Permaculture course?

maybe you are wondering about the chickenshack permaculture course, two intensive weeks examining sustainability, pulling the very idea apart into all its constituent components and putting them all back together. All very interesting I am sure I hear you say, but 2 weeks! come on guys we have got lives to lead as well you know. Well yes, admittedly fair point it is a big investment of time but lets look at it from another perspective. Why would anyone want to take time out to study sustainability.......Maybe people are still not quite getting this, so I shall explain; all the world's climate scientists are now in agreement, the last few contrarians are really only lobbyist from the oil industry, climate change is here, its big, its bad and it is already causing devastation and its affecting the poorest people first; people who live closest to the land, like pacific islanders, Bangladeshi coastal farmers and Inuit and other tibals living in the polar regions. It is this simple, we have to reduce our co2 and other emissions by up to 80% over the coming century if we are to stop the greenland ice cap melting. This ice sheet, over 1 mile thick constitutes 10% of all the planet's fresh water, an average global temperature increase of 2 degrees will be enough to melt it, raising sea level by 7 metres, stopping the gulf stream amongst other things and generally making life pretty unpleasant for most of the worlds' people. So have I got your attention now? To be able to effectively and meaningfully work towards sustainability we need to develop the language, concepts, tools, experience, working examples and so much more to give ourselves a chance of knowing what we are doing. This is nothing less than the challenge of our life time, this is not some utopian fantasy but the emergence of a hardened and tested science of sustianability.

Permaculture is wonderfully positive, its all about solutions, and realising the earth has incredible restorative powers, potentially. Rather than claiming to have all the answers, permaculture provides a frame work with which to understand and tackle big complex and dynamic systems. It makes links from personal to biological, from economic systems to appraches to gardening on almost scale.

Graduates and students of permaculture or indeed any other sustainability discipline are needed the world over, right now, so get active, get involved. Change is a land of opportunity, be part of it!