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Water

Welcome!
We are so glad you are here.

“When you look at a forest you are looking at a lake whose water is locked in trees and earth.” 

– Shad Qudsi 

  • Water is truly one of the most important components and forces of nature. It promotes diversity, thriving life, succession, microclimates, and interesting shapes of the land. Understanding how to interact with it, utilize it, recycle it, clean it, and slow it can unlock many permaculture revelations.
  • This course will cover creating water recycling systems, how to work with your microclimates, when and how to divert and redirect the flow of water, and how to be a responsible water steward.

Questions this course will answer:

What are strategies for slowing, spreading, and sinking the water that flows through your land?

What is the global water system?

How does adding ponds to your land increase plant and animal diversity?

How do you utilize and/or reuse your grey and black water from your house?

Learning Outline

Each course is broken down into digestible lessons and each lesson contains different components.

Lectures are broken down into bite sized mini lectures* with key takeaways for your viewing and comprehension ease. Please view all content for the best learning experience.

Engage with your peers and community in forums and discussions related to this lesson and course. Deepen your understanding by digging into the community knowledge available

 

Additional resources are available for your additional learning at the bottom of the lesson. Take advantage of the opportunity to deepen your knowledge of the lesson at hand.

Take notes using the embedded, super nifty notetaker tool (the black box labelled Take Notes) in the lessons. As you progress lesson to lesson, course to course, your notes will cumulative into one handy-dandy document. 

 

*Note: Since the original filming of these lectures, we have made some improvements, tweaks, and updates such as breaking the lectures into bite-sized chunks, reorganizing topics, and expanding the additional resources available. We made these little tweaks to bring this course from amazing to legendary and to provide the best learner experience possible. So occasionally you may hear one of the teachers refer to a resource (ie: Notepack) or mention a former lesson that you can’t find in this specific course–don’t fret! 

Meet your teachers

Shad Quidsi

Shad Qudsi has 20 years experience in organic and commercial gardening and farming. He is certified in Permaculture Design and has over 12 years experience in holistic site development and homesteading. Shad originally set out to study mathematics and work in big business, but long ago had a change of heart. Shad is the Co-Founder of Atitlan Organics Permaculture Farm and Education Center, and more recently serves the role of President in the non profit organization, Wellkind Guatemala. Aside from all of this, Shad is an enthusiastic teacher who truly believes that humans are good for the planet. Human resilience cannot be erased from the landscape and now, it is coming back with a gentle loving caress.

Jeremy Fellous

Jeremy Fellows has focused ten years of study, mentorship and implementation of permaculture design systems back home in Massachusetts. With many years of experience in botany and horticulture, he is fascinated by the world of plants. After working many years in Guatemala, Jeremy has dedicated his focus to land and water management systems that lend to ecological acceleration and social integration through food production. Jeremy now runs granja tzikin, works as a designer and consultant with Regenera and teaches in the Atitlan Organics teachers guild. 

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Course Content

Sarah Wu

Sarah is a clinical herbalist of 20 years, studying and practicing planetary eclectic, regenerative herbalism with a foundation in Wise Woman Reclaiming philosophies. Influenced by global traditions, Sarah focuses on local food-based healing and ethnobotanical traditions. She leads trainings and workshops in herbal medicine, Permaculture Design Courses, Therapeutic Deep Ecology, Social Permaculture, field-to-the-plate holistic nutrition, herbal first aid and Tarot. She is a passionate mentor and educator, who believes in the teacher’s role in unlocking the innate wisdom of the student. Sarah is the co-founder of the Village Witches project, and is a Co-Founder and Co-producer of Envision Festival.

Laura Palmieri

Laura ‘Lala’ Palmieri is a clinical herbalist, a biologist, plant and fungi lover and grower. She offers health consultations to balance body, mind and soul working with medicinal herbs and mushrooms. Her approach to health integrates the knowledge of many ancient traditions and teachers, fusing spirituality with nature, and science with alchemy through the transformation of the elements.

Lala has spent her years in dialogue with Nature, which has fueled her passion to integrate scientific knowledge and the connection with all beings to help humanity. She integrates her practice with cooking, gardening, and exploring ecosystems. She teaches and facilitates herbal clinics and programs in permaculture, herbalism, botany, fermentation, and medicinal mushroom cultivation, with a regenerative earth care approach and techniques that are accessible to most. She and Sarah co-created the Envision and Cosmic Converge Herbal First Aid Clinics, other relief Clinics in Guatemala for the volcano eruption. You will find Lala crafting remedies for her diverse communities in Guatemala and Costa Rica, where she is actively creating a world with integrated healthcare.

Holly Mech

Holly fell in love with yoga because of the sense of connection she felt every time she came to her mat. She began teaching yoga in Chicago in 2011. Her desire to deepen her teaching and personal practice led her to continue her yoga education in California, Bali, Australia and Guatemala. Holly now travels around the world teaching yoga and facilitating yoga teacher trainings. She enjoys helping new teachers sequence yoga classes and incorporate philosophy into their teachings. Her classes are creative and dynamic with an emphasis on making yoga accessible to everyone.

Holly studied English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and frequently draws inspiration for her classes from literature and poetry. When she’s not on the yoga mat she enjoys exploring nature, singing, dancing and working with textiles.

Ashley McDonnell

Ashley’s work focuses on resurrecting our relationship to the natural world through the development of earth based skills that deepen our connection to place while increasing our sense of sovereignty and resilience. Devoted to the arts of permaculture, natural building, herbalism and birth work as her mediums, Ashley explores with humility the diverse modalities that support us in living in right relationship with the world around us. She views permaculture as a practice that not only creates healthy ecological communities but one that helps to reweave the very fabric of who we are as people. Her work is an offering to the future.

Zach Loeks

Hailing from Ottawa, Canada where he and his partner run the 50-acre Kula Permaculture Farm, Zach brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the course. He works as an educator, designer, consultant and farmer, with an emphasis on integrating diversity, conserving soil and maximizing farm ecosystem services while maintaining high productivity.

Last year Zach published The Permaculture Market Garden, which explores ways that permaculture can be scaled up be a profitable whole-systems enterprise. Zach is a leading figure in permaculture, who brings a new and exciting vision of how it can be integrated into the wider community and marketplace.

Rony Lec

Rony is one of the world’s leading experts in permaculture and Mayan ancestral knowledge. Rony has spent the last 20 years teaching and implementing permaculture throughout Central, South and North America focusing on promoting food sovereignty and preserving biodiversity for the survival of Indigenous communities.

Through his extensive work with Indigenous communities on traditional ecological knowledge, seed saving, native plants, local/global food movements, livelihood security, and the interaction between communities and the environment, he has made a key contribution to the empowerment of Indigenous people around the world. Rony is a co-founder of IMAP.

Neal Hegarty

Neal is originally from Ireland. He grew up on a dairy farm and has been around animals all his life. He studied agriculture in Ireland and has worked as a permaculturist for the past 10 years. Neal was the Volunteer Manager at Atitlan Organics for 2 years before co-founding his own Permaculture-based enterprise, Abundant Edge Farm, in Tzununa. He brings a wealth of experience, enthusiasm, and energy into each Intro to Permaculture Course and Permaculture Design Certification Course and we’re happy to continue to collaborate with him!

Shad Qudsi

Shad Qudsi has over 13 years experience in organic and commercial gardening and farming. He is certified in Permaculture Design and has over 3 years experience in permaculture design consulting. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a double major in Applied Math and Psychology, Shad and his wife, Colleen, moved to Central America with only vague goals of farming at some point in the near future. In January of 2010, Shad and his wife bought and moved onto a very small farm located in the traditional Mayan village of Tzununa, which on the north shore of Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala. The farm developed into Atitlan Organics and now mainly focuses on greens and chickens, a large edible and useful plant nursery, a food forest, and training and education.  Shad is an enthusiastic teacher who truly believes in the work he is doing. Human resiliency cannot be erased from the landscape and now, it is coming back with a loving grace.