Liberation Ecology Project

May

UPDATE: Ecology of Transformation
June 18-21 at the SEEDS Festival (Plainfield MA)

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The Ecology of Transformation
June 18-21
SEEDS Festival, Plainfield MA

The Sustainable Landscape, Mycoscaping, + Liberation Ecology
With Rafter Sass + Skott Kellog
Full Workshop: $270 - 320
Day Rate: $75 - 85
Thursday Afternoon: $35

NEW 4-DAY Format with Daily Drop-ins, Thursday - Saturday

This four-day participatory workshop offers the tools to start reclaiming ecological and social health - all the way from broad strategies to specific techniques. It combines the mushroom permaculture of the Mycoscaping Intensive, the technology skills of the Sustainable Landscape, building aquacultures + compost teas, and the social project design tools of Liberation Ecology. You can come for the whole 4 days, or drop-in Thursday, Friday, or Saturday.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON ::: 2:30-6PM
Introduction to Permaculture, Introduction to Mycoscaping, and a Mushroom Walk on the Land.

Permaculture works to create sustainable, labor-saving ways of meeting all our needs for food, shelter, and infrastructure. As both a design science and a global movement, it is accessible to ordinary folks AND scientifically grounded. Permaculture is a powerful toolbox for individuals and communities to take charge of their livelihoods and their ecological impacts. This workshop will introduce participants to the history, ethics, principles and principles of permaculture - and the strategies, and techniques we need to create harmonious relationships with the environment and everything we do.

DAILY MORNING TRACK ::: 9:30 – 11am
LIBERATION ECOLOGY (For full-time workshop participants only)
What would sustainability look like, if it refused to sustain inequality? All too often, our quest for sustainability is hampered by a lack of understanding of the social reality we work in. We’ll apply holistic design to the the social sphere, and design collaborative projects for long-term sustainability, while connecting them with large-scale social transformation.

FRIDAY ::: 11:30 – 6
MYCOSCAPING: Mushrooms in the Permaculture Landscape

Mushrooms everywhere! Food, medicine, bioremediation, and more - fungi have a crucial role to play in creating healthy and abundant landscapes. Come explore the world of wild and cultivated fungi through a holistic permaculture lens. Includes lots of hands-on!

SATURDAY ::: 11:30 - 6
THE SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPE: Aquatic Polycultures and Bio Brews

We will overview sustainable technologies and then focus on making aquacultures and compost teas. We will build a pond that will be stacked with anarray of aquafic plants and animals for making food, fuel, and fertilizer. We will also brew compost tea: a liquid culture of beneficial microorganisms that can be applied as a fertilizer to crops or be used to remediate contaminated soils.

SUNDAY ::: 9:30 - 1
Liberation Ecology and Mycoscaping Wrap-Up (for full-time participants only)

Mar

Upcoming Workshops…

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

Graduate school has taken it’s toll on my workshop schedule! While teaching is taking a temporary backseat to study for a year or two, nevertheless there are a few great workshops coming up:

Liberation Ecology hosted by Burlington Permaculture

When: Saturday, March 21st 1:00 - 3:00pm
Where: Burlington Infoshop - 117 Bank Street, Burlington, VT
Cost: Free or by donation
• This will be my first local workshop since relocating to Burlington. There is such an amazing scene in Burlington, including a thriving local permaculture community - I’m excited to get into conversation with the people here who are passionate about making change.

Ecology of Transformation / Mycoscaping at the SEEDS Festival

When: June 15-18
Where: Earthdance Intentional Community, 252 Prospect Street, Plainfield, MA 01070. (413) 634-5678
Cost: The prices aren’t listed on the website yet - check back through the links above.
• This will be a very interesting workshop. Thanks to the long format, I’ll be able to incorporate a lot more Permaculture design into the syllabus. I’ll be combining a longer-form Lib Eco workshop with a mushroom-Permaculture workshop I do called Mycoscaping. So we’ll not only be doing lot’s of hands-on social project design, along with a lot of hands-on mushroom-centric Permaculture. Think of the theme as “underground networks of transformation,” or just enjoy the interdisciplinary mix of social and ecological design.

Although I don’t talk about it much on this website - which is oriented specifically toward the Liberation Ecology workshops - I also work professionally in permaculture design, teaching, and consultation. I’m looking forward to this chance to more thoroughly integrate these two aspects of my work.

The venue is an intentional community that - from what I hear - is a very lovely place to be. They began hosting this broad-ranging, future-oriented festival last year. After my four days, I’ll be sticking around for the weekend to guest-present with the wonderful Skotty Kellog from the Rhizome Collective, who will be facilitating a workshop on compost tea and aquaculture. We’re going to make a pond! Hope to see you there…

Jun

summer itinerary

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

I know it’s late notice…

This weekend, July 4-6, I’ll be presenting at the Northeast Permaculture Guild Summer Gathering. It runs all weekend. I’m not sure when I’ll be presenting - so come for the whole thing! It’s going to be great way to ‘observe’ our national holiday. From a distance, as it were.

I’ve been working with a group of amazing organizers to put on this event, coming up in just a few weeks:

Grassroots disaster response network, anyone? That’s one of the goals we’ll be working toward at the Confluence - along with a lot of other strategies, and questions, that are emerging in the space between social justice and climate change. If you are anywhere near the northeastern US, come on by.

I will be be doing some Liberation Ecology workshops, helping with some hands-on permaculture… and who knows what else?

If you’re around for the Confluence, you can come visit Regeneration CSA, the sweet permaculture farm where I’ve been staying since the April - we’re just 5 minutes down the road.

On August 10th, I’ll be presenting at the
2008 Northeastern Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Summer Conference.
Check it out here.

And then, at the end of the season, please come check out this amazing event:

Mar

Tour Report, R.U.S.T., and more…

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

Entrance to the former parking lot at the Rhizome.

Back in Austin now, and here for another two weeks.

The tour was fantastic. When I introduce myself as a presenter, I often say something like: “I do this work because I want to be in conversation with people who are hungry for change, and the tools for making it.” Since that happens to actually be the case, the week of workshops earlier this month was just about the best way I could imagine to spend my time. The participants, and the participation, were amazing. Folks from all different communities and background… urban and rural, ethinic-, age-, class-, and gender-diversity; the only common theme was wanting to be a part of changing the path we are on. I’ve never been so inspired.

Of course, the tour was also demanding, in some ways - kind of grueling, travel-wise. But while I don’t necessarily seek out a challenge like driving out of Manhattan at 6:00pm on a Friday, most of the demands of the tour were the kind of problem I want - adapting the workshop to different contexts, focusing more and more on participatory learning, getting challenged by participants to think in new ways…

Hopefully I’ll be doing some workshops in the midwest this May… more on that as things develop.

I was fortunate enough to teach at the R.U.S.T. Workshop this past weekend. Skotty and Stacy, from the amazing Rhizome Collective here in Austin, put on several of these Radical Urban Sustainability Trainings each year. They are a fantastic, weekend whirlwind introduction to a whole array of cheap, low-tech, ecological systems. My first post on this blog was a review of their first R.U.S.T held in the northeast, at the Albany Free School in Albany, NY.

In addition to helping out with some material on mushroom cultivation, biogas, natural systems, and where ever else it was useful, I gave a 1-hour Liberation Ecology workshop. Trying to squeeze participatory learning activities into a 1-hour timeslot was a crazy, but worthwhile, experiment. It was a good session, despite feeling rushed.

I’ll have a chance to continue the experiment in two weeks, when I do it again! I’ll be teaching another 1-hour workshop at the second R.U.S.T. training at the Rhizome this season. Space is still available in on the weekend of April 12,13, so get in touch with the Rhizome if you are interested.

Feb

Upcoming northeast workshops

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

I’m getting ready for a northeastern mini-tour. Unfortunately, I’m running into trouble with the calendar widget on the right - it’s not displaying all the entries. So rather than mess with it, for now I’m just going to post the information about the coming workshops here.

March 1,2 - Manhattan
Permaculture Design Course - Opening Weekend
I’ll be doing a full-day Liberation Ecology workshop in the opening weekend of a Permaculture Design Certificate course in Manhattan. It’s sponsored by Local Energy Solutions. It’s a great format - stretching a 2-week (72 hour) course out over a year, in order to be as accessible as possible to working folks. I’ll be teaching on the second day of the opening weekend (and then on the closing weekend, a year later). There are still several spots available in what promises to be fantastic PDC. You can register here. (You may need to scroll down to find the course info.)

March 5 - Hampshire College | Session I:
Liberation Ecology / Refuse to Choose! (Between Social and Ecological Health)

Full 5-hour Liberation Ecology workshop. Free to Hampshire students. See here for more details on the workshop, and email Patrick with questions, and for times & places.

March 6 - Northampton, MA | 3-hour Evening Workshop
Lisa Depiano, one of the tireless visionaries behind Montview Neighborhood Farm, is producing an evening Liberation Ecology workshop, open to the public. Email her here for details, or to sign up.

March 7 - Manhattan
Liberation Ecology & Permaculture Design
Andrew Faust, principal of the Center for Bioregional Living, is running a modular Permaculture Design Course each Friday at the Rutherford Place Friends Meeting House in Manhattan. Unfortunately, this session is not open to folks who haven’t registered for the course. Some later sessions are, though, so check out the website for details.

March 8,9 - Epworth Center, High Falls, NY
Permaculture Design Course - Closing Weekend
I’ll be working with my good friend and collaborator Ethan Roland, of Appleseed Permaculture, to co-teach this last weekend of the 07/08 PDC (hosted by the wonderful folks at the Epworth Center). This will be a full weekend with the students: seeing presentations, giving feedback on design projects, sharing the Liberation Ecology workshop, and working with the plans and visions of the participants.

Incidentally, if you are looking for a Permaculture Design Course in the northeast in 2008, email me and I’ll be happy to refer you to one.

March 10 - Hampshire College | Session II:
Liberation Ecology / Refuse to Choose! (Between Social and Ecological Health)

This second evening a Hampshire will be a full repeat of the 5-hour Liberation Ecology workshop, for folks who were unable to attend the earlier session. Free to Hampshire students. See here for more details on the workshop, and email Patrick with questions, and for times & places.

March 11: Fly back to Austin, and sleep for a few days…

Jan

Top 8 Reasons To Winter in Austin, TX…

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

…forsaking the Hudson River Valley for just a few months:
8) Applying to grad school while moving all possessions into storage is fun.
7) Taking bike, leaving truck.
6) 10-week internship with the amazing Glenrose Engineering.
5) Following sweetheart.
4) Friends and collaborators at the Rhizome Collective.
3) Practicar español.
2) Thawing extremities.
1) Breakfast tacos!

Jan

LE Workshop Outline (5-7 hour)

By rafter Closed

Categories: Uncategorized

The bulk of the workshop is divided into two sections: Context & Design.

0. Introductions

I. Context (50-60%)
Objective: re-frame our current situation in terms of “deeper” functional and historical relationships; realize some points of leverage and intervention that might otherwise remain hidden.

This section alternates between:

A. Small-group active learning: create a new “snapshot” of present-day social and ecological relationships using the Daylighting mapping exercises.
B. Lecturette: illustrate and explain long-term trajectories in human cultural evolution along key variables; show relationship between social caste and ecological extraction.

II. Design (40-50%)
Objective: foster opportunities for new interventions; bridge knowledge gained in first section with thinking about current and desired projects.

This section follows a similar pattern of alternation between interaction and presentation, with less small-group discussion, and more large-group.

A. Offer design criteria, tools, and techniques, to frame the transition from theory to application, and stimulate fresh and provocative project ideas.
B. Discuss, dissect, experimentally adopt, playfully provoke: wrestle with questions of application in our lives and projects.
D. Review currently existing projects that can function as models and inspirations for our work.
E. Invite and challenge participants to articulate daring desires, concrete goals, and doable next steps, in order to bring the work home and into their lives and projects.

III. Feedback and Closing

Jan

Back from Belen

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

In the floodplain

I’ve been back from Belen for a week and a half now, and it feels like I’m just beginning to touch down. The whirlwind of the trip to Peru segued immediately into the whirlwind of Xmas, travel, the New Year, sickness, moving, and a host of logistical dramas.Hopefully the regular readers of this blog have been nearly as busy, and so haven’t been waiting impatiently for an update…Belen was just amazing, in about five ways at once. Each of those ways in turn…

To cut straight to the full photoset, go here.

Continue reading ‘Back from Belen’

Dec

Current Conditions

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

View Larger Map

This is Belen, sandwiched between the city of Iquitos and the Itaya River. Or, in the case of Pueblo Libre, the neighborhood where I’ll be working, extending out into the Itaya River. That satellite image probably doesn’t really qualify as “current conditions,” but it is where I’ll be by tomorrow evening.

Right now I’m in San Francisco, having torn myself free of the Hudson Valley on the heels of a blizzard, after more than a day of wrestling fruitlessly with icy roads and plowed-in driveways. I booked my flight here so that I would have a 24-hour visit in the Bay before meeting the GI crew at the airport. I go to meet them in just a few hours now.

I’m vacillating constantly between the feeling that I’m underprepared, that I need to be somehow “cramming” to get ready for the experience ahead of me; and the more rational perspective that there is no way for this first, short, trip to be anything but preliminary, introductory, and exploratory. And more, that there is no amount of preparation that could substitute for responding with flexibility and sensitivity to the conversations and landscapes I find myself in as I meet Belen.

Continue reading ‘Current Conditions’

Dec

Clown for Safety…

By rafter Closed

Categories: Frontpage

…clown for credibility.

That’s what Dr. John Glick said to me when we spoke late last week.

“You’ll be much less of a target for pickpockets, you’ll be safer, and you’ll be more credible, if people know you’re with us.”

John Glick is my main contact with the Belen project. The “us” he is referring to is, of course, the Gesundheit Institute Global Outreach Project. If you aren’t familiar with them already, a major part of their mission is doing international clown-care work - in hospitals, orphanages, refugee camps, and even war zones - all over the world. Clowning is incorporated into pretty much everything they do - including the community development initiative in Belen that I’m involved with.

“Bring a red nose, even if you just wear it around your neck.”

So when I go to Belen for the first time this coming week, I’ll be bringing the usual selection of durable, light-weight travel clothing, plus a selection of mismatched, brightly colored plaid, hawaiian, and striped shirts and shorts, a plaid blazer with the arms cut off, a baby-sized red velour hat that ties under my chin, a small, purple, frilly umbrella, and yes - a big red nose that squeaks when tweaked.

Safety first, after all.

Continue reading ‘Clown for Safety…’

Exploring and Creating the Connections Between Sustainability and Justice

The Liberation Ecology Project works to build conceptual, strategic and personal relationships between global movements for social and ecological health.

Workshops

This coming year, a Liberation Ecology workshop may be coming to your town, school, church, or project. If you want to be on a low-volume email list for upcoming events, or if you are interested in hosting a workshop, get in touch.

The Ecology of Transformation June 18-21 SEEDS Festival, Plainfield MA

Liberation Ecology hosted by Burlington Permaculture

Ecology of Transformation / Mycoscaping at the SEEDS Festival

Exploring and Creating the Connections Between Sustainability and Justice

Workshops

The Ecology of Transformation
June 18-21
SEEDS Festival, Plainfield MA