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Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
Permaculture Around the World Series
Child Soldiers of Liberia,
Transformation through Permaculture
with Warren Brush
Saturday, October 4, 7-9pm 2008
Fundraiser Donation $10
Santa Barbara Central Library, Faulkner Gallery
Please join Santa Barbara
Permaculture Network as it launches its new series “Permaculture
Around the World” by hosting a talk with Warren Brush of Quail
Springs Learning Oasis and Permaculture Farm as he talks about his
journey and work in Liberia, West Africa.
Invited by the Santa Barbara based
non-profit Everyday Gandhis (
www.everydaygandhis.org), Warren Brush traveled to Liberia to teach
workshops in Permaculture as a part of a peace building process, with
vocational training for many former child-soldiers from a brutal 15 year
civil war the country had endured. After the long civil war, the
land was injured, but so were its children, now grown to young
adults. Caught in the nightmare of a war they didn’t create, but
had been conscripted into, many were reluctant to return to their homes
after the terrible atrocities of war. Could Permaculture help heal the
land and its people?
Warren Brush made his first journey to Voinjama, Liberia in 2007 to teach
a Permaculture course to students from a wide variety of backgrounds.
These included elders of all the local tribes, medicine people,
ex-combatant youth, trained agriculturists, subsistence farmers, men and
women, all teaching translated into the local language. Teaching
sustainable agriculture and building techniques, as a part of the course,
the students participated in a design project for a newly created Peace
and Permaculture Demonstration Farm. In March 2008, the first
graduating class of a Permaculture Design Course in Liberia’s history
received their diplomas from an assistant to the country's President
H.E.Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, noting the significance of the event.
Permaculture (PERMAnent agriCULTURE) is the conscious design and
maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems that have the
diversity, resilience, and stability of natural ecosystems. It is the
harmonious integration of landscape with humans in providing shelter,
water, food, energy and other material and non-material needs in a
sustainable manner.
Quail Springs is a 450-acre working farm and wilderness center focused on
modeling and teaching the concepts and practices of sustainability.
Located in the Cuyama Valley north of Ojai, CA, Quail Springs (
www.quailsprings.org) has been incorporating Permaculture into all of
its land practices on their farm and demonstration site since it's
inception. Permaculture teachers from around the world have taught
at Quail Springs, and most recently, students from Liberia have attended
advanced training courses there. The hope is to share ecological
design techniques and strategies with both the local communities of
California and the world. Currently Quail Springs is involved in a
capital campaign to help build a Core Mentoring Center to accommodate
this work, and join a network of Permaculture Training Centers around the
globe.
Warren Brush is a certified Permaculture designer, educator, and
storyteller. He is co-founder of Quail Springs Learning Oasis &
Permaculture Farm, Wilderness Youth Project, Mentoring for Peace, and
Trees for Children. He works extensively in Permaculture education
and sustainability design in North America and in Africa. Follow
Warren's work in Africa on his blog at
http://web.mac.com/warrenbrush/iWeb/Site/African%20Journeys/African%20Journeys.html
.
The event takes place at the Santa Barbara Public Library, Faulkner
Gallery, 40 East Anapamu St, in downtown Santa Barbara, on
Saturday, October 4, 7-9pm, 2008. No reservations are required,
fundraiser donation for Quail Springs work $10. For more information
please call (805) 962-2571, or email
margie@sbpermaculture.org;
www.sbpermaculture.org. Sponsored by the Santa Barbara Permaculture
Network and Everyday Gandhis.
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A Pattern Revolution
by Warren Brush
(complete article can be found on the Quail Springs
website at
www.quailsprings.org)
For many years my life work has been to facilitate the best next step
process for youth and adults alike through various workshop and mentoring
modalities. In my working with and learning alongside thousands of
people during these years, several key patterns have emerged that are
instrumental in connecting us with our next best step toward knowing how
to be responsible for our lives and for the communities in which we
live. These subtle ideas/patterns are truly revolutionary in their
capacity to bring healing change, and they are approachable from where
you dwell TODAY in your uniqueness of being and life circumstance!
Our work is in the weaving of a cultural basket that supports the health,
well-being and spirit of individuals and their communities. The wefts of
change beneath are the constant pattern understandings innate in all
peoples. The weaves come from our own uniqueness and the beautiful
diversity that we are capable of offering:
Incorporate Nature Into Your
Worldview: Develop routines that immerse your senses in the
influences of the natural world on regular basis. This could be a
daily ritual of sitting in one place over and over again, surrounded by
nature, for a few minutes each day, whether in the woods or leaning
against a tree in your urban neighborhood. This is the beginning of
awakening your true nature as you step into a worldview that
includes nature rather than ignores its deep connection to you.
Another key ingredient to shifting your worldview is to be mindful of
where you focus your mind energy. So many people spend countless
hours giving their attention to the medias often fearful and politically
motivated interpretation of the world around us. Begin by losing
your television, look at the newspaper less, read more books, observe the
happenings of the world around you in present time. Replace fear,
depression and hopelessness with a positive outlook.
Link the World Together Into
Patterns: The world is made up of multitudes of patterns that
make up larger sets of patterns that make up still larger sets of
patterns that are inextricably interdependent. We are forever
integral to this amazing web that touches everything. The
industrial human has been unfortunately acculturated to see the world as
individual and separate parts disassociated from the patterns of the
whole. It would be like trying to picture a friend, their uniqueness,
what they love, and their value in the world by looking at one cell in
their pancreas rather than stepping back and seeing the amalgamation of
patterns that make up the wholeness of their being. It seems
idiotic at best, yet for many of us this metaphor accurately represents
our daily relationship with the world that sustains us. Try this
linking exercise: Find a tree across your yard or street and then
identify another tree at least 100 yards away. Then find a link
between them by tracking those nuances that touch both of them through a
storyline. Maybe you will find a ground squirrel visits the base of
one tree to pick up the dropped food of a crow eating a chestnut high in
the branches. The ground squirrel carries the food back to its in-ground
nest and stores it for a rainy day. During those rare spring rains,
water enters the nest hole and reaches down into the storage of the
squirrel and sprouts the chestnut seed, which grows toward the light.
That sprout gets eaten by a deer, which leaves its scat, as a natural
fertilizer, on the other tree. It does not matter if the trees, or
any element of this world, for that matter, are hundreds of miles apart.
You can link them together with enough investigation. This
understanding, once kinesthetically learned, is the basis of
understanding our deep need to be responsible for our impacts on the
earth and one another.
Develop Routines of
Gratitude: I believe it is better to live in a state of
gratitude than to be in a state of hopefulness. Hope has often
served to stagnate action; i.e. If only the (democrats, green party,
republicans, etc.) were in political power; everything would change for
the better; I could afford to do what my heart wants me to do if I only
won the lottery; If I find the right partner I would then be a
happy person. In hope, often we relegate ourselves to sitting and
waiting when there is so much work to be done now in our lives and our
communities to bring about positive change. Gratitude engages a
different energetic mechanism than hope. Gratitude opens doors to
awareness of the tools needed to be in rightful action. Everyday our
family and visitors to our Permaculture farm sit in a circle before
dinner where we share our gratitude for the things we are truly thankful
for that day. It has become an important feedback loop in our unique
ecology of action where our hopes are being lived and reflected upon in
positive ways and shared as a part of our developing story.
Observe Your Life From a
Birds Eye View: Often we see our lives myopically through the
worries of the brain rather than from the wholeness of our hearts.
Regularly stepping back - physically, emotionally and spiritually -
to see our lives within a broader landscape of space and time, is
essential for us to stay synchronized with our destiny. There are
infinite ways this can look, yet, we have had many successes with these
few actions:
Physically, look at your
home, your neighborhood, and your community from different vantage
points. Climb a nearby mountain or tree, stand on the tallest
building, and look at where you dwell. To define and know where you
are, you must define that which surrounds you.
Tend a Re-Membrance
Fire. Kindle a fire in your back yard, fireplace, or a special
place in the wilderness from sunset one day to sunset the next.
Place your intentions of wanting to see the bigger picture of your life
and your next best steps.
Gather your family
together in a circle and ask each to share their dreams as they
understand them at this point in their journey. Before you
begin, create a safe space of listening and sharing by picturing your own
circle within a circle of all your ancestors who are intently listening
and holding each of you in their wisdom, grief, and joy. Then
picture a circle inside the family circle where you picture the children
who are yet to be born the next generations. As your dream sharing
circle ensues, remember that you are each a vital link that connects the
ancestors with the children yet to be born.
Grow a Garden: History shows
us that most of the problems in the world can be solved in the
garden. Cultural stability comes from living within regional
ecosystems that feed their inhabitants, whether naturally or by human
design. These ecosystems have the diversity, resilience, and equitability
to support a permanence to human habitation. When we grow a garden,
not only do we get local, healthy, fresh food that we know the source of,
we get the security of knowing we can feed ourselves without needing to
be reliant on a failing industrial complex or imperialistic power. The
garden grows us through our tending its needs and it tending ours with
truth and integrity. Much of the foods and medicines many
westerners have come to rely on are poisoned, depleted and spiritually
crippled. The garden reminds us that our bodies, our emotions and
our spirits are inextricably intertwined. Our patterns of health,
happiness and culture are inspired through the gifts of tending life in
the garden. Nurture a garden to life today!
Convert Your Economic Capital Into
Natural Capital: There is immense economic wealth that is squandered
daily on products and systems that are destroying the capacity for our
future generations - our grandchildren - to live and thrive. We are
literally stealing from our children and grandchildren to feed
ourselves. The western economic wealth that has been derived from
mining the earth needs to be converted into natural capital as we near a
catastrophic tipping point where life-necessary natural resources become
scarce. Many economists have stated that we are nearing the point of
possibility where our money could become completely worthless. There are
many ways to regenerate natural resources:
*Convert your monies now
into natural capital through planting beneficial food-bearing perennials
around your home, neighborhood, and community.
*Engage a Permaculture
Designer to lay out a sustainability plan for your home including food,
water and energy stability, and security.
*Give substantially to
groups that plant trees in sustainable systems.
*Join a CSA (Community
Supported Agriculture) program where the farmers are producing food in
regenerative systems that ensure ecological health in your region and
keep land out of development.
Take responsibility
for your personal impacts on the earth by purchasing ALL the goods needed
to sustain your life from local sources. Know the stories of how the
materials and processes involved in the production of these goods impact
the land. Better yet, begin to produce more of the products you,
your family, and your community need to survive.
It takes many heartfelt steps to change the pattern of ones direction
toward healing and balance, and even more to be an instrument of
regenerative change to the larger patterns that make up society. By
reading this book at this fortuitous moment in your own journey, you have
opened the door for beneficial change to weave itself deeply into your
life patterns and deeply into the landscape that sustains you. Take
courage in knowing that you are not alone in this process. Many of us are
shifting our life patterns, not only toward being sustainable, but toward
being instrumental in bringing to life a new era of cooperation between
humans and this earth that holds and nurtures us. Together, we will
be the change we want to see as our beautifully diverse lives
weave together in an earth shaping pattern
revolution.
-end-
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
an educational
non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org