Permaculture Design Course August 10th-19th in West Cork February 18, 2007
Posted by Graham in : General , trackbackThis August myself, John Dolan and Lisa Davies will be hosting a 10-day Permaculture Design course set over our three equally beautiful but quite diverse sites in West Cork.
This will be the first 10-day course that any of us have facilitated and promises to be an exciting event. We will of course cover the usual curriculum of such a course, but the real value of it will be the participants’ experience of the three different sites and the opportunity to see the different ways in which we have developed them.
*Left:Lunch at a course in Slovenia
In each of our different ways we have been developing our small-holdings along permaculture principles over the past several years. We have a lot to show and demonstrate, and have made a lot of mistakes to be learned from!
In addition, we plan a range of engaging and practical components to the course including some gardening (naturally!), natural building and a look at renewable energy and appropriate technology.
I did my first Permaculture Design Course some 17 years ago with Mike Feingold and Tim Barnstaple at the Wheatstone Community in Shropshire, where I was living at the time. I still remember it as a life-changing experience, an intense immersion in the theory and practice of sustainability with a group of dynamic and like-minded people. I often tell the story of one of the participants who embodied the spirit of permaculture: he turned up off the bus from London with a pram, from which he unloaded first a very basic shelter consisting of a bell-tent pegged out around a single, collapsible central pole; and then set up a roll of chicken wire around the outside. Next, he installed a chicken that had traveled with him, and each morning presented someone with a fresh egg! That is really permaculture in practice, and just shows that you don’t need a garden to get started.
I attended another such course two years ago in Slovenia, with David Holmgren, Tony Anderson and George Sobol. Right: design presentations at the course in Vransko, Slovenia
This was also a fantastic experience, with the added interest of being in the beautiful and fascinating country of Slovenia (of which more in a future post).
During the course, and the time I spent with him subsequently at the Permaculture Convergence in Croatia and the Fueling the Future Conference in Kinsale, David Holmgren explained how the original idea behind the 10-day course, as he had devised it 30 years ago with Bill Mollison, was to provide an intense experience of what living in a genuinely sustainable culture would be like. They went to considerable effort to show the connections between different elements in the community around them. Food was always a big part of the course, and the man who delivered the organic veg to feed the participants would be the owner of the local farm they would subsequently walk to harvest potatoes. He admitted it was partly “smoke and mirrors” but the effect it would have would leave a lasting impression on the participants.
*Below: David Holmgren (centre) talks to students at a local farm in Slovenia
To some extent, I would hope that we can provide a similar taste of what sustainability might be like. The connections between the many sites in West Cork where gardening, organic farming,traditional crafts and low-impact living have been practiced for many years gives a useful platform from which to build local, sustainable communities. And that is what Permaculture is all about.
Over the next few weeks I will do a short feature on each site.
Full details, profiles and booking forms available from the dedicated website (thanks Tom!) www.westcorkpermaculture.org
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