Occidental Arts & Ecology Center

“Egosystem restoryation.” For Brock Dolman, Co-Founder and Program Director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), that is the hopeful outcome in our exposure to permaculture. Learning about watersheds, gardens, landscape design, composting toilets and more are all important pieces of the web within which we must enact change. But at the heart of that web and Brock and OAEC’s work, is re-storylining the ego. When exploring this in our interview, he elaborated “permaculture to me is an egosystem restoryation effort. We are trying to re-story the storyline of the egosystem. How do I personally and us collectively as a bunch of humans learn how to understand how the natural world works and then get on board with that 3.8 billion years of evolutionary intelligence that life has brought forward on this one crazy planet in our universe?” We must re-story, rediscover, rethink and reclaim our role and potential on this Earth.

The OAEC, located in western Sonoma county, CA, is one of the longest standing permaculture demonstration and education sites in the U.S. In the 1970s, before funding was cut by the Reagan administration, the Farallones Institute Rural Center that eventually morphed into OAEC was already offering workshops ranging from passive solar design to building ferrocement tanks, and also served as a peace corps training center. Chefs, especially Alice Waters with her Chez Panisse restaurant, kept the site running following federal cuts by purchasing fresh, diverse salad mixes and other farm goods in an era where farm-to-table was not yet popular. In the early 1990s, the site served a few years as a western hub for Seed Savers Exchange and in 1994,  Brock and the six other Sowing Circle LLC and OAEC co-founding partners put together a winning proposal and vision for the property out of around 150 submissions. As a result, the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center was formed as a 501c3 and now nine people and their families co-own the site’s 80 acres.

Brock was first exposed to permaculture in the early nineties. On an 8-hour car ride to a permaculture convention at Sandy Bar Ranch, he wound up with Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual in his lap, and deeply pursued the entire book. This book and Brock’s endeavor into permaculture provided an umbrella framework linking together his thinking and education in agroecology and conservation biology.

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s mission is to cultivate ecological literacy and build the “capacity of civic and social movement leaders and organizations to guide their own communities to an ecologically regenerative, economically viable, and socially just future.” Programs range from ecological literacy to climate justice, and expertise branches into extensive international work, especially in Africa and Latin America. In their programming, the OAEC weighs heavily on the traditional ecological knowledge of local Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people. Trainings and policy rule changes are major pieces as well. For example, Brock is heavily involved in county and state-level policies including California’s greywater policy and policies regarding salmon and beaver restoration. As a result, they are enacting positive change from the bottom-up and the top-down.

The OAEC offers two-three permaculture design certifications (PDC) a year for the public. When reflecting on the PDC, Brock said it gives participants “a framework that with planned redundancy supports them with some confidence that there is a way to see the world, the connectivity and opportunity, as a whole-systems thinker. Because then you are going to leave and next week a ‘propportunity’ [problem/opportunity] is going to present itself. How do you comport yourself to say ‘oh, alright, what have I got, what do I want, what does success look like?’ And then do [solutions-based] design.”

Regarding their permaculture programming, “we often start with basic earth systems science, energy flows, matter cycles of life webs, and you figure out how to redesign your civilization to get on board with those thermodynamic realities upon which the evolution of life comes. It’s amazing, not that complicated, and fungus is ready to party with you!” He goes on to add “when people leave the PDC…we hope they feel they are networked into a global community. That people are working hard on these things. There is a shared vision of earth care, people care. There’s a set of principles that they can cling to and are really helpful.”

Outside of PDCs, a large focus of OAEC programming concerns resilient community design. For example, Kendall Dunnigan (Permaculture/Resilient Community Design Program Co-Director) is leading a collaborative project working with 20 Miskitu villages in northeast Nicaragua on women’s food sovereignty programs as they were illegally removed from their homeland. The OAEC also partners with the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, bringing together activists and artists from social justice organizations around the nation to participate in two three-day Justice & Ecology Retreats at the site. Retreat participants then have the opportunity to implement regenerative designs in their communities by participating in a 2-week long “Permaculture for the People” design course, subsidized through extensive fundraising efforts.

When reflecting on this Permaculture for the People course, Brock clarified that “OAEC has a very explicit radical, progressive, social justice-based orientation as an organization collectively. And so, to that degree that we are supporting increasing the diversification in expression of who has access and can reclaim their appropriate relationship to what is the indigenosity of permaculture for many of these people…I think we are pretty forthright about the social, cultural, political, spiritual, economic, governance set of permaculture skills that we all have to learn to figure out how to get along with each other to then develop and work with these systems that have integrity intergenerationally – through time – to actually express all of our aspirations of what a regenerative future might look like.”

At the center of all this work, “it’s the people. And at least in the U.S., I know my upbringing the schooling I got in public schools there wasn’t anything about cooperation or…inclusive, participatory – it was just read and write and arithmetic…I think we are unfortunately afflicted with that as a societal malaise a little bit. And ecological illiteracy is the greatest epidemic happening on the planet in my humble opinion. We are just radically ecologically illiterate on all the cycles.” The good news is, each one of us can undergo egosystem restoryation and re-write the storyline of our understanding and relationship with this beautiful planet.

To discover more about Brock and the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, visit: http://oaec.org