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/ 
