Regenerating Landscapes for Community and Climate Resilience
The Soil Sponge as Essential Infrastructure: February 8-12 Deep Dive with Didi Pershouse, Founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative
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2020 was a long year...why not start out 2021 with an entirely new perspective?
Learn how to dramatically reduce the risk and impact of extreme weather events, rebuild local economies, and restore health and immunity for all living things...by working with (not against) nature's own processes.
You are invited to join our international community of practice for a 5-day intensive course.
February 8-12, 2021 (Monday through Friday)
Meeting Daily, 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm EST (New York) with optional social time afterward
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“This will be an incredible course. Didi Pershouse is one of the best educators around.”
— Nicole Masters, Integrity Soils
For years now, we have been watching our communities struggle with drought, wildfires, flooding, heatwaves, loss of biodiversity, failing economies, and health crises.
Now I want to invite you into our community that shares this new perspective. People who have learned to see the essential work of other species and how it underpins our economies, health, and climate, are working along with nature to rapidly bring life and water back to dry degraded landscapes.
Join us for this participatory course that will introduce you to an entirely new way of looking at life, land, water, and health. Large scale health and resilience are within our reach.
Farmers and communities that create conditions for a soil sponge to grow experience interrelated benefits such as:
- Healthier crops, animals, and people
- Abundant clean water
- Reduction of wildfire risk
- Resilience to flood and drought
- Reduced erosion, dredging, and road repairs
- Higher farm profitability
- Cooler regional temperatures
- Prevention of algae blooms and dead zones
- Cleaner air
- Increased biodiversity
- Reduced conflicts over resources
- Improved local economies
- Puts atmospheric carbon to work creating landscapes that support all of life.
This isn't about using heavy equipment to move soil around. This isn't about buying products to spray. This is about understanding the work of other species and collaborating with that work.
Whether you are a farmer, a policymaker, a journalist, or an impact investor trying to make a change in the world, after taking this course you will see the potential of simple strategic land-management decisions to create the conditions for land to naturally regenerate its healthy, resilient, spongy structure underground, and make way for a natural underground workforce to improve the health and resilience of the entire region.
You will gain:
- a working knowledge of whole systems landscape function
- an increased ability to evaluate land management decisions, practices, and policies
- tools to create and lead soil health initiatives in your region
- a community of practice: deep discussions with people working towards similar aims.
Our community of practice brings together experience and perspectives from around the world--in our courses, our ongoing Google discussion group, our annual conference, and our strategic innovation groups.
You will also gain:
- A clear picture of soil's central role in addressing current economic, social, and environmental pressures.
- A scientific understanding of living matrix of the soil carbon sponge, and its relationship to carbon, water, and nutrient cycles.
- A deeper view of the soil health principles, and why focusing on principles first (before "Best Management Practices") will create dramatically different outcomes.
“Didi Pershouse is an awesome teacher. I highly recommend studying with her if you're interested in regeneration and building resilience to drought, fire, and floods.”
— Rebecca Burgess, Founder, Fibershed
Course Schedule
This course will meet on Zoom video conferencing from 3pm to 4:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (New York, USA) for five consecutive days, February 8 through February 12. Recordings will be available if you miss a class.
Discussion will continue via our private google group: this is a great way to deepen connections with people working on regenerative projects around the world, learn from each other's wisdom and experience, share resources, and dive into more detail on specific questions.
Participants will gather on Zoom Video Conferencing for these interactive online classes. You can join by computer, smartphone, iPhone, or even telephone.
*A few spots in every course are reserved for participants who need to pay less or cannot otherwise afford to attend. Please do contact us if this is you. We are particularly interested in saving spots for farmers and agricultural leaders from the Global South.
If you have any questions please email me through my contact page by clicking here, or at [email protected]
NOTE: BE SURE TO DOUBLE CHECK YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WHEN ENROLLING. IF YOU PUT THE WRONG ONE, WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO CONTACT YOU WITH COURSE INFORMATION!If you are finding the enrollment page troublesome, please try using Chrome as your browser, or starting over from an incognito page. Teachable has a cookie issue. (As do many of us!)
Your Instructor
Didi Pershouse is the author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function. She is a contributing author for Health in the Anthropocene, and the Regenerative Economy Collaborative.
As the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine, she developed a practice and theoretical framework for systems-based ecological medicine—to restore health to people as well as the environmental and social systems around them. After 22 years of clinical work with patients, Pershouse now travels widely in North America and Europe as a speaker, teacher, and consultant.
Pershouse is a skilled facilitator, who brings people with diverging views together into effective working groups with common aims: improving soil health, public health, food and water security, and regional resilience through simple changes in land management. Both online and in-person, her participatory, inquiry-based workshops engage farmers and ranchers, policy makers, investors, and scientists in living-systems thinking and deep listening, to allow for emergent strategies. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
In 2018, she founded the Land and Leadership Initiative, and the "Can we Rehydrate California?" Initiative. She is currently a Planning Commissioner for her town, a member of the Vermont State appointed Payment For Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, a working member of the Northeast Healthy Soils Policy Working Group and is on the board of directors of the Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetlands while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is currently working on projects with the UN-FAO Farmer Field School program and the Climate Resilient Natural Farming Initiative in Andhra Pradesh, India (involving over 800,000 farmers). You can learn more about her work at www.didipershouse.com