Permaculture Design Certificate Course
Have you taken one?
The Permaculture Design Course (PDC) Certificate is Awarded to Students who Complete the 72-hour Curriculum in Permaculture Design as created by Bill Mollison and who successfully complete the design project.
Who should take the course?
~Home-owners, gardeners, and farmers will learn to increase the value and productivity of their property to provide stable income/produce and resilience.
~Real estate, construction, and development professionals will be able to better address the public’s growing concern for the environment and to reduce resource use and impacts, thus bringing down the budget.
~Educators will learn why and how to integrate permaculture design into their curriculum in ways that have been proven to raise student engagement and performance.
~Planners and public officials will be able to identify and solve bottlenecks and impediments to implementing their programs and find holistic solutions to land-use and resource issues.
~Energy, water, and waste-systems personnel will learn holistic management strategies for integrating their projects into the larger community.
~Students will be able to get connecting insight linking various subjects in the conventional syllabi and thus determine their future professional studies/careers.
~Entrepreneurs looking for new, ethical business ventures.
~Design professionals can add new qualifications to their resumes and offer improved services to their clients. Their designs will tend to use fewer resources, work more efficiently, and are easier to maintain.
~Any environmentally conscious individual who wishes to change their lifestyle to improve health and reduce carbon foot-print, especially urban dwellers.
~Any other professional who wishes to re-look at their profession in the light of the Permaculture ethics and framework.
What does the course enable you to do?
In the permaculture tradition established by Bill Mollison, with this certificate a graduate may confidently use the word ‘permaculture’ in the promotion of their work or business. During the course the students are made aware of various ethically profitable business opportunities that exist in today’s world scenario. This might include permaculture design consulting, designing, implementation or teaching. The only limiting factor to starting one’s own business is their own personal knowledge-base, experience, or skills and the Permaculture Design Course will help jump start the student’s learning curve on all these fronts.
What does the course cover?
This course is a 72 hour INTENSIVE Permaculture Design course, which includes class-room sessions as well as hands on practicums. The curriculum is based on the brilliantly transformative and successful ‘PERMACULTURE: A Designers Manual’ by Bill Mollison, the founder of the Permaculture Movement.
The modules which will be covered (in the PDC being conducted by Gardens of Abundance) are as follows:
1. Introduction to Permaculture — Ethics and Principles
2. Concepts and Themes
3. Methods of Design (Design Practicum starts)
4. Patterns and Pattern application
5. Climate Analysis and Landscape Profiles
6. Trees and their Energy Transactions
7. Water
8. Soils and soil building mechanisms (practicum)
9. Earthworks and Earth Resources (practicum)
10. Climatic factors and Design
11. Aquaculture, Gardening strategies (practicum)
12. Restituting Damaged landscapes, Broad Acre regeneration
13. Ecological House and Habitat design (Design Exercise starts)
14. Alternative Technologies
15. Permaculture in the Indian Scenario — Challenges and solutions
16. Urban Permaculture Strategies
17. People Systems and Permaculture Nation
18. Design Exercise Submission and Review
19. Affirmations and Next Steps for students
The PDC being conducted by Gardens of Abundance, will have a special thrust on Indian scenario as well as on restituting damaged landscapes and broad acre regeneration
It draws from the vast amounts of knowledge from various classic books and upon traditional knowledge and is designed to give you a broad understanding of the Permaculture Design Methodology.
How will the course experience be?
All ‘courses’ are designed to equip the learner with some new knowledge, information or skills.
The Permaculture Design Course is unique in that it firstly it teaches you how to observe, how to think and approach what you see around you.
In a society which values action and achievement and winning at all costs, often the rewards are not worth the efforts. Just as accurate diagnosis is critical to successful medical treatment, it is crucial for a designer to observe.
This course teaches you to observe at various levels — cycles in nature, movements in history, practices across cultures, patterns in social behaviour and self – and thus to increase one’s awareness and learn how to interact harmoniously with nature to achieve your goals.
The permaculture design course teaches whole-systems thinking. Most of the time we are taught to think in terms of departments or specializations that make up our world. For example: healthcare and numerous specializations within it , or schooling and various subjects to be studied, city vs. village etc. This approach lets us exclude supposed “externalities” like knowledge of how goods are made, mass farmer-suicides, loss of indigenous and intellectual property rights and so on. There are side effects such as pollution and rising cost of healthcare, of which we become unwitting consumers. Systems thinking focuses on the relationships among the parts, the features that emerge from these relationships (often unexpectedly, just as new towns emerged from transportation hubs), and how the parts come together to make up greater wholes. It is the key to sustainable living.
Systems thinking and approach brings to light several unexplored and innovative business opportunities.
It is about going beyond merely “Green or organic business models”. It offers a framework for critical decision-making and right, resilient livelihood in view of the challenges presented by life in the current industrial system.
There has been great technological advancements in all professional fields. However, this has not translated into our daily lives. There is increasing pressure and insecurity over basic necessities world-wide. This course will equip you with holistic strategies and tools to create and practice sustainable solutions for food, water, energy security and energy efficient natural housing. That is, go beyond the norm of depleting resources and the human spirit but renewing and invigorating them. You will be able to do this for yourself and design your own future.
Since individual needs are but a subset of the community’s needs, this course will also empower you with ideas and resources on building social capital; developing a sustainable economy, and renewing local communities on all scales so that they accommodate differences, local needs, diversity and stability from global market fluctuations. Permaculture uses ecological principles to design sustainable human communities that are harmoniously woven into the environment and that aim to have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.
Permaculture is a worldwide grassroots movement, organized on principles and ethics. Permaculturists are the people with solutions. They have worked for people in extreme climate conditions. Permaculturists have proved to be very effective in restoration work at earthquakes and cyclones disaster sites. They make up the world’s largest unfunded aid-organisation.
It is exciting to be part of this huge network and to be able to do meaningful work which the world needs right now. In this course you will meet people concerned about the same things you are. There are many opportunities during the course for interaction, cross-cultural learning and group work which in many cases has laid the ground work for future collaborative relationships.
“If you want to learn something, it should totally envelop you and you should begin to see it everywhere. Then there will come a time when you will be able to design using that.” – Dwarakanath Jnaneswar about Pattern Understanding.
The Permaculture Design Course is one of the few educational systems in the world of its size that allows so much freedom to students and teachers alike. The course material and presentation is structured to address different learning styles. Each topic expands and deepens our understanding of the previous topics and thus the knowledge and understanding of the student is gradually built up.
Design Exercises help bring this into application and make corrections. Just as the course material is vast in its size and scope, the course presentation too extends beyond the classroom teaching, design exercises and audio-visual sessions. Permaculture flows over to the meals shared, nature walks/garden visits, the gardening work which has produced the food, learning new practical skills and checking theoretical learning with experiments.
‘Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarassingly simple’- Bill Mollison
Gardens of Abundance is conducting a ‘Permaculture Design Certificate Course’ from September 10th — 24th, 2017 in Hyderabad, India. Those who are interested can know more by clicking this!
