O2 Supports Permaculture Courses

The Oxygen Collective is excited to provide teaching assistance, transportation and logistical support for a series of ground breaking permaculture design courses this Spring. The first course took place this February with Priscilla the biofuel bus carrying a full crew of students from the SF Bay Area down to the South Coast of Big Sur. Hosted by the Urban Permaculture Guild, this class is called the Permaculture First Responder. After the final ten day intensive at the epic Esalen Institute, graduating students received their permaculture design certificates.

The second course runs the second half of March and takes place on our home turf at Boone's Farm in Southwest Oregon. It is a ten day graduate level course accredited through the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) called the Alchemy of Permaculture. This is our second course working with CIIS and we are collectively taking it to the next level with an inspired team of competent instructors.

These courses bring students from mostly urban areas out to small farms and homesteads for hands-on instruction in the practices and philosophy of permaculture. They both incorporate a combination of academic readings and classroom lectures with full days of digging hands in the dirt and doing the real work of designing and building projects that work with natural systems to achieve human goals of food production and ecological restoration. This includes tending to compost piles, building structures with natural materials, planting orchards, building soil and much, much more.

"Permaculture (permanant agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order." - Bill Mollison's Permaculture Design Manual.

Besides offering primary support roles setting up farm infrastructure and operating the bus, O2 members are giving presentations on grassroots activism, community organizing/sense of place and will guide natural history and fire ecology tours of the surrounding wild areas of the Big Sur Coast and Siskiyou Mountains.

Posted by laurel at March 21, 2007 12:26 PM | Category(s): Frontpage