“Egosystem restoryation.” For Brock Dolman, Co-Founder and Program Director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), that is the hopeful outcome in our exposure to permaculture. Learning about watersheds, gardens, landscape design, composting toilets and more are all important pieces of the web within which we must enact change. But at the heart of that web and Brock and OAEC’s work, is re-storylining the ego. When exploring this in our interview, he elaborated “permaculture to me is an egosystem restoryation effort. We are trying to re-story the storyline of the egosystem. How do I personally and us collectively as a bunch of humans learn how to understand how the natural world works and then get on board with that 3.8 billion years of evolutionary intelligence that life has brought forward on this one crazy planet in our universe?” We must re-story, rediscover, rethink and reclaim our role and potential on this Earth. The OAEC, located in western Sonoma county, CA, is one of the longest standing permaculture demonstration and education sites in the U.S. In the 1970s, before funding was cut by the Reagan administration, the Farallones Institute Rural Center that eventually morphed into OAEC was already offering workshops ranging from passive solar design to building ferrocement tanks, and also served as a peace corps training center. Chefs, especially Alice Waters with her Chez Panisse restaurant, kept the site running following federal cuts by purchasing fresh, diverse salad mixes and other farm goods in an era where farm-to-table was not yet popular. In the early 1990s, the site served a few years as a western hub for Seed Savers Exchange and in 1994, Brock and the six other Sowing Circle LLC and OAEC co-founding partners put together a winning proposal and vision for the property out of around 150 submissions. As a result, the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center was formed as a 501c3 and now nine people and their families co-own the site’s 80 acres. Brock was first exposed to permaculture in the early nineties. On an 8-hour car ride to a permaculture convention at Sandy Bar Ranch, he wound up with Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual in his lap, and deeply pursued the entire book. This book and Brock’s endeavor into permaculture provided an umbrella framework linking together his thinking and education in agroecology and conservation biology. Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s mission is to cultivate ecological literacy and build the “capacity of civic and social movement leaders and organizations to guide their own communities to an ecologically regenerative, economically viable, and socially just future.” Programs range from ecological literacy to climate justice, and expertise branches into extensive international work, especially in Africa and Latin America. In their programming, the OAEC weighs heavily on the traditional ecological knowledge of local Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people. Trainings and policy rule changes are major pieces as well. For example, Brock is heavily involved in county and state-level policies including California’s greywater policy and policies regarding salmon and beaver restoration. As a result, they are enacting positive change from the bottom-up and the top-down. The OAEC offers two-three permaculture design certifications (PDC) a year for the public. When reflecting on the PDC, Brock said it gives participants “a framework that with planned redundancy supports them with some confidence that there is a way to see the world, the connectivity and opportunity, as a whole-systems thinker. Because then you are going to leave and next week a ‘propportunity’ [problem/opportunity] is going to present itself. How do you comport yourself to say ‘oh, alright, what have I got, what do I want, what does success look like?’ And then do [solutions-based] design.” Regarding their permaculture programming, “we often start with basic earth systems science, energy flows, matter cycles of life webs, and you figure out how to redesign your civilization to get on board with those thermodynamic realities upon which the evolution of life comes. It’s amazing, not that complicated, and fungus is ready to party with you!” He goes on to add “when people leave the PDC…we hope they feel they are networked into a global community. That people are working hard on these things. There is a shared vision of earth care, people care. There’s a set of principles that they can cling to and are really helpful.” Outside of PDCs, a large focus of OAEC programming concerns resilient community design. For example, Kendall Dunnigan (Permaculture/Resilient Community Design Program Co-Director) is leading a collaborative project working with 20 Miskitu villages in northeast Nicaragua on women’s food sovereignty programs as they were illegally removed from their homeland. The OAEC also partners with the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, bringing together activists and artists from social justice organizations around the nation to participate in two three-day Justice & Ecology Retreats at the site. Retreat participants then have the opportunity to implement regenerative designs in their communities by participating in a 2-week long “Permaculture for the People” design course, subsidized through extensive fundraising efforts. When reflecting on this Permaculture for the People course, Brock clarified that “OAEC has a very explicit radical, progressive, social justice-based orientation as an organization collectively. And so, to that degree that we are supporting increasing the diversification in expression of who has access and can reclaim their appropriate relationship to what is the indigenosity of permaculture for many of these people…I think we are pretty forthright about the social, cultural, political, spiritual, economic, governance set of permaculture skills that we all have to learn to figure out how to get along with each other to then develop and work with these systems that have integrity intergenerationally – through time – to actually express all of our aspirations of what a regenerative future might look like.” At the center of all this work, “it’s the people. And at least in the U.S., I know my upbringing the schooling I got in public schools there wasn’t anything about cooperation or…inclusive, participatory – it was just read and write and arithmetic…I think we are unfortunately afflicted with that as a societal malaise a little bit. And ecological illiteracy is the greatest epidemic happening on the planet in my humble opinion. We are just radically ecologically illiterate on all the cycles.” The good news is, each one of us can undergo egosystem restoryation and re-write the storyline of our understanding and relationship with this beautiful planet. To discover more about Brock and the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, visit: http://oaec.org
0 Comments
The terminator seed, formally known as Genetic Use Restriction technology, would render seed saving impossible due to a sterile second generation. News of this development in genetic modification germinated Erik Ohlsen’s path into environmental activism and regeneration: “I remember we were learning about this and we were 18 years old, about seeds and plants and that a seed was going to be released with sterile pollen and if it got out into the world it could sterilize the vegetation of the planet and the biosphere could collapse. Kind of having an ‘ah-ha!’ awakening moment of ‘holy s*#%t, there is stuff happening in the world that is so devastating, why would we do anything but try to be a solution to that?” So, at the young age of 19, Erik and his friends started an organization called Planting Earth Activation giving heirloom seeds away in events they dubbed the “Great Garden Giveaway.” His goal was to create an abundance of heirloom open-pollinator seeds as a solution to the news released of Genetic Use Restriction technology. The group would focus on one neighborhood at a time and plant 6-10 gardens in a weekend using all donated materials and seeds. Over 40 people volunteered each weekend and they transitioned one lawn after another. Musicians and dancers would perform and the group would celebrate with a big potluck where many neighbors met each other for the first time. While running Planting Earth Activation, Erik and four of his friends travelled to Seattle in 1999 to gather donated seeds and also attend a World Trade Organization meeting protest. According to Erik, “that was a life-changing moment. I had never been in a really big protest before and I was just learning about what the World Trade Organization even was and the more that I started to learn about it, the more fear and grief for the world sprouted up in me…that was a very intense time. I remember one of the first big days of the actions, I had no idea what to expect. We get down into the city and all of the activist blockades were already up and there were riot cops on every corner…And so we joined the civil disobedience and blockaded the delegates from getting to the World Trade Association meeting. There was one instance where I remember I was walking down the street and there were all these monarch butterfly puppets and all of these sea turtle puppets and I look around and every race is in the streets with me. There are punks and there are people wearing suits and there’s people with their children and there’s every age – grey haired people and kids – and then in front of me, there is a wall of police officers and they are shooting tear gas at us and it was that moment where something inside me changed. I realized at that time ‘here is a representation of people and life on the planet here in the streets together and there is the corporate empire that is protected by these weapons.’” Erik then formed an organization called Green Block and spent years traveling the world building gorilla gardens, distributing heirloom seed balls, and more at civil disobedience protests. He then experienced a major burnout in 2005 and developed a chronic nervous system illness that he is still coping with today. Suddenly he couldn’t travel and fight in the front lines for global justice, and he underwent a crisis in identity. Like a true permaculturalist, however, he turned the problem into the solution and developed the Permaculture Skills Center (PSC) in 2012. The PSC is a five-acre demonstration garden and farm that had been neglected for decades and was dominated by invasive bunch grass. It now hosts a food forest, over 2,000 feet of water harvesting swales and raingardens, water harvesting habitat ponds, over 300 fruit and nut trees, and various hedgerows. Erik had purposely looked for a site on the highway that was easy to find, accessible, and close to the Bay Area of California. In addition to trainings and self-guided tours, multiple ecologically-based organizations work out of the site. This includes businesses such as Erik’s Permaculture Artisans (a landscape design contracting company installing permaculture regenerative systems at all scales throughout California. Erik has hired around 20 employees representing a mix of cultures and languages) and Transition United States (providing support for transition initiatives across the nation). Regarding skills building, Erik remembers “really clearly this one day I went out to dinner here in town and the waiter was like ‘oh hey, you taught my permaculture course’ and we had a little chat and I remember him saying something like ‘all I want to do is permaculture but I can’t figure out a way to make a livelihood doing it so I’ve gotten back into waiting tables and I just work my garden on the weekends.’ And that’s a story I kept hearing over and over again. Being in the permaculture movement so long you start to wonder ‘why aren’t the solutions more widespread? Why aren’t we implementing them at large scales when the crisis is so huge? Why are we not meeting the need to regenerate at that scale?’ And for me, one of the things I realized was that without having a more professional angle to doing this work, a way for people to have careers and livelihoods, it was always going to be more-or-less nonrelevant to most people.” Given the common scenario Erik experienced at a restaurant that day, the Permaculture Skills Center focuses its efforts on empowerment, with the mission “to empower students with the knowledge and skills to create regenerative and resilient ecosystems, communities, and economies.” In addition to on-site trainings and opportunities, online courses include a “Regenerative Landscape Business Training,” “Regenerative Agroforestry,” and an “Eco-Landscape Mastery School.” These types of job-building trainings are a major driver for Erik, given that “so many folks that get turned on to this work, that feel the grief of the world and the weight of our responsibility to take care of earth and people, struggle in finding a way to make a life doing that. They are stuck in the economic system that we are in.” When walking away from a PSC experience, Erik says “one thing that I hope people would take away with them is a feeling of empowerment that they can make a life regenerating the planet.” He goes on to include “that they feel like they’ve got a set of tools that is more than just concepts. That they feel like they have a feeling of competence around the tools of land regeneration or starting a small business. There’s competence there, it’s not foreign and elusive.” Many pieces of Erik’s journey resonated directly with me. I recall when news of the terminator seed was released. I was walking mono-cropped fields as a farmer’s co-op employee, making recommendations to spray and ensuring the herbicides had worked effectively, and had already accumulated many questions about our degenerative model of industrial agriculture. There comes a point when it is too much. You know too much, your heart has broken too deeply, but the shattered pieces reconfigure into action and guide you down an alternative path. Your knowledge becomes power in enacting positive change. Our interview brought us both to tears. The pain of social injustice and environmental destruction is still close enough to the surface that it wells up, like a fresh water spring feeding life into our collective efforts towards an alternative future. To discover more about Erik and the Permaculture Skills Center, visit: https://permacultureskillscenter.org/ Suitably, we met on in a busy street-side café in downtown San Rafael. Kat Steele was Director of the Urban Permaculture Guild from its inception until 2008, when she left to become the Sustainable Development Manager of the Esalen Institute until 2015. After leaving that position, she launched and still runs the Woodland Institute and Retreat Center in Fairfax, CA. When I asked Kat to share with me what her ‘title’ is, she paused, contemplating for a second, then said “permaculture educator and activist, and Climate Reality leader.”
At 24, as media maker with Universal Studios, Kat worked on a project in the former Soviet Union. The group arrived in Kazakhstan, where Kat vividly recalled having “met with the people who had been harmed by nuclear radiation poisoning…it was very heart opening and mind blowing and activist-making.” Shortly after, she visited an intentional, international, spiritual community where she saw what was possible with both healthy communities and a positive relationship with nature. It was in the these worlds of activism and creative expression that Kat found her home, which she had never discovered in her traditional mainstream catholic upbringing in Miami, FL. After visiting the former Soviet Union and her first intentional community, Kat enrolled in her first PDC decades ago. The experience, although beautiful regarding in the concepts and potential, resulted in anger and frustration at the rural farming and ranching focus. “I was living in Oakland at the time and my daily experience was with people with very little economic means, a lot of racial and economic diversity, lots of young activists who were struggling financially and it felt like a big disconnect. ‘Wow I’m learning all of this really amazing permaculture stuff but how does it really relate to me and my community? I don’t have a farm. I don’t have a husband and lots of children and a white picket fence. I don’t have land, so how does this relate to me?’ At that time I got really excited about this possibility of bringing permaculture to the urban setting.” So Kat formed the Urban Permaculture Guild. She was living in Oakland, CA, when growing food in the city wasn’t very popular. Through an outlet of helping people grow gardens in urban front and back yards, Kat interwove permaculture design as a way to help people “gain more empowerment by seeing the world through a permaculture lens.” Now, permaculture weaves its way into Kat’s daily life is as “a platform, a view, a perspective that I can use in making very simple daily choices about how I spend my time and money and energy. What food I put in my body. My politics. Where I can use my power to uplift people that may not have as much privilege as I do…to recognize the parts of my inner world that have been colonized by patriarchy or consumerism.” From those earlier days in the permaculture movement to now, Kat is feeling hopeful. “I am very heartened and inspired by the recent shift in perspective around the value and also upliftment of the voices of indigenous people who have inspired so much of what permaculture design is all about – that love of the land, the relationship, that reciprocity. There’s a huge opportunity for more inclusion in the permaculture movement…and I also think that in the past two years especially there’s a lot more women practitioners and leaders in the movement, there’s a lot more men in the movement who have a deeper understanding about how the lack of inclusion has impacted them and all of us and I see a lot of waking up that’s happening.” In the form of movements ranging from “Me Too!” to youth globally walking out on classes and demanding action on climate change, we have woken up and are taking action. On this national journey, I’m learning what may be the most critical role of permaculture in serving as a platform to guide that awakening into solutions-based thinking. When I worked as an environmental educator in rural Georgia for less than $10 an hour, freshly graduated from 22 straight years of education, something happened that forever changed me. We were hosting a group of 8th graders from Atlanta, many boasting gang symbols and flat expressions upon first arrival. As the day progressed, I witnessed layers of heartbreak, inadequacy and anger flow away downstream as we searched for macroinvertebrates. One young man ran towards me in pure joy, shouting “Ms. Brain, Ms. Brain, a bird!” This bird was a Tiger Swallowtail – yes, a butterfly – but my correction was swallowed in the light of his joy. The classroom had never fostered such hope for humanity as that day in a Georgia stream. What happens when we touch, taste, are scratched by, and cry in awe over our natural environment? Our natural environment. Something can move us unexpectedly into the realm of the people care ethic of permaculture, closely interwoven with earth care. Large portions of our society have never immersed themselves in nature. This is a byproduct of our developed, plugged in, concrete, artificially lit, busy is better operating system. Many have not had any opportunity to develop a passion for the elements that allow our survival as humans on this beautiful planet. And we are longing to fill the void. We do not have to grapple through life under the overwhelming message that we aren’t enough. Nature immersion, whether on a small urban plot or protected wilderness area, allows us as educators to offer a meaningful alternative to the broken message of inadequacy where the best way to fill the void is through our credit cards. Quail Springs Permaculture was created in 2004 by Warren Brush, internationally renowned permaculturalist, to address this gap in nature connectedness. Targeting young at-risk high school students, the site offered a deeper connection with nature, themselves, and their peers in a place where the water comes from the watershed and food from the farm. The site is a 450-acre former cattle ranch in the high desert rain shadow of coastal California. Back then, the property included a hanger, an air strip, arid heavily grazed land and a pond. Through years of passion to regenerate the land and contributions from educators, students, interns, and donors, that pond is now in the middle of a food forest and is filled with great western toads and common snipe. Quail Springs offers what Brenton Kelly, Watershed Steward, calls “nature awareness programming.” This type of programming includes all aspects of tracking, recognizing the behavior of specific organisms in the environment, inner tracking or reflection, primitive/origin skills, integrated organic farming, healthy and humane butchering, and more. A dedication to reconnection. About 2,000 program participants engage with the site each year, immersing themselves in nature through programs generally ranging from five days to two weeks. Numerous surrounding schools visit representing all grade levels, along with people come from all over the world. Course offerings include traditional Permaculture Design Certifications (PDCs) (their last PDC had 34 enrolled) and an international development design course for agencies and organizations sending people to various countries to do aid development work; critically needed people care and earth care training. A youth program is offered each summer called Sustainable Vocations that includes a green jobs fair with information ranging from beekeeping to solar installation (which provides youth an understanding of what a green job is outside of the typical nonsensical imagery of a man standing in a green field wearing a business suit with a leaf in his pocket, holding a briefcase). For those wanting a full immersion, a farm internship program is offered and so is a natural building program with a variety of construction methods demonstrated and implemented. Regarding natural building, Quail Springs is also engaged in advocacy for this design approach. They serve as a research site for physics majors at California Polytechnic Institute, writing the codes for monolithic adobe walls and Influencing international and American building codes. What do people get when they come to Quail Springs? According to Brenton, they “get an experience this landscape offers that is not something we can even put on a brochure.” When they walk away, two areas of knowledge and skills change are hoped for: “one is that permaculture is never a perfection. I love to say that our systems are completely in chaos and need an infinite amount of energy that we now know we would want to redesign differently because we learned something in the last iteration of the process…you don’t come to Quail Springs or look at any permaculture site as going ‘oh, there’s the answer! There’s the solution! There’s the one size that fits all!’ I’m a big reactionary to the permaculture dogma syndrome where ‘berms and swales, berms and swales, save the world with berms and swales. Every design ought to have a spiral herb garden’ – all of the check the box kind of approach in permaculture …The other part is inspiring the optimism that it will require to maintain enough energy to solve these problems. If it is possible to live in this high desert and address some of those issues and come up with some real tangible solutions and live in a world that has ethical balance between those three permaculture ethics, principles are engaged and responsibility is held for our metabolic transactions, then there is a future. If we can do it out here with high desert minimal resources, then surely we can find a way to survive in the luxury of our larger metropolitan areas and in the lives that most people live in.” At Quail Springs, participants give through contributing to the site financially and manually. “Most of the buildings that we live in are built through workshops where people came, ate our food, crapped in our toilets, made their footprints and fingerprints on the walls of our homes and went home with enough of a knowledge base that they could actually put mud on a wall and build something, or plant a tree, whatever their next step in integrated living is.” When reflecting further on the meaning – and misperceptions of – permaculture, Brenton stated “permaculture, that’s organic gardening right? Or permaculture, that’s natural building. They are facets on a gem that’s too dazzling to really observe in its integrated true self. So how we do that is through experience.” And according to Brenton, it is the experiential aspect which has helped create a stronger connection with nature and more hands-on skills then the stand-alone academic nature of the PDC. At Quail Springs, participants might milk goats, butcher a chicken, turn a compost pile, harvest produce, and more. “I mean at some point you are going to have people all academic’d up and no place to go.” As a result, “we do a lot more hands-on workshops where permaculture isn’t really what they are signing up for. They are signing up for a natural building course or an edible wild landscape culinary course, or a garden farm community course. It’s all permaculture.” And these facets of the permaculture gem are helping to re-immerse and reground us in the natural environment that allows for our survival. Programs offering this reconnection with nature through human bonding and hands-on experience allow a reshaping of our relationshis. We hold limitless depth in potential to regenerate our social and environmental systems, and moving away from a parasitic relationship with others and our planet brings me back to that light of hope I felt over a decade ago in a Georgia stream. To discover more about Brenton and Quail Springs Permaculture, visit: http://www.quailsprings.org |