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The Newforest Institute is an educational non-profit organization dedicated to the restoration of mutually sustaining relationships between people and the land.
Located on 300 acres of forest, fields, edible forest gardens and permaculture gardens in mid-coast Maine, within walking distance of the Village of Brooks, the Institute pursues its mission along multiple strands. The development and renovation of our facilities is guided by the ethics and principles of permaculture design. Our five-fold programs seek to cultivate individual and collective capacity for creative responses to those challenges in both the natural and built environments in order to envision and build a sustainable future for all. Since our launch in early 2007, Newforest has organized and hosted numerous events at the community and regional levels. It has involved neighbors, schools, visiting scholars, interns, community and academic leaders, as well as tradesmen, builders and business owners in a wide range of educational programs as well as extensive and innovative garden, forest and building projects, all of which reflect our commitment to the values of human development and tangible works.
- Permaculture Education Center - The establishment of a permanent Center for the teaching of Permaculture Design theory and practice, with large-scale demonstration projects, including gardens, edible forest gardens, four seasons greenhouses and a community teaching/demonstration kitchen.
Newforest Institute is now accepting apprenticeship applications for the 2009 season. Apprentices live on-site and are actively involved in hands-on permaculture projects designed to rehabilitate the land. Individuals with diverse interests and students of all disciplines are encouraged to apply; independent study credit may be available from your college or university. For more information, click on Apprenticeship Program in the main menu.
- Women’s Earth Project - The Women’s Earth Project, a community-based forestry project, seeks to reclaim two often neglected parts of the Maine landscape—rural low-income women and the degraded, poorly harvested forest parcels increasingly endemic to the region. Our intent is to reconcile the social, economic and health needs of the human community with the long-term silvicultural rehabilitation of degraded forest land.
- Urban-Rural Youth Forestry Partnership - This pilot partnership links children and land across natural/built and urban/rural boundaries in the shared enterprise of community forestry. The program seeks to foster a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the connections of forest ecosystems across the landscape. The project includes the development of K-12 curriculum in Land Literacy as well as forest and garden projects at schools and in the communities of Waldo County and Jersey City.
- Center for Applied Research - The development of a network of scholars whose research is relevant to communities struggling to chart a more sustainable course. The Center includes artists- and scholar-in-residence programs, fostering collaborative thinking and initiatives across disciplines.
- Mid-Coast Green Guild - The establishment of a network of sustainability practioners to facilitate the rapid introduction of green building to the region’s housing stock and to diversify the sources of its economic well-being. To learn more, visit www.buildgreenmaine.org
For contact information or directions to Newforest Institute, please click here.
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.
This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.
- Wendell Berry, Work Song, part 2: A Vision
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