Reducing your intake of animal products is a powerful and positive step towards a more compassionate lifestyle, and greatly reduces your environmental impacts. Yet even a vegan diet can have a high carbon footprint if still reliant on processed foods from industrialised agricultural systems. These often remove trees and forests from land in order to grow fossil fuel-dependent annual crops, or rely heavily on imported products, cash crops and exploited labour. The Veganic way combined with permaculture design can create a world that is not just ‘sustainable’ but truly REGENERATIVE, restoring forests, repairing ecosystems, building soils, increasing biodiversity, developing local economies and addressing issues of social justice and animal liberation.
Graham Burnett, author of the Vegan Book of Permaculture and long-term vegan permaculture practitioner and teacher, created the Vegan Permaculture Design Course with others back in 2014 with a belief that by bringing people together to focus on gardening, sustainability, community and solutions-focused thinking we can provide some hope and sanity in these times of uncertainty, as well as nurturing the sense of community that comes from an active and inspired group utilising permaculture principles for creative problem solving. During the lockdown of 2020 we made the decision to shift online out of necessity, quickly evolving and adapting to the scary new format that was thrust upon us almost overnight. It’s great to now be able to return to running physical courses, however we’ve definitely learned that our online courses still have many advantages, and so this is an option we will continue to provide.
Lots of people find the format more accessible, especially for those who are unable to travel, or can’t commit to spending up to twelve days away from home for whatever reason. It’s also opened us up to a geographically wider, even international, audience with participants joining us in the virtual classroom from all over the UK, not to mention the USA, Australia, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Normandy, Greece, New Zealand, Singapore and many other countries who would never be able to attend an ‘in person’ event together. Another advantage that quickly became apparent was our ability to bring in a whole range of guest tutors who provide virtual tours of their projects or specialist sessions covering their own areas of expertise, ranging from building soil fertility, running community garden projects, how to set up an animal sanctuary, the ins and outs of running a low impact housing co-op, getting started in veganic agroforestry to techniques for propagating perennial vegetables. Our roster of guests has included no-dig expert and writer Steph Hafferty, KMT Freedom Teacher of May Project Gardens in South London, VON’s own Iain Tolhurst of Tolhurst Organics near Reading, Jenny Hall of Climate Friendly Foods, perennial veg grower Mandy Barber of Incredible Vegetables plant nursery, Joe Kilcoyne and Heather Patrick of Wild Earth Farm and Sanctuary in Kentucky, USA, Paul Payne of Ecoworks community garden in Nottingham and many others – all very busy people who would never otherwise have been able to give up the time to deliver their fascinating and deeply informative sessions! Furthermore all content is recorded for reference, so if any participants miss anything for any reason they can easily catch up at their leisure.
There are also opportunities for small group discussions and activities so participants can meet and learn from each other, and plenty of ‘homework’ assignments throughout the course with peer and tutor based support sessions built in. At the end participants are awarded the internationally recognised Certificate in Permaculture Design, and the presentations are always of a very high standard, I’m constantly delighted by the creativity and positive solutions that everybody brings to the party!
So if you’ve been thinking about enrolling on the Vegan Permaculture Design Course but have been challenged by the commitments of travelling or being away from home for lengthy periods of time, the online course might be just the answer you’ve been looking for. Bookings are now open for our next online course beginning in spring 2023 click here to find out more!
“I can recommend doing the Permaculture Design Course – life changing for me!” – Jo from Epping, Forest Schools practitioner
“I would like to applaud Graham Burnett for his interactive teaching approach and patience, and just wish that more schools would take on this style of teaching as I learned so much in a short time.” – Jasmine Kime, course participant
“Thanks for a superb Vegan Permaculture Design Course! I’m telling everyone about it and you may need to run it more often in future!” – Piers Warren, course participant and author of The Vegan Cook and Gardener, How to Store Your Garden Produce: The Key to Self-Sufficiency and 101 Uses for Stinging Nettles
The Online Vegan permaculture Design Course is supported and certificated by The Permaculture Association (Britain) and The Vegan Organic Network.
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Reducing your intake of animal products is a powerful and positive step towards a more compassionate lifestyle, and greatly reduces your environmental impacts. Yet even a vegan diet can have a high carbon footprint if still reliant on processed foods … Continue reading →
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