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My guest is Natalie Bogwalker, the visionary behind Wild Abundance, a permaculture skills center and homestead near Asheville, North Carolina. As a primary instructor at Wild Abundance, she teaches a variety of classes, including tiny house building workshops, women's carpentry, and permaculture design courses. She likes to share her passion with others to help them live in an empowered and Earth-centered way.

As a founder of Firefly Gathering, one of the most significant primitive skills events in the United States, Natalie brings years of Earth-focused skills and living to each of her classes. This focus forms the center of what she joins me to talk about today, as we discuss including hands-on primitive skills to create a more in-depth, grounded permaculture education. We also touch on how an extended experience, as her Earth-skills Permaculture Design Course takes 27 days spread over nine months, changes the nature of the PDC. We wrap up by talking about what students can bring to their course, and how permaculture instructors can improve Permaculture education.

I’m thankful for what Natalie shared with us about extending and expanding on Permaculture education, both for the amount of time spent in courses, the skills we develop while there, and on mentoring and advanced classes after we start down this road.

Her question, “How many hours did you spend in the fifth grade?” raises a point I’ve considered many times, though based more around college classes. A 72 hours PDC is about the equivalent of 6 college credits. So you can think of the Permaculture Design Course, as an introductory course, as about the same as Biology 101 and 102. It’s a great place to start, but there’s so much more to do. 

Extended courses, such as Natalie’s and others, add to the time between teachers and students. This extra time allows us to add to our hard and soft skills, from fire starting and shelter building to carpentry, nutritional knowledge, and social justice. With a student-focused approach, this can include not only the core knowledge necessary to complete a PDC, but also create the shared lexicon required to discuss design, ethics, and principles, and apply these ideas to more than the landscape. 

Until the next time, eat something wild every day while taking care of Earth, your self, and each other.