Earth Activist Training | Winter 2017

January 7 – January 21, 2017
Black Mountain Preserve, Cazadero, CA

Earth Activist Training is a 2-week intensive residential PDC course.
Cost: $1700 – $2200 US sliding scale. Includes lodging and fabulous meals. Work trade available, apply early.
Instructors: Starhawk and Charles Williams with assistant-teacher Pandora Thomas.
Register Now – http://bit.ly/EAT-Winter2017

Learn how to heal soil and cleanse water, how to design human systems that mimic natural systems, using a minimum of energy and resources and creating real abundance and social justice. Learn how to read the landscape, design integrated systems, harvest water, drought-proof your land, build soil, sequester carbon, make compost and compost tea, biochar, and bioremediate toxins. Explore the solutions to climate change, and the strategies and organizing tools that can put them in place. EAT also focuses on the social permaculture: how do we organize ourselves, resolve conflicts, make decisions, work together effectively, and sustain our spirits.

Participatory, hands-on teaching with lots of practical projects, games, songs, and laughs along with an intensive curriculum in regenerative ecological design that earns a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC).

Earth Activist Training combines an internationally-recognized permaculture design certificate course with a grounding in spirit and a focus on organizing and activism. We teach interactively, not just through classroom presentation but through games, songs, ceremony, guided visualizations, design practice, field trips, and lots of practical, hands-on projects. Hands-on projects vary with weather and needs but may include mapping, water harvesting structures, graywater or roof catchment, compost, compost teas, sheet mulch, plant propagation, planting trees and shrubs, seed-starting, natural building—cob, straw-clay or plastering—and a collaborative design project. Our projects can be tailored to students of varied levels of physical ability and diverse ages and previous experience.

Who is the training for?

We firmly believe that everyone can benefit from learning the tools and insights of permaculture for earth regeneration. It’s not just about gardening: It’s about social design, public policy and survival strategies for these challenging times.

That said, our students include:

    Young people looking for a career in sustainability.
    People in mid-life looking for a new direction.
    Retirees wanting new fields to explore.
    Established professionals wanting to broaden and deepen their knowledge of sustainable alternatives.
    People who are starting, or members of, or interested in joining intentional communities, cohousing and eco-villages.
    Gardeners, farmers and ranchers.
    Green business entrepreneurs.
    Teachers, environmental educators, and youth workers.
    Workers in school gardens and community gardens.
    Architects and landscape designers.
    Artists, musicians, poets, writers and dancers.
    Community organizers.
    Activists from many movements, including environmental justice, food justice, global justice, anti-oppression, Transition Towns, Occupy, human rights workers, and others.
    Dreamers and visionaries.
    And more…

You can be any age, you don’t need to have previous experience with permaculture or horticulture, and we can accommodate a broad range of physical abilities or limitations. Please contact us at earthactivisttraining@gmail.com if you have specific needs you’d like to discuss.

Topic list:
We touch on all the topics below—some in more depth than others, obviously, in a two-week course. But the overarching thing we teach in the course is not any specific subject, but rather how they all fit together into systems that can meet our human needs while regenerating the environment around us.

Permaculture ethics, history and principles

Design:

    Observation
    Reading the landscape
    Site analysis
    Zones and Sectors
    Mapping
    Design tools and processes
    Design project
    Broadacre permaculture
    Urban permaculture
    Permaculture for gatherings, mobilizations and disaster situations

Water:

    Creating healthy water cycles in living systems
    Water harvesting
    Swales, ponds and earthworks
    Keyline systems
    Erosion control
    Rain catchment for roofs
    Greywater and blackwater systems

Earth:

    Soil structure
    Soil biology
    Soil building
    Compost
    Sheet mulch
    Compost teas and ferments
    Mushrooms
    Bioremediation and mycoremediation
    Biochar

Plants:

    Plant needs
    Plant guilds and polycultures
    Cover crops
    Agroforestry
    Food forests
    Plant propagation
    Tree care: pruning and planting, choosing varieties
    Sustainable forestry

Animals:

    Animals in our systems
    Raising and feeding “microherds”—healthy soil microbial communities
    Beneficial insects
    Bees
    Worms
    Humane treatment of animals
    Poultry
    Livestock for the homestead
    Holistic management grazing systems
    The role of predators
    Wildlife habitat
    Alternatives for vegans

Climate:

    Climate change and strategies for adaption and mitigation
    Microclimates
    Windbreaks
    Drylands
    Tropics
    Wetlands
    Cold climates

Energy:

    Alternative and renewable energy: evaluating and designing systems
    Active and passive solar
    Wind
    Microhydro
    Alternative fuels and biogas

Natural Building:

    Insulation and thermal mass
    Sustainable forest products
    Cob, straw-bale, light-straw-clay
    Plasters

Social permaculture:

    Personal regeneration and self-care
    Site design to support social aims
    Urban redesign
    Group dynamics
    Communication tools
    Governance structures for collaborative groups
    Ecovillages and community design
    Meeting processes
    Meeting facilitation
    Alternative economics

Organizing and activism:

    Strategic organizing
    Pro-active and prefigurative movements
    Campaign planning and organizing
    Power mapping
    Organizing in diverse communities

Spirit:

    Connecting to the spirit in nature
    Creating ritual and ceremony
    Grounding and centering
    Sensing and shifting energy
    Drumming, dancing, singing and meditation
    Daily rituals

About the Place
Black Mountain Preserve is in the Cazadero hills area of northern California, in west Sonoma County. The Preserve centers around a complex of dorms, dining/kitchen, classroom and offices, surrounded by 485-acres of forest and coastal hills. Expect a wide variety of natural beauty. Walking trails and unused dirt roads lead off in several adventurous directions, through ecosystems of redwood/fir, oak/madrone, and coastal prairie. You can see the ocean from high points on the property, while a couple of creeks run through in low spots.
We have held EAT sessions at Black Mountain since 2001; it is currently owned and operated by the Padmasambhava Peace Institute, a Tibetan Buddhist group. At one time BMP was a state camp for petty offenders, but renovations have made it a cozy and comfortable conference center, a real-life swords-into-ploughshares example. There is a Peace Garden and a Rain Garden designed by EAT students. Across from our classroom is a beautiful and authentic Buddhist altar room, which is open to EATers for quiet meditation.
Standard accommodations are dorms with cots; bring your own bedding or rent some from BMP at extra fee. BMP is easily accessible by car; we strongly encourage carpooling and will have a shuttle for people flying in or taking bus. “Transportation Details” are in the confirmation packet when you register, as is much more information about the facility.

Find complete details on our schedule page: http://earthactivisttraining.org/courses/earth-activist-training-winter-2017/