This June, the Okanagan will be home to a learning event that seeks to create better stewardship of ecosystems by strengthening biodiversity, growing food that supports local communities and encouraging leadership and responsibility.
Re-Earthing Your Life and Community is about strengthening neighborhoods and villages. The Permaculture Design and Wildcrafting Course takes place June 6 to 16 at the Wildcraft Forest School near Lumby. The course curriculum places special emphasis on building awareness about soils and watersheds in support of the United Nations 2015 International Year of Soils.
Special guest instructor is Matthew Stephens, a permaculture designer based in Chicago and the founder of the Earth Reforestation Project and Permaculture America. Stephens has become a prominent advocate for the worldwide permaculture movement and has been instrumental in creating a global network on social media to facilitate cross-communication between permaculture designers.
“When people with diverse skill sets, talents and a combined understanding and mutual agreement to cooperate and collaborate with one another in small effective teams, they can achieve great things for the planet,” said Stephens.
Born, raised and still living in Chicago’s South Side, Stephens said the Windy City has not typically been the first place one would think of with regards to permaculture and urban sustainability, but he is doing his part to change that as he effectively puts into practice teambuilding expertise, knowledge of urban food deserts and the nutritional dilemmas within inner city environments.
“Small scale organic gardens will always be the sustainable solution to feeding the global human population with maximum efficiency, minimal energy inputs and minimum waste,” said Stephens.
For organizer and co-presenter Don Elzer, the event is a chance to help transition the Okanagan by creating what he calls re-earthers.
“We need to begin to fix things ourselves,” he said. “We can no longer depend on governments, institutions and corporations to restore habitats and create food security. The system is too slow and cumbersome.”
According to Elzer, a new generation of leadership is emerging in the Okanagan eager to take positive action to solve important problems that have become too institutionalized.
“Every day throughout the world and including the Okanagan we deplete our soil. We pave over it, we ignore it, we kill it. We should remind ourselves that the coming apart of a society is not dramatic, it unravels very slowly and largely without notice,” he said. “Great civilizations have fallen because they failed to prevent the degradation of the soils on which they were founded.”
Re-Earthing Your Life and Community carries participants to a Permaculture Design Certificate as well as entry towards achieving a Wildcraft Practitioners Diploma for becoming a Master Wildcrafter. Participants will be guided through core wildcrafting teachings that they can apply to their approach to permaculture. This course places emphasis on introducing wild dynamics into urban, suburban, agriculture and forest edge areas and is especially designed to address present and emerging issues linked to our changing planet. This course provides tangible training that addresses water conservation, soil restoration and new opportunities within intensive small footprint gardening and agriculture as well as community and neighbourhood problem-solving and leadership.
To register please visit www.wildcraftforest.com/School/11-ReEarthing-WildDynamicPermaculture-1Kelowna.html
This event is co-sponsored by The Okanagan Institute and the Okanagan Geotourism Initiative.
