Courses/Workshops

Come Join Us in Panama for a 2-week Permaculture Design Certificate Course, June 4-18, 2010

We will be holding the course at Tanglewood Wellness Center, 90 minutes from Panama City. This is a beautiful retreat center that caters mainly to health and wellness and is working on incorporating Permaculture Design techniques to stabilize soil, grow their own food, secure clean water, use grey-water systems and become sustainable while contributing to their local community.
While there, we will be designing their property, getting our hands dirty learning design techniques and teaching the full 72 hour Permaculture Design Course including the following topics:

  • Design methods
  • Understanding patterns in nature
  • Trees & their energy transactions
  • Forest establishment
  • Food forests
  • Climatic factors
  • Temperate zones
  • Humid tropics
  • Dry land strategies
  • Islands
  • Aquaculture
  • Water harvesting
  • Waste management
  • Soil biology, creation and erosion control
  • Energy efficient architecture
  • Legal strategies and trusts
  • Earthworks & their use in earth repair
  • Strategies for urban and rural environments
  • Effective working groups
  • Money and finance
  • Bio regional organization
  • Ethical investment
  • Effective aid

Be assured that nothing will be left out. We are very familiar with the course content and have worked closely with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton on previous video based projects and have spent time working on their farms in Australia.

Partial scholarships are available to local Panamanians with proof of citizenship and we’ve extended the offer to the rest of Central America (Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize). Please email us for details.

For those attending from outside of Central America, the cost of the course, including shuttle from the airport, 14 days accommodation in comfortable rooms with fans and private bathrooms, 3 raw vegan meals per day along with snacks, and a full Permaculture Design Certificate Course is $1995 US.

Panama is a beautiful country to explore and we’ve made it our home and are working at a different site, creating our own sustainable, education center, off the grid, providing our own food and securing clean water. Panama has a dry season, and even though we get over 2 meters of rain per year, in the dry season things get very VERY dry. Over the years the dry season and the rainy season have become more severe, causing a lot of problems with flooding and extreme water shortages during the dry season.

We hope to start a program, working with the government to teach local farmers water harvesting techniques so all of their precious resources don’t run immediately off into the ocean. We want to teach locals many Permaculture concepts including the importance of slowing water down, and use it as many times as possible before letting it go. Remember, water should be walking (or crawling) and not running!

  • For our Bios, please click here.
  • For additional course information, please click here.
  • If you have any questions, please email us at mattwhittley (at) mac.com

We look forward to seeing you in the tropics!

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