Hello Friends,

We are very excited to announce that Darren Doherty will be joining Geoff Lawton as one of the teachers for the Quail Springs Permaculture Design Course in May of 2007.  This is a great gift as Darren is one of the top Permaculture Teachers with Arid land experience (see his note below).  Darren has taught previous courses with Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, and many of other of the top teachers in the world.  He brings to the Quail Springs PDC his extensive knowledge of Keyline applications as well as his arid lands PC application skills and understandings.  Darren will be teaching the first week and Geoff the second week as Geoff was had unexpected meetings arise in the Middle East during the first week of the course as a part of an important contract he has with the country of Saudi Arabia.  Geoff has stated that this year’s U.S. courses may be some of the last that he will teach internationally as his vision and his skills are being directed to work on a large scale with willing countries around the world.  Geoff and Darren are both excited to teach together again, and have created a dynamic curriculum for the two weeks of the course.  An updated announcement of the course will follow this email. 

Best,

Kolmi Majumdar

Caretaker, Quail Springs Learning Oasis and Permaculture Farm

info@quailsprings.org   805-886-7239

From Darren Doherty:  I have been a full-time Permaculture Designer since 1993 (at age 24) and focused the first half of my career on design and development work, to the point where I became the most prolific Permaculture Designer in Australia, designing and developing over 1100 properties in that period, with a large development and management team backing my design efforts. With the births of our two younger children, by 2002 I tailed off my emphasis in that regard and am now working on selected "special projects" and teaching about 5 PDC's per year. I spend about 40% of my working time these days in Viet Nam or managing my Viet Nam projects (Permaculture development and education  projects for M&M's/Mars Inc. & ACDIVOCA) with the remaining time spent managing a 60ha working research & demonstration farm in Southern Victoria, Australia plus a smattering of broadacre design jobs here and there. David Holmgren and I co-teach one Permaculture Design Course a year here in my home town of Bendigo, Central Victoria, which is the one of the only PDC David teaches on these days.

Geoff and I have been in close contact for years now and we share our extensive photo libraries, a similar arrangement I have with David Holmgren, and an array of other Permaculture folks which is a great resource to draw upon in the development and delivery of my presentations.  Indeed, I avidly share an array of other data, articles, presentations, photos etc. etc. in an effort to accelerate our students' Permaculture pathways in teaching, design or development work.  Geoff, Nadia and I are all Registered Teachers of The Permaculture Institute, so we have to follow a set curriculum for the delivery of the PDC course. Our course programs are very similar, though I add on a few bits here and there with regards to professional design practice.