Courtney Brooke: Hi there. Coming to you from the sauna at Earthaven EcoVillage. And the Sauna is right by the swimming hole, which is in the creek. The thing about that is that the Creek, when it floods, erodes away the bank. Then if it erodes away too much more than it will start to impact the sauna.
So we’ve been trying to come up with the plan to save the sauna and prevent some erosion from happening. We had a water expert come out, and he showed us how to put these big cement blocks in.
And so now the big cement blocks are getting placed.
So check it out…
We got Paul driving the excavator and Brandon helping out here.
The way that the blocks are placed, so that when the water comes, the water’s flowing this way. When the water comes in a big event, the sediment gets trapped behind that block, and then the water can keep going. So, it actually builds the bank.
It’s like a water bar, but it’s a sediment bar.
Ok, here it goes. Swinging it (the camera) around.
So that the part that’s in the Creek is facing upstream, at an angle….And they’re just lowering it down.
Brandon: Up again.
Paul: I think that’s sticking out too far.
Brandon: Ok. Wait a second.
Courtney Brooke: Alright. And so there’s going to be several more of these that are going along the bank here. Where we see that the erosion happens here.
Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live.
Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing.
Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between.
Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.
