Greetings. As promised I am now beginning the process sending out a two hundred page curriculum in bite size chunks over the next year. This curriculum covers Hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, settlement and agriculture and modern appropriate technology skills. The entire Permaculture Design Certificate Course is embedded in this outline. I hope that this will offer information and insight into the development of human doings over the centuries and give us way to develop hand skills and a working knowledge of how to become more self-reliant. Please share this with friends. As I state in the very beginning of the outline, it is very important at this juncture in history to do whatever we can to promote a strong sense of reinhabiting our “place” and creating balance and harmony in the landscape and in our lives for the generations that will follow. Enjoy and please put this into practice. Yours, Wayne
PERMACULTURE AND THE THREE EPOCHS OF HUMANITY CURRICULUM
At this time in history the delicate balance of Nature and Her systems are threatened, i.e. water, soil, air, forests and protective ozone. We desperately need to promote care and understanding for the earth and all her creatures. Implementing the proper eco-skills does make a difference and will help restore health to our environment. By developing “local and regional agriculturally productive ecosystems” (Bill Mollison), and by utilizing appropriate technologies that sustain, rather than hinder and destroy the balance of nature, we step on a path toward harmony and health. When the natural resource base of a society is destroyed, when an abstract monetary system becomes the guiding light of a people, when greed and power become the status quo for the few, and when the means to production and money are taken out of a local bioregion strictly for profit, the circle of life is broken beyond repair. The Three Epochs curriculum addresses all of these issues and needs as a uniquely unified yet diverse hands-on science. The ecological approach of The Three Epochs Curriculum has the potential to add significantly to a resacralization of the living world in which life forms are more than mere resources – they are also our relatives.
One can come to understand the inherent connection between Nature, humanity and society, revealing that every thought, word and action carries consequences. Each person shares responsibility for the development of another. Ethics and values grow naturally out of these practices: care of the earth, care of people, ethical surplus distribution, building an ecological-human support base. Care and love of the environment are at the core of our work. Education focuses our efforts to answer life’s fundamental questions. Learning the answers to these questions is best encouraged through love, nurturing, cooperation and reverence for all life.
We seek to create positive and ethical lifestyle change, develop ecological and environmental harmony, stability for future generations, and teach appropriate technologies that sustain rather than harm. We seek to immerse ourselves in the landscape and exhaust all possibilities of an understanding of place. There is great benefit when intellectual knowledge is translated into personal experience, and right and appropriate action. We seek to promote true self reliance through design and hands on practice for farmers, gardeners, home owners, urban dwellers, educators, administrators, communities, businesses, students, ranchers, landowners, architects, environmentalists, regional planners and builder-developers. Ultimately, we can achieve balance and health by synthesizing applied biology, eco-technology and integrative architecture: the merging of renewable energies and biological-earth systems.
“Cultures cannot survive without a sustainable agricultural base and land use ethic. Permaculture is about the relationships we can create between minerals, plants, animals and humans by the way we place them in the landscape. The aim is to create systems that are ecologically sound and economically viable, which provide for their own needs, do not exploit or pollute, and are therefore sustainable in the long term.” (Bill Mollison)