Hands-on: Education in Organic Agriculture

Dear Friends,

What does activisim have in common with the Phyto Power? Read on.

The 13th Annual Westen Price Foundation Conference is coming up on November 9th thru the 12th in Santa Clara. It’s entitled, Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts.  Here’s the link: check it out.

If you are not familiar with the Westen Price group, it is definately an important group for you to get to know.

The Foundation is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the American diet through education, research, and activism.  They believe in organic and biodynamic farming, pasture feeding of livestock, community supported farms, including the establishment of universal access to clean, certified raw milk and a ban on the use of soy formulas for infants.

A new book by the Center for Ecoliteracy has just come out, August 16th, 2012.  It’s entitled:  Eco Literate:  How Educators are Cultivating Emotional, Social and Ecological Intelligence. Here’s an excerpt:

A tender and exquisitely planned teachable moment opens our new book, Ecoliterate, coauthored by renowned psychologist and bestselling author Daniel Coleman and the Center’s Lisa Bennett and Zenobia Barlow. Ecoliterate introduces an integration of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence that advances student success and helps engage young people in today’s ecological challenges. It offers inspiring stories of educators and other leaders from the Arctic to Appalachia and New Mexico to New Orleans who are using these capacities to creatively address food, water and energy issues. Reviewers are calling the book powerful, eloquant, and a treasure and urgently important.

Click here to read furthers excerpts from the Introduction.

When one asks how do I get involved in hands on training to be a positve activist, these are the two groups, Westin Price and Eco Literacy, that fill the bill.  Here’s one more:

This organization comes right from my own neighborhood—the San Juan Islands, in Washington State.  On beautiful Orcas Island resides one of the premier permaculture sites in the world—The Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead. You can go for just an afternoon tour, or even sign up for an intensive week long stay and practical training in permaculture farming methods. I must confess that I haven’t been up there myself, and I have no good excuse. I will take pictures when I go for all of us!  I promise.  From all I’ve heard it is a phenomenal place.

So we’ve gone, in the last couple of weeks, from introducing you more fully to our new Phyto Power, a product built with wildcrafted berries and herbs derived from the wilds of Alaska, to looking at hands on opportunities with life changing farming communities like Bullock farm and seminars like those of the Westin Price Foundations and the Center for Eco Literacy.

My hope and prayer for all of us is to let nature come back into our lives, to develop a love affair with the natural world.

Sincerely yours,

Seann Bardell

BioImmersion.com

Clinical Note:
“….everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission.  This is the Indian Theory of existense.”  Christal Quintasket (1888-1936) Salish.

We are presently, through our collaborating partners, making major inroads into relationships with the Native People of Alaska and the First Nation Peoples of Canada. Their elders intimate knowledge of the traditional use of the native plants is beyond exciting.  It is enlightening.

And, their attitude towards life, as expressed by Chief Seattle, bring healing to our souls:  “Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.  If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.  This we know:  the earth does not belong to man—man belong to the earth.  This we know.  All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.  All things are connected.”

The Last Quiz Answer:

A young Gelada Baboon, resting.  He lives in the Ethiopian mountains as a part of a troups of approximately 400 baboons.  Geladas are a gentle species of baboon and it is possible to sit amongst them and not be harmed.  They are a large baboon, with adult males looking like a cross between a lion and a poodle.  Geladas are the most vocal of all the primates and can make 27 distinct noises.  They are very social animals, organized into harems with one dominant male and 4 to 6 females and their offspring.  Believe it or not they even raise feral dogs as pets.  Have a look!

During the past few months, there has been much emphasis on the crucial role that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform will have for the future of European agriculture.  Public interest is growing, but to help foster greater understanding of the significance of the reform and the gravity of the decisions being made not merely for agriculture but quality of life in general – Slow Food and other civil society groups are organizing a public march starting in mid-August and culminating in Brussels on September 19 with a conference at the EU Parliament.