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  • From: Keith Johnson <keithdj@mindspring.com>
  • To: Permaculture ibiblio <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] From Starhawk--A vision and an appeal
  • Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:31:44 -0500

My friend and colleague Starhawk recently sent out this appeal for support that I think you will find worth reading.
Keith

Dear friends,

Many years ago, I wrote a book called /The Fifth Sacred Thing,/ that envisioned a transformed, diverse and green San Francisco in a world divided by war and ecological collapse. I go back to that story a lot, these days, as both the worst and some of the best aspects of it seem to be coming true.

That San Francisco of the future is a place where streams flow freely through garden streets lined with fruit trees, where celebrations and rituals honor a multiplicity of cultures, where humans have learned to heal and live in harmony with nature.

Now, I spend a lot of my time not just writing about that vision, but trying to make it a reality by teaching the skills of ecological design. In 2002, together with Penny Livingston-Stark, I began teaching Earth Activist Trainings, because I saw so many enthusiastic, deeply committed people on fire with the desire to change the world, but often without a clear sense of what the solutions are.

Over the last six years, Earth Activist Trainings have loosed hundreds of fired-up permie potentizers onto the world, seeding communities across the globe with the skills and knowledge of regenerative design. Here’s just a few of the things they’ve done:

Disaster Relief and Bioremediation:

In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, EAT alumni became core organizers of the grassroots Common Ground Relief efforts, ran the trauma support and counseling program at the clinic, and started a bioremediaiton project to clean toxins from soil using microorganisms, plants and fungi.

Sustainable Development in the Third World:

Rainwater catchment in Bolivia, a model permaculture farm in Brazil, community development and tsunami relief in south Indian fishing villages, sustainability programs in the rural Phillipines, women’s programs in a permaculture institute in the West Bank of Palestine.

Urban Permaculture;

Rejuvenating a community garden in the Bayview, the poorest area of San Francisco; living and working in the L.A. Ecohouse, growing food in the projects of Miami, transforming intersections into gathering places in Portland; model backyard gardens and community power-down programs in Iowa City; youth programs in poverty stricken downtown Detroit.

And much, much more than we can fit on this page. You know as well as I do that the world is at a crucial turning point right now. Finally, the general public gets it that climate change is happening and the waters are rising around us. But we still haven’t begun to make changes on the scale and with the speed that’s needed. The media is full of green news and the stores are full of green products, but we can’t buy our way out of looming ecological collapse. No one technology or technique can save us.

That’s where we come in. There’s a pressing need to train people in the art of designing flows, links and connections, creating systems that meet human needs while healing and regenerating the environment around us. And that’s just what we do.

Please help us continue this work. We have three residential courses planned for 2008, an Urban Permaculture course over a series of six weekends, a new Youth Course, and a Sustainable Skills Tour with our newly built EAT bus.

To do all this, we need your help. EAT has had generous funding which has allowed us, in turn, to be generous with financial aid. For each of our courses we’ve provided ten to twenty thousand dollars of work trade and scholarships, which in turn makes it possible for activists and low-income students to attend. But that funding is now at the end of its cycle, and we need help from new sources to continue being able to say ‘yes’, not ‘no’, to those who want this training.

Many of you are out there, right now, doing your regenerative activism on a daily basis. (Thanks!) And you may not have a lot of financial wealth to share. But, please, think about the value of Earth Activist Training. And think about how desperately we need more activists of this caliber. Then, give whatever you can. The results of even a small pledge of $10/month will be exponentially effective in the big picture. Because every dollar you donate will help train more passionate, intelligent people to cleanse the soil, heal the water, share their skills, and restore the balance – in countless and priceless ways.

Please consider a donation right now of:

$1700 (provides one full scholarship for a two week course.)

$800 (subsidizes one work trader)

$100 - $250 (provides some hands-on supplies for a course)

Just to be clear, we welcome donations of every size and kind. Large. Small. One-time. Quarterly. Annual. Sporadic. We gratefully accept it all. *Make a monthly pledge for exponential impact. Join the EAT Mycelium Fund Monthly Giving Circle.
*
And now we invite you to choose the way you will contribute to this most necessary educational endeavor.

Donate online at http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html <http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html>

or send checks to

Earth Activist Training
POB 251
Sierraville CA 96126

Thanks! Your generosity is a crucial part of the solution.

Starhawk

Earth Actiist Trainings

www.earthactivisttraining.org
www.starhawk.org

P.S. Don’t worry—I haven’t stopped writing. In fact, my holiday gift to you is an expanded, updated vision of San Francisco of /The Fifth Sacred Thing/. It’s too long to send, but you can find it at www.starhawk.org/ <http://www.starhawk.org/> . Look on the left sidebar for “Latest Essay”.

--
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47407
(812) 335-0383
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
http://www.PermacultureTradingPost.com
Switch to Solar Power the Easy Way
http://www.jointhesolution.com/KeithJ-SunPower
http://www.PowUr.com/KeithJ-SunPower
Blog: http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/design/Designconsult.html
also Association for Regenerative Culture
http://www.ARCulture.org
also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a
small world after oil.
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/applebloomington
also Bloomington Permaculture Guild


  • [permaculture] From Starhawk--A vision and an appeal, Keith Johnson, 12/08/2007

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