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FULL DAY INTENSIVE with Starhawk THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 GET TICKETS Social permaculture looks at the people-care aspects of permaculture. Vegetables are the easy part—people are the challenge! All groups struggle with issues of power, conflicts, and the need to make decisions. Collaborative groups may be healing, nurturing, and inspirational—or they may founder on the rocks of conflict and poor communication. In this one-day intensive, we’ll look at regenerative patterns for human interaction. How do we come together across barriers and create spaces where we are welcome in the full complexity of who we are? We’ll explore how to structure our groups for maximum group health, how to share power fairly, improve our communication skills, mediate conflicts and facilitate group processes. The foundation for this workshop is based on tools and practices from Starhawk’s book, The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups. About Starhawk Starhawk is a committed global justice activist, organizer, speaker, teacher, and the author or coauthor of ten books. Starhawk is founder of Earth Activist Training, and travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism for diverse groups, communities and audiences. Starhawk is perhaps best known as an articulate voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. Besides her inspiring, much-read books, she is a cofounder of Reclaiming, an activist branch of modern Pagan religion, ...

FULL DAY INTENSIVE with Stephen Brooks & Chiraya DharmaTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20GET TICKETS  Join Chiraya Dharma and Stephen Brooks for this experiential playshop and deep dive into Ecovillage Creation. Stephen will present his experience in the creation of several different Ecovillage projects over the past 20 years, while living in Costa Rica. Participants will discuss the different invisible structures that he used while spending time during the day working collectively on understanding and creating next steps for different people in the workshop that are working on projects.Chiraya will then lead the group in the second part of the day, for an Anchor The Dream Experience. In this visionary playshop, participants will Source their most powerful visions for Ecovillage Living, and then, act out these visions through spontaneous theatrics. This is off the charts “reality creation” fun, not to be missed if you are desiring to manifest your dream ecovillage experience in life.Expect to leave the workshop with confidence and next steps to move forward in your manifestation!  About Stephen Brooks  The founder and primary Director of Punta Mona, has been living in Costa Rica, since 1995. Stephen observed the problems facing small farmers and communities in Central America and Costa Rica due to mega-monoculture agricultural practices and loss of dynamic community. He strives to provide students, landowners, businesses and neighbors regenerative solutions and strategies to increase quality of life. Stephen ...

FULL DAY INTENSIVE with Max Meyers THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 GET TICKETS Are you interested in learning how to grow clean and green Cannabis? Would you like to improve the quality of the cannabis you grow by moving beyond organic? Want to learn how to produce it using more sustainable, even regenerative practices? Well then, join us for this one of a kind class and learn how to Green Your Grow! This introductory class will help you improve your cannabis growing methods so that they are not only better for you and your pocket book, but for the consumers and the environment as well. Many problems facing this fast growing industry relate to the wasteful amount of non-renewable resources being used everyday in the production of the cannabis plant. From the common practices of using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides, to the destruction of forest systems and waterways, California’s booming new industry in recreational Cannabis must also become more sustainable, clean and certified Organic. The successful changes we are helping to spread will help the state to become a leader in clean green cannabis, which is not only better for the consumers, but better for the environment. In this 1-day Intro workshop Master Grower Max Meyers will teach you the basic concepts of growing Cannabis using ecological design. Some Key Benefits To Greening Your Grow Learn ...

The Convergence Music Lineup includes headliner Ayla Nereo, J Brave and Braxton, Bicicletas Por La Paz, LoCura, MJ's Brass Boppers, DJ Dragonfly, Lydia Violet :: Music As Medicine Project, Amikaeyla Gaston, Hannah Mayree ! We are super thrilled to have all of these outstanding heart centered musical artists board for 2018. ALYA NEREO “Can love itself be expressed in sound? Because if so, this is surely that sound… lyrical mastery that strikes at the heart ” ~ Collapse Board Everybody's talking about Ayla Nereo these days. “My music is for all of us in our human family, to remember that right relationship, which I also forget. I get caught up in the human things, and I feel my music is for remembering the right relationship with all beings on this planet, especially the non-human ones. We’re really powerful. We get to take care of this amazing garden planet," says Nereo in an interview on Lost In Sound. MJ BOPPERS NEW ORLEANS STYLE BAND Attending an MJ’s Brass Boppers shows is the next best thing to following a brass band down New Orleans’ famed Claiborne Ave. The swinging and singing brass-line is the Bay Area’s only New Orleans-style brass band whose founding members were born and raised in New Orleans itself. LoCURA For the past 11 years, Oakland-based LoCura has crafted their own unique musical identity: "Califas Mestizo Music," a blend of Latin American and Iberian rhythms such as ...

FULL DAY INTENSIVE with Greta de la Montagne of *M*A*S*H*H* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 GET TICKETS Herbal First Aid has the advantage of using materials that are widely available such as kitchen spices, weeds, and wild plants.  In this regard, having knowledge of useful remedies that are often close at hand can be empowering to communities, especially those facing economic challenges, a catastrophic natural disaster, or just simply those who wish to live closer to the earth with a focus on resilience and self-sufficiency. This Full Day Intensive will present strategies, remedies and routines gathered from two decades of working on the front lines in the forest defense and social justice movements, and administering off-grid first aid clinics at large outdoor gatherings. Geared toward the practicing herbalist or medical clinician, this class is also designed as an introduction to home health first aid for the lay person with no previous medical or herbal training. For laypersons, homesteaders, wilderness trekkers, earthquake preparers, forest or social justice activists.  Learn some basic herbal first aid skills and assessment tools or enhance your existing knowledge. Plant identification, wildcrafting/plant collecting ethics, herbal first aid kit ingredients techniques such as wound poulticing, sprain management and heat exhaustion. Empower your home or community toward greater self-reliance.  Greta has practiced herbal first aid exclusively for nearly 30 years, and has first hand experience treating ...

FULL DAY INTENSIVE with Lydia Violet & Amikaeyla Gaston THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 GET TICKETS Music As Medicine is collaborating with the Permaculture Convergence to offer this full day workshop with renowned artists Amikaeyla Gaston and Lydia Violet, facilitating group work filled with music meant to inspire resiliency in the spirit and a fire in the heart. In this workshop we will explore our capacities to strengthen through community singing and engaging the histories of music born from social movements across the world. Singing in a council of friends is one of the most healthful, encouraging, invigorating, and nourishing things that we know. Hearts opened by grief and celebration want to sing their songs of longing, despair, belonging, reckoning, valiant warrior-ship, and gentle loving kindness. It’s our birthright (and a deep need of today’s world) to engage in this culture-creation together. Lydia will also offer teachings and an exercise from Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects (WTR). This dynamic, interactive body of work was developed by Macy in response to activist burnout, born from her scholarship in systems theory, deep ecology, and Buddhism as well as 50+ years of international activism. Together we’ll learn tools, meditations, and concepts (deeply steeped in music making) that we can rest into and organize with, in our desires to be effective allies to both planet and people. About Lydia Violet Harutoonian Lydia ...

By Warren Brush of Quail Springs Permaculture and Casitas Valley Farm Digging our well-surveyed swales I woke up this morning, put on my gum-boots and went out for a walk around our family farm in the rain. This in itself might not seem to be anything special to many folks, yet this was a 2”/5cm rainfall after several intense years of drought here in Southern California. I cannot express how exciting this morning has been for me as I was thinking of our entire thirsty state getting an average 2-6 inches/5-15cm of rain during the past 48 hours. I was also exuberant this morning as today marked our fifth-day after completing an epic and highly successful “Earthworks for Resiliency” course for an area of our farm that was transformed into using earth structures to harvest water for our market garden area. During the course we installed three large swales (one of them integrated with 150 feet of hugelkultur growing bed), a Zuni Bowl diversion structure, some key drains with associated stone and urbanite “armor,” some one-rock dams/gabions, and we used a keyline plow in the interstitial spaces between the swales for our main crop gardens. We then mulched and cover-cropped all of the sites disturbed by our excavator, tractors, and shovels. It was amazing to see how much was learned and accomplished by the 18 students who participated. This ...

by Erik Ohlsen, originally published by Resilience | SEP 14, 2015 As I write this, wildfires continue to rage in Northern California just 40 miles from where I sit. I feel the collective grief in the community right now. I feel the grief for the animal community that is being decimated by these fires. I feel the grief of pastoral systems and mixed woodlands that are being completely incinerated in this moment. I feel the grief for the human communities who've lost so much, their homes, their schools, their businesses, their belongings and their animal friends. What's really the cause of these great disasters? Is it climate change? Is it the drought like fire officials are telling us? Can we just chalk it up to these issues that we feel we have no control over? Is here something bigger and greater taking place? Do we actually have the will, and the power to mitigate disasters like these? I think the biggest illusion that we are living in, is how we think about these kinds of natural disasters. The California drought and wildfires are in many ways human induced to the scale that we are feeling them. Yes, I said it, the scale of these disasters are more human made than they are natural. Why is it human made? I'm not just talking about human influence ...

My name is Chief Caleen Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, I’m the fifth leader in an unbroken traditional leadership since settler contact. Our ancestral territory expands all along the McCloud River watershed below Bulyum Puyuk (Mt. Shasta). In the 1940s, with the installation of the Shasta Dam, my people were flooded out of our homelands and our Salmon relatives were blocked from returning to their spawning grounds. SALMON ARE SACRED We believe that when Creator put us on this Earth we had no voice. Our Salmon relatives saw we needed help and gave us their voice.  In return, we promised to always speak for them. Today, climate change, GMO farming, habitat destruction and water diversions for Big Ag are pushing our salmon relatives towards extinction . Our tribe has an ancient prophecy, “When there are no more salmon, there will be no more Winnemem Wintu people." For this reason, we believe that we must do everything we can to bring back our salmon. There is still hope. Our tribe is taking action to save our endangered salmon relatives and restore this keystone species to its rightful place in the natural world. OUR STORY In the late 1800s and early 1900s, salmon eggs were taken from the McCloud River to populate the rivers in other parts of the world. After the Shasta Dam was installed, we ...

By Graham Bell Graham Bell's moving tribute to Bill Mollison, who died 24 September in Tasmania, a true pioneer who gave up a promising academic career to challenge the status quo and establish the global Permaculture movement. Bruce Charles 'Bill' Mollison (born 1928 in Stanley, Tasmania, Australia and died today, 24 September 2016 in Sisters' Creek, Tasmania). A few people are born who are world class heroes to those who know them and unknown to the great majority, until one day their inescapable influence floats to the surface and is generally recognised for the cream it is. In hindsight such leaders go on to become household names. Such a man was Bill Mollison: backwoodsman, academic, storyteller, lady’s man and to many just ‘Uncle Bill’, but doing all these things par excellence. In consequence he has left a worldwide movement of remarkable resilience. He has left much useful information and not a few words of guidance and encouragement for those who will miss him most. Growing up in Stanley, Tasmania, he left school at fifteen to help run the family bakery and before 26 went through the occupations of shark fisherman and seaman (bringing vessels from post-war disposals to southern ports), forester, mill-worker, trapper, snarer, tractor driver and naturalist. His lack of formal education gave him many learning opportunities in how the real world works. Bill ...