An Introduction to The Soil Sponge and Living Climate Workshop
Join us for this 5-week live online participatory workshop on whole-systems landscape function, with Didi Pershouse - Founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative, author of The Ecology of Care, and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function.
Thinking in systems can dramatically reduce the risk and impact of extreme weather events (i.e. drought, flooding and fires), rebuild local economies, and restore health and immunity for all living things by working with - not against - nature's own processes.
- We meet on five Wednesdays: September 3rd to October 8th 2025 (no class on October 1st).
- 12-2:30 EDT (UTC-4) Check here to see in your time zone.
- All classes are recorded for those who cannot participate live.
What to Expect from this Workshop
This workshop on whole systems landscape function will provide you with an entirely new view of how land works, while connecting you with an international community of practice. You will see new opportunities for growing cool oases, productive farms, and healthy resilient communities that are protected from the worst effects of flooding, drought, heatwaves, and fire.
We will discuss the structural and functional integrity of soils--the living matrix of a healthy “soil sponge, how it is formed, and why it is the foundation for so many other key processes of life on land.
We will dive into how life regulates the climate, cloud and rain formation, health, agriculture, urban planning, and economics. You will learn numerous easy methods for measuring whether land and soils are recovering their spongy integrity, or losing it.
We will discuss the difference between community based regeneration approaches that grow local capabilities, versus more extractive ones that create dependencies and drain resources from communities.
You will meet people from around the world, and come away feeling inspired by a new understanding of how we can address many of our major challenges through changes in land management.
If you sign up, be prepared to get into deep discussions with other participants, and to reflect on your own lived experience. The class includes small group discussions, large group discussions, journaling, the use of living systems frameworks, as well as informational lectures with slides.
Completion of the course also serves as a foundation for those who want to learn ongoing project and policy design in the international Land and Leadership Development Community.
All sessions will be recorded, for those who need to miss a session.
The sessions will be held on the Zoom platform. You will be sent relevant links.
PLEASE NOTE: This course will fill up quickly, please enroll promptly. Last minute registrations may not be available.
Scroll down to enroll!
“This will be an incredible course. Didi Pershouse is one of the best educators around.”
— Nicole Masters, Integrity Soils
The regeneration of a deep soil sponge can provide interrelated benefits such as:
- Healthier crops, animals, and people
- Food and water security
- Cooler regional temperatures
- Reduction of wildfire risk
- Increased resilience to flood and drought
- Reduced erosion, dredging, and road repairs
- Prevention of algae blooms and dead zones
- Cleaner air and water
- Reduced conflicts over resources
- Thriving local economies
- Putting 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. This is about understanding the work of other species and how we can collaborate with that work to create a better future. In addition to many stories from the diverse experiences within the group, we will look at successes of innovative land managers who are providing real value to their communities, reducing damages from storms and crop diseases, and restoring the dignity and profitability of farming.
Participants will gain:
- a working knowledge of whole systems landscape function
- an increased ability to evaluate land management decisions, practices, and policies
- a clearer picture of soil's central role in addressing current economic, social, and environmental needs
- a community of practice: deep discussions with people working toward similar aims
COURSE TOPICS
Landscapes that Work for All Life
A living “soil sponge” can soak up rain, store and filter water; and provide health, resilience, and thriving economies for the communities that grow from it. What is the "soil sponge" and why is it essential infrastructure for life on land? How does biology slow and sink water on a total landscape scale? How does nature grow a soil sponge, and how can we participate? How does a healthy soil sponge provide resilience to flooding, drought, heatwaves, and wildfires?
Collaborating with the Essential Workforce of Other Species
What is the essential work of other species, and what are the job descriptions in a functional landscape? How does biological work regulate local and global temperatures, create rain, and drive the water and carbon cycles? What are the processes that this natural workforce uses, and how can we apply that understanding to create better principles for urban design, farming, and ranching?
Measuring Change for Long Term Success
How do you know if your land's soil sponge structure and function is improving? What tests are useful and affordable? What can you tell with just a shovel and your own eyes? What apps can you use to save your data? Should you share your data or keep it private? When should a project use monitoring, and when is it safe to trust in computer-simulated models of landscape function?
Money, Life, and Land
How can we deepen our understanding of the relationship between the soil sponge, and functioning ecosystems and economies? Where will the money for regeneration come from? What are the costs of degraded land and who is paying those costs? Can we redirect those funds toward land regeneration? Are the emerging markets for soil carbon, water, and ecosystem services actually working from a living systems perspective and creating regenerative outcomes? If not, how can we improve them?
Choosing Effective Intervention Points
Why are some regenerative land projects gaining enormous momentum while others are stalling? What role do human relationships play in effective projects? When do "experts" and research studies help make change, and when do they disempower people from taking action? How do we design projects and policies that grow human and ecological capability, and engage people for the long haul?
(Note: these topics may change somewhat based on our discussions, but this gives an idea of where we will likely go.)
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, Climate Change and Creation Care, 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, and on the board supervisors for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District. She is on the board of directors of the Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. She was a member of the Vermont State appointed Payment For Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group (and helped to steer the state into a better path than simply financializing all of nature's processes.) 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
What People Say About This Course
“Clear, accessible and paradigm shifting. Didi is the only person I know of worldwide making this foundational science information available to the general public in a palatable format. The understanding she provides is at the core of climate change and the future of farming. We all need to learn from these seminars, to make our regional environments more resilient, and for professional development. I strongly recommend you take up this opportunity."
~ Phyllis Tichinin, NZ Dairy farmer, Soils consultant, Eco-nutritionist
"This workshop would be a fantastic preparatory class for policy makers and global influencers. It should be required for anyone voting on soil or agricultural issues."
~ Participant
“I can’t speak highly enough of Didi’s work. If you’d like to understand soil health and regeneration: this is a must.”
~ Gregory Landua, CoFounder, Regen Network
“If you want to learn how to make your farm more resilient to droughts and floods, then here is your chance! Didi is fantastic at explaining how to fix our broken water cycle.”
~ Gail Fuller, Farmer/Rancher, Co-Founder of Great Plains Regeneration
"Brilliant. I was absolutely blown away by some of the facts I learned about cloud formation and water cycles. I found it exciting and even though I am too shy to participate live (and watched the recordings) I truly felt part of the group movement and really loved some of the stories shared."
~ Melita Coggins
"She's a David Attenborough type in terms of how she can take complex concepts around what building soil organic matter does, to keeping soil in a landscape, and how that can slow a water cycle and create rain and restore weather patterns on an acre or a continent scale. As a keystone baseline to anyone's understanding new to this sector [her teaching] will be profound." ~ Christopher Ramsay, Partner Pelican Ag, Steering Committee Member for Patagonia's 1% for The Planet
Course Time and Dates
We meet on 5 Wednesdays: September 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th, and October 8th (we will not meet on October 1st)
Wednesday, 12 pm – 2:30 pm, EST (New York, USA: UTC-5). Use this Time Zone Converter if you need help identifying the timing for your time zone. https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=The+Soil+Sponge+Workshop+Sept%2FOct+2025&iso=20250903T12&p1=164&ah=2&am=30
Many participants also choose to stay on after class to continue with a more informal discussion.
All sessions will be recorded, for those who need to miss a session.
The sessions will be held on the Zoom platform. You will be sent the relevant link after registration.
The Story of this Course, and Pre-Class Details
Join the "Wisdom Underground" Substack Community
Substack - The Wisdom Underground: Rehydrating Los Angeles: Alpha Lo and Didi Pershouse
During this conversation, I offered up a phrase that captured our emerging plan for creating resilience in fire prone areas: “Harden the Houses and Soften the Land.”
Here's What I Think Everyone Needs to Know About Climate Change
This is a repost of a piece I wrote in 2018 to send to some of my more liberal-minded communities. I wrote it because I felt many of them were seeing climate through too narrow of a lens—resulting in skewed conclusions like “carbon is bad,” “technology will save us” and “Republicans are climate deniers.”
Why COMMUNITIES Should Invest in Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Sponge.
It is rare to find a single intervention point that can effect tremendous change and create multiple benefits to the systems around us. The “soil sponge,” lowly as it sounds, might just be that perfect center for effective community investment, because it is the basic infrastructure that makes life on land possible.