EPOCH I: THE HUNTER GATHERER

In order to learn the intricacies of the local terrain and the origins of technology, for homesteading purposes and a general understanding of the immediate environment, it is important to become familiar with the spatial and temporal dimensions of the lay of the land. Folk and life ways, settlement configurations, geology, plants, animals and weather patterns will give us the ability to hone in our observation and develop creative hand and eye coordination. The ancients were highly skilled at reading the landscape and knew, intimately, where to locate the materials and tools to meet their basic necessities. The majority of the skills listed here are conducted with materials culled only from the local environment. Some skills and equipment used are modern imitations of ancient tools. They are included for comparative analysis. The student is required to seek information and additional instruction necessary in order to complete specific lessons. Learning to seek out appropriate information is tantamount to becoming a complete designer.

I. The Basic Hunter-Gatherer Philosophy
A. Discuss the impact of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and how its adoption improves a student’s skill and dedication to learning
B. Discover the value of learning to master the physical in order to excel in the spiritual
C. Learn the local environment- total immersion in the landscape (from the stars to biology of the soil

II. Beginnings
A. The spirit and heart of the skills: describe the spirit and heart of all the skills, associated legends, learning principles, practices (create one of the following)
a. Earth: stone, plant, animal, humans
b. Fire: fire, shelter, magic, signals
c. Water: navigation, water, the seasons
d. Air: the quest, creation, sky, spirit
e. Singing, drumming, dancing, primitive instruments (ex: bullroarer)
f. Storytelling (drama and ritual, mask-making)

THE THREE EPOCHS OF HUMANITY AND THE PERMACULTURE DESIGN CERTIFICATE COURSE

ACTIVITIES
The bulk of course activities consist of experiential, hands-on training, writings, and reference materials utilizing multimedia resources. Activities follow a logical sequence, moving from broad-based ideas to specifics. The course is divided into six sections with larger blocks of time allotted to the most essential principles and skills of the Three Epochs (for example: Permaculture ethics, ecology, observation, zone and sector analysis, microclimates, stacking and vertical use of space, etc.). There will also be a significant block of time allotted for conceptualization and drawing of a design based on The Three Epochs principles, toward the end of the program. Based on the student’s particular educational needs, exercises will be selected from the following. What these specific exercises are will be thoroughly analyzed with your personal instructor after registration is completed for the course.

Please note: This curriculum is intentionally comprehensive. It is distributed as an outline information source to all participants. Hands-on activities are chosen from each general area of practice, along with course texts applicable to specific incremental lessons. Reports to the instructor will be by e-mail, digital photographs, or snail mail, whichever works best for the student. Materials from the instructor will be sent out in similar fashion.

This segment comes from Darren Dougherty:

PERMACULTURE DESIGN CERTIFICATE COURSE PROGRAM

Target Audience
Local and regional partner convenors are the best judges of the local market for a PDC. That said we anticipate that targeted participants will primarily be those people working in the Permaculture-aligned industries that have an interest in or are working in sustainable project development. Urban fringe and rural landholders wanting to buffer their properties against the vagaries of climate change and on-going land degradation through drought-proofing, soil renovation and crop diversification are also a likely market. Urban participants wishing to understand, design and develop the more intensive production systems needed in cityscapes are also target, as are students, teachers, professionals and activists wishing to broaden their minds and vocational horizons for the betterment of earth systems and the habitats of humans.
There are no minimum education requirements to attend a PDC, though some previous reading or knowledge, traditional or scholastic, is an advantage. My preference is to limit class sizes to 25 people, with learning, assessment and participatory difficulties faced more often than not where numbers above this are encountered. Certainly the operational cost of catering for larger groups becomes less sustainable.
Outcomes
Our clear intention in delivering PDC’s is to facilitate to all students the understanding of the design concepts and themes that are Permaculture Design and to provide them with the best opportunity to manifest these into sustained on-ground action as Permaculture Design teachers and/or developers.
Furthermore our intention is to enable future local and regional Permaculture Designers to broaden and strengthen their business opportunities by free access to our pioneering business model which has been very successful and identified as such by many a Permaculture luminary.
Participants attending our PDC’s will gain the following outcomes/products. The first of these is a minimum requirement of a PDC delivered by a Registered Teacher of TPI. All others are available to accelerate the ability of participants to develop, consult and teach Permaculture Design:
• Demonstrated understanding of Permaculture Design according to the criteria laid out in Permaculture: A Designers Manual
• Basic understanding of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications in developing Permaculture Designs
• Provision of Microsoft Excel-based Worksheet package for Client & Project Management, Development and Management processes
• Complete digital photo library catalogued according to subjects
• Base understanding of design and development principles involved with Broadacre Permaculture applications including:
o Whole Farm Planning/Property Management Planning
o Land Component identification and classification
o Earthworks & Soil Renovation techniques and machinery applications
o Use and development of land system-based standard designs
o Farm Forestry & Tree Crop ground preparation, management & processing techniques
o Water Harvesting & Drought-proofing methods and applications

PROPOSED EDUCATION PROGRAM

Assessment
Assessment of participants will be based upon full attendance of the 72 hour program, and by completion of the group-based major design exercise. Historically failure of the PDC has been by those who have not fulfilled either of these criteria, but more so by those who fail to put the knowledge gained to productive use after completion of the PDC.

This section comes from me:

LEAD INSTRUCTOR

Wayne Weiseman is certified by the Permaculture Institute of Australia as an instructor of the Permaculture Design Certificate Course, and has taught the course and consulted internationally for many years. He has worked as a school teacher and as a consultant to educators and administrators in curriculum and professional development. As a primitive wilderness instructor he relied on observation techniques and a thorough understanding of the natural world in order to educate his students. He has worked extensively with corporate executives in the arts of team building, nature study and the application of ideas in business and life developed through observation of the cycles and connections found in the natural world. He has worked as a builder and contractor, herbalist, renewable energy expert, farmer, educator, and designer and site planner for the past twenty-five years. Wayne is Director of The Permaculture Project, a full service, international consulting business promoting the ideas of eco-agriculture, renewable energy resources, eco-construction methods, and education. He currently plies his trade at Dayempur Farm in Southern Illinois, a land-based, self-reliant community project combining organic crop/food production, ecologically-built shelter, renewable energy, appropriate technologies and educational programs.

A Balanced Middle Way

The current education-information system will become a more flexible entity where cultural exchange between educators, students and stakeholders establish communication that precludes a deeper reading of the Book of Nature and the practical application of ideas quarried from that reading. Through a mixture of theoretical and participatory hands-on teaching and learning in the art of The Three Epochs and Permaculture methods, a responsive, learning dynamic results. By delivering a systemic approach such as The Three Epochs to a larger and more diverse audience, an ethically balanced “middle way” approach to land use leads to a sustainability “mind-set”, viable for a large cross-section of producers, educators and students.

The systems approach is all-inclusive. If the underlying “law of unity” is constantly at the threshold of our thinking in education, research and communication, we will always be called to look for what brings us, and nature, together in harmony, rather than the separation from the natural world that most of the populace feels. This includes farmers and stakeholders who manage huge mechanized and mono-cultural corporate farms. They have “lost touch with the land “. By studying and applying this course in the ethics and principles of The Three Epochs and Permaculture we take a step closer to the stability of sustainability that we, in one way or another, all seek, for ourselves and for future generations.

The Three Epochs of Humanity and the Permaculture Certification Course seek to integrate
holistic education with all aspects of life and learning that promote personal self discovery in the natural world by:

-Encouraging self reflection on Nature
-Increasing and defining ecological and bioregional literacy
-Studying cultural and natural diversity
-Teaching global thinking and the spiritual understanding of the natural world
-Celebrating change, observing and studying the rhythms and evolution of Nature
-Creating sustainable designs for living within a region of study
-Recreating the life and folk ways of local prehistoric and historic cultures
-Intertwining environmental and ecological studies with our daily existence

“We must create designs for human settlements that incorporate principles inherent in the natural world in order to sustain human populations over a long span of time.” (John Todd)

The entire Permaculture Design Certificate course materials are included in this on-line course.

Permaculture is a copyrighted word of the Permaculture Institute of Australia. Graduates of the certificate course are permitted to use the word Permaculture in their choice of livelihood.

The Permaculture Design Certificate Course is a training utilizing Bill Mollison’s “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual” as the essential text. The goal is to achieve a working understanding in ecologically-based site planning, design, implementation and management.

The Permaculture Designer’s Manual is the main course text. You will receive this book along with your registration.

Biological-Ecological Design Precepts (By John Todd, Creator of the “Living Machine”)

1. The living world is the matrix for all design
2. Design should follow, not oppose, the laws of life
3. Biological equity must determine design
4. Design must reflect bio-regionality
5. Projects should be based on renewable energy sources
6. Design should be sustainable through the integration of living systems
7. Design should be co-evolutionary with the natural world
8. Building and design should help heal the planet
9. Design should follow sacred ecology

As we study the development of human settlement throughout history we will utilize what we have learned by creating a final design that depicts an ecologically-biologically sound and sustainable rural, suburban or urban settlement, emphasizing zero-waste, circular models of development and energy integration. Through observation, creating maps, learning appropriate hand skills, problem solving initiatives, community building and working in design teams, we will come to know our site intimately and build settlements that are self-sustaining. By invoking intuition and practicing the arts of communication, advocacy, planning and management, and backwards thinking, where we start with the whole and move to particulars, we come to know ourselves and our personal and team creative process, intimately. Areas covered during the course include:

-Primitive living skills
-Pastoralism
-Settlement, village life-ways and folkways
-Map building and modeling
-Permaculture principles
-Concepts and themes in design
-The local ecosystem
-Forms of eco-gardening and farming
-Broad scale, bioregional site design
-The application of specific methods, laws and principles to design
-Pattern understanding and observation skills
-Climatic factors
-Plants and trees and their energy interactions
-Water: collection, storage, purification
-Soils
-Earth-working and earth resources
-Infrastructure and roads
-Zone and sector analysis
-Food forests and small animal husbandry, forest management
-Cropping and large animal husbandry
-Harvest and utility forests
-Natural forests
-Land and forest restoration
-Aquaculture
-Planning the homestead
-“Green” structures, ecological building practices
-Craftwork and chores, machinery
-“Natural” medicine
-Clothing
-Cooking and food preservation
-Equipment, tools, bio-fuels and vehicles
-Renewable energy, system design and implementation
-Energy conservation
-Biological waste management and recycling
-Strategies for different climates
-Urban and suburban strategies
-Small farm and garden management and marketing
-Project planning, budgets and timelines
-Office procedures
-Building and planning software
-Communications
-Emergency preparations, safety procedures
-Building codes
-Strategies of an alternative global nation
-Political, social, economic issues and solutions
-Designing public policy
-Designing sustainable economy
-Human settlement and local ecology
-Site selection, mapping and modeling
-Dividing, distributing, apportioning land
-Practical work on design

This is message recently sent to me from my friend Deanne Bednar, the consummate earth builder, from Michigan.

“It was a great pleasure to host the Midwest Permaculture Course, held in Columbiaville, MI…for an a tour & some hands-on building at the Strawbale Studio land this summer, 2009.

Permaculture here includes: planting black currents, paw paws & sun root (aka Jerusalem Artichoke) at the edges of the woods surrounding the garden. The Zandala garden is coming into fullness (Mandala +Lasagna). We did sheet & tarp mulching, put in oat & buckwheat cover crops, garlic bulbs & “bulbuls”, a winter garden in the greenhouse, and made an herb spiral.

Foraging has given us infinite salads with nibbles of mallow buds, dandelion, comfrey, plantain, violet, along with the perennials ~ lovage, comfrey, chives, nodding onions, oregano (which has taken over the lawn), lemon balm, catnip, and now, in the fall, dried apples, raspberry leafs, wild grape wine and vinegar, fermenting experiments with crab apples, lambs quarter seeds for gruel, acorn flour, stag horn sumac berries for seasoning, nettle leaves ~ dried, tinctured, vinegared ~ tinctures of solomon seal, echinacea + more! Interns & I have been enthusiastically exploring the “Wild Fermenting” Book, by Sandor Katz and doing Kefir, Kombucha, sourdough, dosa, Injira, mead, wine, cheeses + !

We are easily eating at least 80% local! CSA, eggs, goats milk, honey & maple syrup, grains, beans makes food a “nearby & neighborly” experience !

Young farmers are sprouting up around here, studying permaculture, doing gardens, greenhouses, the farmers market & leading the inspiring way… while established farms like 3 Roods, grow food / share information from a deep established base. A time of great collaboration & hope.

Building projects included thatching a new wood shed & the doing the stemwalls and thatched roof of the Oxford Kid’s Cottage. A new earth oven was initiated by intern Sam Runner, and we co-taught a great earth oven class.

Thanks for the forum!”

Mt. Kilimanjaro Ice Cap Continues Rapid Retreat