BEYOND UVM: Whole Systems Design Permaculture Design Course

See below for more on this immersion in problem solving techniques…

This course offers an unparalleled opportunity to gain hands-on applied permaculture skills immersed within one of North America’s most diverse and intensive permaculture research sites.  Participants will engage with high-performance home and community resource systems that will be more resilient in the face of problems posed by peak oil, climate change, environmental toxicity, and the inability of existing economic and social systems to deal with such challenges.  Participants have the unique opportunity to live in a working small farm and homestead and see exactly what opportunities and challenges arise in developing and maintaining a productive and resilient home and land resource system. The site represents numerous cutting edge design opportunities for developing a self-reliant, liberated lifestyle customized for the cold climate, temperate biome.

This course includes the standard certificate curriculum but goes beyond the typical Designer’s Certification Course by utilizing the background of skills-based trainings offered in Whole Systems Skills, and is filled with practice-based, learning-by-doing experiences, not only concept and information-based study. Students in this course will not walk away from the experience without basic post-peak oil resiliency literacy including: how to plant a tree, fell a tree, split firewood, inoculate soil, make aerobic compost tea and biochar, layout on-contour swales and build them, harvest biomass with a scythe and sharpen it, sharpen and maintain other basic tools, perform earthworks, plumb basic waterworks and harvest water, inoculate mushroom logs and spread mushroom patches, perform basic metal work relative to home and farm fix-up projects, and innumerable other hard skills.  NOTE: This course takes a significantly different approach than every other PDC we know of: there are actual qualifications met by meeting this course’s requirements and as such, taking this course actually means one has understood specific learning goals, rather than simply attended a course for a certain period of time. We are using an assessment to make this value of the course a reality.