EPEC Spring 2007

Reweaving Stories of People and Earth: a Collaborative Community Performance Project
Type of activity: Spring Course

This group will gather to take a semester-long journey, during which we will uncover, assemble, and physically animate the stories of our relationships with the earth, as individuals and as a species. We will generate material collaboratively with the help of various exercises and walking meditations that the facilitator will lead. As the semester progresses, we will shape our material into one narrative, or a combination of related narratives. We will use the available skills (especially dance, fire poi, acrobatics, contact juggling, staff, contact improv; and plant, ecological, historical and sociological knowledge) of participants to animate our tales. We will culminate with an outdoor performance this spring.

PARTICIPANTS NEED NOT HAVE PREVIOUS PERFORMANCE EXPERIENCE!

Meeting Times: Monday, Wednesday 6-8PM Meeting Place: Centrum Gallery, Donut 1 Start Date: January 31st, 2007 End Date: May 2nd, 2007

Facilitator: Alisha Mai Frank, amf05@hampshire.edu, Box: 0600

Bio: Mai Frank is a third year transfer student studying permaculture, ritual, storytelling, and circus theater as containers of cultural paradigms and mediums for social change. She is a signer for Local Foods Initiative, works for Leslie Cox at the Farm Center, and is a Certified Permaculture Design Trainee interested in physical play with a social purpose.

Permaculture Design: A Foundation
Type of activity: Spring Course

Permaculture is an ecological design system, based on ecosystem mimicry, for creating abundant, appropriate habitats that meet the food, energy, shelter, cultural, and other requirements of humans and all other inhabitants. To quote Dave Jacke and Jono Neiger’s consolidation and expansion on previous definitions by Mollision, Holmgren, Sley, Toensmeieer, and Hobbs, “Permaculture is the conscious design and co-creative evolution of human cultures that have the diversity, stability, and resilience of “natural” systems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people—providing our food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way while meeting the needs of the land for its own healthy self-expression and evolution.”

The intentions of this course are as follows:

Participants will gain a fundamental understanding of Permaculture, its ethics, and its design principles. Most importantly, everyone will learn to complete a simple Permaculture design process.

We will articulate our needs and goals as a group of individuals, and with these in mind, flesh out/revise/rework the course below. We will approach this as a continuous process that will last the semester through, evolving along with our depth of understanding of the subject matter. We will interweave a common design of the course for all, with compatible specialized designs for individuals’ or groups’ according to interest and available energy and time.

The Course:


 * We will begin with a basic introduction of the subject matter for those who want it. I will provide a booklist with important resources on the topic, including work by David Holmgren, Bill Mollison, and Dave Jacke. * We will partake in a number of workshops and lectures by permaculture teachers Jono Neiger and Dave Jacke, Hampshire alum and herbalist Chana Laila, and Hampshire professor and soils specialist Jason Torr. * Participants will have the opportunity to barter labor for teaching with Jono Neiger, on his land near the Sirius Community in Shutesbury. * We will collaborate and overlap events with EPEC course Green Design: A Look at the Community Garden. * The semester will rise and culminate with a doable project such as analyzing a site, mapping the information, and generating designs (irrigation pond area, community garden, elsewhere?), designing and planting a perennial polyculture, working on community garden projects, or any combination thereof.

Meeting Times: Monday, Wednesday 10-12PM Meeting Place: Start Date: January 31st, 2007 End Date: May 2nd, 2007

Facilitator: Alisha Mai Frank, amf05@hampshire.edu, Box: 0600

Bio: Mai Frank is a third year transfer student studying permaculture, ritual, storytelling, and circus theater as containers of cultural paradigms and mediums for social change. She will be collaboratively designing, making, and performing in an early succession permaculture garden/performance space for her Div III next year. She is a constant member and sporadic signer for Local Foods Initiative. She has taken a Permaculture certification course with Dave Jacke and Jono Neiger, and will be completing a Permaculture Teacher Training with them concurrently with this course. She works for Leslie Cox at the farm center, and is interested in herbalism, living willow sculptures, dairy goats, and physical play with a social purpose.

Green Design: A look at the Community Garden
Type of activity: Spring Course

This course will be focused on rebuilding and reviving the community garden at Hampshire College and exploring different theories and methods to make it as sustainable/self-sustaining as possible. We will incorporate theory, design and application through readings, field trips, guest speakers, workshops, mapping, planning, planting and building. This is a very multi-disciplinary, diverse course, rewarding in many ways.

Permaculture is a form of sustainable agriculture and design. This is just one approach we may take, if there’s interest we might look at Biodynamic Agriculture (a theory on sustainable agriculture by Rudolf Steiner). We shall look at the benefits of no-till vs. tilling, sheet mulching, composting, green manures, double digging and other methods of soil preparation.

Some goals will be to construct a new fence, build a cob oven, a new shed for tools, rebuild the arbor, constructing a trellis system for hops, building screens for soil filtering, cold frames, and possibly looking at the repairing the pond. If there’s interest we might also look at how the bioshelter (greenhouse) attached to Cole Science may be used better.

Field trips may including going to Sirius community, to the Northampton Community Gardens and to the Arboretum at Smith College. Guest speakers might include Chana Laila (alum with an interest in herbal medicine), Dave Jacke and Jono Neiger (Permaculture design experts).

There might be many opportunities to work with the EPEC course “Permaculture Design: A Foundation” (even merging the two courses together). If you’re interested in incorporating this EPEC course into an independent study or one of your other classes that may also be an option.

Meeting Times: Fridays, Noon-4PM Meeting Place: Community Garden on good days, CSC- 1- ECOL on bad ones. Start Date: February 2nd, 2007 End Date: May 4th, 2007

Facilitator: Tobin Porter Brown, tp05@hampshire.edu, Box: 1229

Bio: Tobin is a second year DIV II living in the greenhouse mod. His concentration is on Sustainable Living: agriculture, architecture and sustainable technologies. He’s the current signer for the community garden, the contra dance collective, a new signer for the dandelion den, Local Foods, and the student trustee for the Buildings and Grounds Committee. In the spring he will also be working on coordinating the ESSP: Environmental Science and Sustainability Program. This past summer he worked on the HC farm with Leslie Cox and has tried to maintain the community garden since then.

ILDES: Thinking, Planning, and Acting for Sustainable Development in Latin America
Type of activity: Project-based course

The Latin American Institute for Ecological and Sustainable Development (ILDES for its initials in Spanish, www.ildes.org) is a currently-forming nonprofit with participants in the US and Argentina, and contacts throughout the Americas. ILDES is focused on the promotion of social justice, human rights, and peace through ecological and sustainable development (ESD, based on permaculture) and the formation of coalitions of people, movements, and institutions. An understanding of solidarity and sovereignty are central to our method of work, and we act based on input from the people most directly effected by our work.

The primary focuses of ILDES this semester are: grant searching and grant writing; a situation analysis of Argentina; incorporating and filing for tax-exempt status; gathering knowledge about ESD techniques; coordinating the work of interns; further developing our website; and continuously planning our strategy with input from many people. We will learn how a transnational nonprofit functions in the US and Argentina, we will learn about sustainable, ecological, participatory development, and we will use our knowledge and skills to grow and develop ILDES.

Concepts central to our learning and action include: facilitation (vital to many other actions), management, direction, fundraising, website creation and maintenance, coalition building, transnational networking, internship coordination, and transnational activism. We also need to understand the issues and fields around which we promote and help cause social change and development. This means that we will explore issues of: sustainable, ecological development, participatory development, social movements, permaculture and agriculture, history, economics, resource management, human rights, law, education, solidarity, and many more.

The only requirement for participation is interest. Everyone is encouraged to contribute what they are motivated to contribute. ILDES is an open organization that appreciates new participants, and everyone with an interest in the issues listed above is invited to participate in this EPEC project.

Meeting Places &amp; Times: Wednesdays, 7pm to 9pm in ASH 222 Start Date: Wednesday, February 21 End Date: none Number of Meetings: 12 this semester

Facilitator: Patrick Gibbs, pag05@hampshire.edu. Box: 660 Bio: Patrick is in his fourth semester. He spent June, July, and August in Argentina working on a farm and participating in meetings about agrarian reform. He's particularly interested in food politics, environmental history, permaculture, solidarity, economics, and using computers as an appropriate technology. Patrick has been participating in ILDES since April 2006.