GEM bringing Australia-based
Permaculture instructor to Stevens Point
Darren Doherty, an Australian who studied Permaculture with the discipline’s founder, is the instructor for the GEM Permaculture Design Certificate Course this fall in Stevens Point.
Permaculture, or permanent agriculture, is the design and maintenance of growing systems in harmony with nature. Its practitioners learn to provide their food, energy, shelter and other needs in a sustainable way. The two-week course, scheduled for Nov. 5-18, is designed not only for professionals in agriculture and landscaping but for urban residents and small-tract landowners who want to learn sustainable living-systems design.
Offered by the Global Environmental Management Education Center (GEM), a center within the College of Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, the GEM Permaculture course includes hands-on exercises in composting, landscaping and beer-making, and field trips to see local examples of sustainable living designs. Those who successfully complete the course earn the Permaculture Design Certificate and are certified to teach Permaculture. It is not a college-credit course.
Doherty spent his early years on the family farm in the Bendigo District of Victoria, Australia. The farm was run by his maternal grandfather, Frank Dole, whom Doherty describes as “a champion rifleman, ardent and erudite socialist and highly skilled engineer/machinist among many other things. In those formulative years and up till his death Frank passed on a range of rural skills in farming and self reliance plus a strong sense of social justice.”
Those skills and values framed Doherty’s life. While managing an organic foods shop, he began consulting for the shop’s customers, based on his own experience as a farmer and gardener. In 1993 Doherty did his first Permaculture course and founded his own business designing gardens and small farms in the Bendigo District.
Doherty brings great skill and enthusiasm and a sense of humor to his work, traits that have earned him a growing reputation as an environmental consultant. He has worked in Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam and Argentina. He studied under and co-taught courses with Permaculture founder Bill Mollison, who recommended Doherty as instructor for this GEM course. Complete information about the GEM course and on online registration form is on the Web at www.uwsp.edu/cnr/gem/PermacultureHome
