Registration for the 18th Annual Permaculture Design Course is open now!

This course happens over five weekends every February and March. Dates for the upcoming 2013 course are:
February 9–10,
February 16–17,
March 2–3,
March 16–17, and
March 23–24
Cost: $695, or $650 for early registration (before December 15). 
Partial scholarships are available.
There is also a class book fee of $42 for a copy of Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison. Also highly recommended are Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands & Beyond, Volumes 1 and 2.
For the last seventeen years this course has been full with a waiting list, so early registration is encouraged. To give a high-quality educational experience, we limit the size of the class to eighteen participants. Contact Dan, the course registrar, at dorsey@dakotacom.net or 520-624-8030 to register or receive more information.
This Permaculture certification course covers all aspects of sustainable design with a  Southwest drylands flavor, including a balance of hands-on experience, classroom time, and design practicum. Dynamic exercises encourage pattern recognition, noticing the links between plants and animals, climate, and landforms that make up natural ecosystems. The course focuses on dryland communities with a strong urban and semi-rural emphasis, addressing individual site and neighborhood “problems,”  such as stormwater flooding. Students learn to read the landscape, to map and analyze energies flowing through a site, and to develop integrated designs for sustainable systems. The weekend format of the course makes it easier for people who hold a weekday job to attend and promotes better integration of the course material into daily life. Our course closely follows the standard 72-hour format developed by Bill Mollison and others.
Course topics include agroforestry, appropriate technology, building design, design principles and patterning, site analysis, dryland gardening principles, ecosystem restoration, philosophy and ethics of Permaculture, regenerative community economics, soils and erosion control, village and community design, water harvesting, invisible structures, and many other topics.  The classroom site is in the central-Tucson area and at other Permaculture sites in the Tucson area. Much of the class is held outdoors. This course is co-taught by Dan Dorsey, Brad Lancaster, and Barbara Rose, each with two decades of Permaculture experience, as well as other SPG associate teachers.
To visit the Sonoran Permaculture Guild website’s listing for this course, go to www.sonoranpermaculture.org/courses-and-workshops.