Growing Resilience to Floods, Fire, and Drought – A Soil Sponge Workshop with Didi Pershouse
Hey all, just wanted to let you know about an opportunity to learn from one of the Earth’s true soil restoration masters, Didi Pershouse, as she has an in-depth intensive workshop coming up. Michael highly recommends attending anything put on by Didi as she is a world leader in these solutions! So without further ado, here is the piece from Didi herself, as published in her article about it:
Hey Y’all,
I want to invite you to my favorite thing.
I’ve been teaching versions of the Soil Sponge and Living Climate 5-week workshop to several cohorts every year since 2018, and I have had such a blast every time! Over 2,000 people have taken the workshop from literally all over the world, and our discussions have been phenomenal. Many people take the course more than once, because it’s different every time.
Recently I’ve started asking people in each course to introduce us to their place through a series of questions and imaging exercises—where it sits on the planet, what the terrain is like, how people, water, weather, animals, and vegetation work there. What do you love there? What’s at risk? And what would be forever lost if the place ceased to exist?
These deep dives into ‘Place’ ground our work together in each of our real circumstances: not endless intellectual rambling or AI generated theory. Not some extractive ‘regenerative’ greenwashing bullshit. The people and places in my course startle me with their singularity, yet when looked at together, show me what an interwoven story our places can tell about this particular moment in history, and our work going forward.
For example:
- P’s parents’ overflowing garden and orchard in Italy—on the tiny parcel they have managed to hold onto—with tall hedges to block pesticide drift from the monocrop fields that surround them.
- The village along the Nile in Egypt that keeps building more stories on top of their houses, so that everyone can stay close to the fertile river’s edge in the middle of the desert. (The desert that used to be all green).
- D’s organic farm in the Netherlands, separated by a moat of canals from the huge chemically grown farms all around her.
- An intensely steep and dry mountainous area in South America where A was working out conflicts between mining industry people, investors, and seasonal cattle herders who use Holistic Management.
I can’t stop thinking about each of these places, the people who showed them to me, and how deep and wide the trajectory of place goes. It’s amazing the blindness we can have to the uniqueness of our own places and contexts (thinking all the world is basically some other version of where ever we live). AND…wow…what a unique planet we live on. How tremendous that we get to do this work here, together, locally, while cheering on people on the other side of the globe.
I would love to have you come to this year’s Soil Sponge and Living Climate Workshop: Growing Resilience to Flooding, Drought, Heatwaves and Fire, starting September 3rd. (If you have already taken it before, I can send you a coupon for a reduced rate.)
“Clear, accessible, and paradigm shifting. Didi is the only person I know worldwide making this foundational science available in a palatable format to the general public.” —Phyllis Tichinin, New Zealand Dairy Farmer, Eco-Nutritionist, Soils Consultant.
We meet on five Wednesdays: September 3rd to October 8th, 2025 (no class on October 1st). Noon-2:30 EDT Check here to see in your time zone.
All classes are recorded for those who need to miss a day.
Please share this invitation with others who you think would be interested!
