“There is presently no other way for humans to educate themselves for either their survival or fulfillment than through the instruction available through the natural world.” (Thomas Berry)

 The Three Epochs of Humanity curriculum contains the creative and experiential application of living skills passed down by our ancestors into the present time and beyond. The three areas of concentration are: 1) The Hunter-Gatherer Lifestyle; 2) Agricultural Settlement; 3) Appropriate Technology and the Ecological Epoch. The Three Epochs Curriculum is designed to teach students to utilize what is available in the immediate landscape in a conscious and ecologically astute manner. By learning from the ground up we immerse ourselves in living history where knowledge and hand skills come together in an integrated, healthy fashion.

 Project Summary

 This course will reveal to participants the awareness of The Three Epochs of Humanity as a complete system of appropriate technology. It will help students research and access related systems of eco-agriculture and earth skills. Students will deepen their ability to understand personal needs, penetrate to the root of existing problems, and through the whole-systems approach of the Three Epochs curriculum, be able to pinpoint biases and dogma in preexisting systems of education and training received, and transcend them. They will learn to turn theory into practice, becoming more astute observers of the landscape. And they will learn hand-skills that can be used for life and passed down to the next generation.

 Students will be exposed to the belief that minerals, plants, animals and humans interact in one vast web of being. This will afford them the opportunity to apply the lifestyle methods employed from the Three Epochs coursework that begin with whole thinking and move to specifics.

 Students will learn to use appropriate technologies that sustain life, realizing that how we make use of the natural world can be both ecologically sound and economically viable. They will be able to deliver the principles and skills learned in the course to a wider audience, family, friends, associates, where attitudes toward land-use and land-ethic will change. Overall health of nature and humanity is the first priority. They will become caretakers of the earth, thus giving heed to a “sustainability mindset”. By becoming aware of the structure, locational pattern and function of everything we see or place in the landscape, we are able to construct circular models where zero waste, use and reuse, and conservation become the essence of our thinking and doing.

 The curriculum consists of lectures and hands-on practicum in the hunter-gatherer, agricultural and modern appropriate technology lifestyles, depicting human settlement patterns and land-use. Curriculum is divided into five major areas: the three epochs with two transitional pieces in between each one. Students will receive personalized instruction by local craftsmen and artisans along with their main facilitator. Information packets, course and resource materials and a complete bibliography on related topics will be distributed. Student partnerships and team projects are encouraged.

 The proposed course design entails meeting with students and teachers at a working site, and through classroom lectures and practical hands-on activities in the field, based on season and site requirements, gives participants a basic background and context to extend the principles, methods and values of The Three Epochs into a working practice that moves beyond mere theory to develop life transforming skills and abilities. The primary method utilized is observation, where we learn to read directly from the Book of Nature, gather essential data from our observations and thereby assimilate this data into an agricultural and technological approach that works in a balanced fashion within the local bioregion that a site exists in. We will create working maps and models in the classroom that depict the entire history of human settlement and landscape metamorphosis, while working through political, social, economic and environmental issues toward an ecologically sound and sustainable land use ethic.

 Training in primitive living and nature skills sharpens our ability to see life as it is and develop hand and eye coordination. If our assumptions are correct then there is still an enormous need to communicate information about these topics and related eco-agricultural and sustainable technological systems to students, educators, administrators, politicians, the media, farmers, architects, ranchers and the like. The dual approach of theory and practice is specifically project-based and team oriented. Along with practical projects that we will tackle during the training, we will also be building communication skills, thoughtful introspection and the ability to enhance our work in the future with prospective clientele in whatever profession we choose.

 Students will learn about leading trends in sustainable agriculture, i.e. Permaculture, Biodynamic Agriculture, Bio-intensive gardening, the eco-agriculture movement as purported by Acres USA, organic systems, the natural way of farming of Masanobu Fukuoka and indigenous systems of agriculture. They will also learn about renewable energy systems (wind, water, solar), ecological building practices (straw bale, cob, earthbag, etc.) and everything from tool-making to animal husbandry. The curriculum includes all of these systems and merges them into a working whole.

 Based on an understanding of the basic principles and ethics expounded during the course participants can evaluate their work in the field through an applied set of ideas that move from the whole to the specific. With astute observation and an understanding of essential and cyclical patterns found in the natural world students and educators will be able to help themselves and others to lift the veil of the landscape and create new ideas based on the archetypal energies and forms which give birth to all the diversified elements and interactions on the farm, in the garden, the home site, the village, suburbs and city.

 By utilizing appropriate technologies that sustain, rather than hinder and destroy the balance of nature, an ethic and attitude of care, cooperation and the need to follow nature’s pristine example will become apparent. We will learn to mimic the ecological processes within the local bioregion where we live and work, creating balanced ecosystems in their own right.

 Because we postulate that we start small and stay relatively small with practices such as utilization of vertical space in our planning (stacking), ecologically based design, and increasing yields-not size of acreage, participants will have the opportunity to deliver a unique point-of-view geared to small and mid-sized land-bases. By presenting a holistic system such as The Three Epochs to mainstream educators and students, and by showing how it can be economically viable and ecologically sound, education policies toward land use and land ethic will change. Educators and educated will become more sensitive to the overall health of human life, their basic needs, and the needs of all beings in the landscape. By seeing wholes rather than parts, educators and students will be more apt and willing caretakers who will work to restore and sustain the intended living environment for all creation.

 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 methods, a responsive learner 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 delivering this workshop in the ethics and principles of The Three Epochs 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.

“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)

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

 The living world is the matrix for all design

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

• 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

• Zone and sector analysis

• Food forests and small animal husbandry

• Cropping and large animal husbandry

• Harvest and utility forests

• Natural forests

• Aquaculture

• Planning the homestead

• “Green” structures, ecological building practices

• Craftwork and chores

• 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

• Strategies of an alternative global nation

• Political, social, economic issues and solutions

• Designing public policy

• Land and forest restoration

• Human settlement and local ecology

• Site selection, mapping and modeling

• Dividing, distributing, apportioning land

• Practical work on design