyle choices and creating the best community designs/infrastructure is where most of us can work to make the system as resilient and survivable as possible. I just can't let the UNworkable problems make me so overwhelmed and despondent that I don't do any of the preparations that are going to push us in the right direction.
We'll all get ours at some point anyway. 'Survival' is just a form of procrastination, after all.
Bob
"Life is a short warm moment. Death is a long cold rest." - Pink Floyd
Hi Jokuhl--If your wife likes Joel Salatin's farming methods, she'll love Logsdon's All Flesh is Grass.
Why would anyone need a freakin certification? Sounds like a conventional moneymaking scheme to relive the naive of their money. "You have a need, we have the product... sign here".
Nothing against Permaculture, but when it is used as just another business opportunity to make money, forget it. If people are serious about Permaculture then they supply the knowledge, you supply the labour, money need not enter into the transaction. Otherwise it is just another conventional business about the bottom line and scaling/leveraging up the product to simply make money to live a conventional lifestyle.
False prophets? I'm sceptical, convince me.
Burgundy,
I've had the same thought.
There is surely something to permaculture (small p), but Permaculture (TM!) seems a bit overly interested in charging cash money for this and that.
That said, there is plenty of permacultural information to be found for free here and there.
Permaculture is not something you can learn out of a book, it takes experience and knowledge to get it right. And where do you think that experience knowledge about permaculture came from? People who are serious about permaculture INVEST their time and money in learning these skills and in publishing. None of this is free. You're naive if you think people will invest without any return.
I can see your sentiment, but this isn't a gardening course. I'd be happy to break down the costs so you can see that nobody can make a serious living charging this amount. Certainly I won't make anything (money out of my pocket, not in it). I seriously doubt the teachers are in it for the money, either. Even the Ashram will have expenses from buying food for two weeks, cooks, cleanup, etc. Inevitably, somebody has to clean the toilets and somebody needs to be available to answer a phone to validate someone took the step to learn this design concept. Imagine you put classes down on your resume and nobody could answer the phones where you took the course to validate what you said on your resume (did they do well, present for the whole course, what does the piece of paper mean, etc).
If a teacher wanted $10/hr, that would be similar to 80+ hrs of work for a 72 hour course, or $800. I don't know about you, but $20k/yr doing this full time wouldn't pay my rent either (beginner teachers tend to ask $1k to $2k per course, as teaching these courses is part time at best). To make it worth the effort to a dedicated teacher, you might want to pay more. These particular teachers, though considered among the best available, aren't expecting top dollar (I've seen teachers charging over $5k). Since this course will have multiple top notch teachers, you can imagine we'll need at least a dozen or two students at the $850 tuition being charged.
Inexperienced teachers won't have many students, so end up charging more to make up for having only a few students. Experienced teachers attract many students, so can ease up on tuition. Experienced teachers also tend to have successful design businesses, such that a course is more of a sense of duty than a business interest.
Any extra money after paying the teachers and other course costs (travel expenses, advertising costs, drafting supplies, architecture drawings, handouts, etc) will be used to seed future PDC courses, help students who can't afford it, etc. I can tell you first hand that some students end up not paying anything. Green Phoenix Permaculture is a 501c3, so your contribution to help lower course costs would be tax deductible. There is already a list of folks wanting to take this course, if you'd be willing to help them (I still won't be paid).
If $850 is still too much, feel free to look for an alternative. Either way, the individual skills and concepts being taught (through hands-on demonstration and direct involvement in the design process) would cost you far more than $850. This is an intense course and isn't for everyone. My course included some 18 hour days, though the course itself is billed as 72 hours.
A weekend series course might also be an alternative, if you can't afford paying for accommodations in addition to the course tuition (there are plenty of course offerings). However, even weekend courses range from $700 to $1000, depending upon location (still need to pay the rent for classroom space). We had a $300 weekend course here in NYC, which we can't find class space to repeat. Note that these weekend courses tend to involve the entire weekend, plus heavy homework (your design project).
In the ideal sense, we would have properties near cities that didn't have a mortgage to pay, provided all of their own food (including for students, teachers, apprentices, and interns), and housed teachers that didn't need any further money. It's a nice thought, but not reasonable to expect we can magically provide. Personally, I have that in mind, but it takes time to raise money to buy million dollar properties that can support this sentiment.