Courtney Brooke: All right Paul, what are the three things you most love about living at Earthhaven?
Paul Caron: Well, this is going to be a kind of a unique answer because my relationship to Earthaven is different from other people in that I’ve been visioning and working towards this situation all my life. I mean literally since I was 19. I decided that making a community would be the thing to do.
So, for me, the main thing that I love about Earthaven is that it’s exceeded my total expectations. Like really doing it, making a difference and the fact is I have a tendency to be a little bit of a hermit. So I like it that people are around and I always have help when I need it. You know it’s the social situation is just perfect. Much better than being in town although I must say that an ecovillage needs to come to every city block. It’s not just a rural thing. It’s just that we moved out here because it would be easier to you know avoid government regulations and such so that worked out pretty good too that’s another whole story…
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.
