How Plant Health Shapes the Intelligence of Life
Why We Can't Think and What to Do About It
Join us Saturday, April 18th at 4:30 EDT
Click here to see this in your time zone
Plants are the basis of food webs on land and sea, and provide the energy and ingredients for nearly all of life’s processes. Therefore, what happens to plants–and the conditions in our farms, fields, forests, lawns, and oceans–determines the clarity of biological signals, and capacity for intelligence that moves through all the layers of living systems.
So what do plants need, and how can we make sure they are getting it?
In this liive, online participatory workshop with Didi Pershouse (based on her recent article series on Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems) we will explore how plant health shapes the health and intelligence of the rest of the food web. From humans to bees to grazing animals–plant health plays a role in our ability to sense conditions, respond, regulate, discern, and remain coherent in changing environments.
We will discuss the basic and not-so-basic needs of plants, and how to create conditions where those needs are easily met.
The workshop will also examine how disruptions to these conditions—such as soil degradation, synthetic inputs, biocides, and monocultures—are affecting plant health and, in turn, impacting the intelligence and functioning of broader systems, including our own ability to think and make good decisions. These impacts include nutrient deficiencies, neurodegeneration, loss of membrane function, and the accumulation of harmful substances that move through the food chain.
We will look at where our conventional agricultural, forestry, and land use practices are creating massive downstream effects, and how we might shift things.
This also points us to an incredible opportunity for intervention: to manage land and food systems in ways that will uplift the health and intelligence of the whole.
Sign up now to join us live on Saturday, April 18th at 4:30 EDT
Your instructor
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by Carol Sanford), and is seeding new communities of practice in a Wisdom tradition that uses living systems thinking.
READ THE
"LAYERS OF INTELLIGENCE IN LIVING SYSTEMS" ARTICLE SERIES, BY CLICKING ON THE IMAGES BELOW
1: Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems: Why We Can't Think and What to Do About It
3: Plants Provide the Energy, Ingredients, and Conditions for Life: How Can We Make Sure They Are Getting What they Need?
(Coming soon!)
