Getting Permacultured in Vermont

I have to take a moment to be an emissary for Yestermorrow Design & Build School in Warren, Vermont. I took their Permaculture bootcamp course this past weekend... and it was worth far more than I paid for it, in great part due to the expertise of my instructor, Andrew Faust. He's quite a jack-of-all-trades (and master of many of them) - naturalist, builder, designer, gardener - I suppose I'd call him a "medicine mason", because he is someone who heals by design. Bucky Fuller, for example - who I will probably refer to incessantly, btw - resides in my personal mythology as one of the modern progenitors of medicine-mason consciousness...

Among other things Andrew teaches Permaculture Design Certification classes - one of which is a 12-day course taught at Yestermorrow - and has recently started an edible garden consulting and design business in Brooklyn (his main game is called The Center for Bioregional Living, which was previously born from the generation of his biodynamic homestead in West Virginia)

And yes, the Yestermorrow creature is just as fantastic as it has always sounded. This place is the local Jedi training grounds. Every flavor of green craft is available in forms easily digested and expressed by the brains and limbs of earthlings, respectively. There are also a lot of courses that focus on the more psycho-spiritual side of green-craft, like applications of sacred geometry and dowsing, or naturalist know-how like tree identification, reading the landscape & general geomancy. They just added a course on Farm Design, too. It looks delicious, and yes, I cry every night because my job as a professional student prevents me from participating. (You can transfer credit from some of the 1 and 2 week courses to UVM now, too!)

Here's Yestermorrow's blog, in which they mention the upcoming exhibition at UVM's Fleming Museum that chronicles the design/build movement in Vermont in the sixties and seventies - our local incarnation of the first post-industrial back-to-the-land movement.

::teleport to the exhibit's webpresence::