Higher Elevation

Project Name: Higher Elevation
Website link: www.highere.org
Contact: http://www.highere.org/contact/
Location: Teton Valley, 6500 feet elevation Idaho, USA
Type of project: Permaculture education and Earthship experimentation Center

The intentions of Higher Elevation Permaculture are many:

To radically transform the planet with inspiration, love and joy!
Gift-economy courses, workshops and internships
To share our passion for a more fulfilling and sustainable way of life.
To help make our lives more fulfilled; forever learning, growing, and experimenting with this crazy planet.
To link with the amazing work already happening in Teton Valley and see how we might synergistically add to it.

Who are we?

Taiga Marthens has lived on one side or another of Teton Pass since 2001. She has been avidly gardening, exploring, skiing and enjoying all that the Tetons have to offer. In the last six years Taiga wrapped herself up in Permaculture, Natural Building, and learning about self-reliant living. She is overjoyed to be putting down roots in Teton Valley. She also heads up Fired Earth Pizza, a mobile wood-fired pizza business using as locally-sourced ingredients as possible (eventually right out of her own greenhouse). In addition to all this, she is also and incredible landscape artist, professionally installing organic landscapes with TapRoot Gardens.

Christian Shearer is just transitioning from spending most of the last eight years running the Panya Project in northern Thailand. He is a permaculture teacher, designer, consultant and enthusiast. He would be hard pressed to be taking up permaculture design in a more opposite climate! Christian is one of the lead consultants at Terra Genesis International, a permaculture design firm which has does design work in diverse locations as the Philippines, Thailand, Ecuador, Barbados, and the US. Even more so, Christian is an educator, having taught the Permaculture Design Course over 20 times in five countries. And as of 2012, he is also the founder of WeTheTrees, a crowdfunding website helping projects focused on environmental or social change raise funds for their missions.

Taiga and Christian were married in the Fall of 2012, and decided to have a go at life in the Tetons. Higher Elevation is an education center built on a five acres piece of property where they plan to build the first Earthship in Teton County, and practice small-scale self-reliance agriculture and animal husbandry. They aim to have a cold-hardy food forest, a highly productive veggie harden, rotational grazing animals, and a semi-tropical greenhouse producing food year-round. They are excited to add to all the positive activity already present in Teton Valley.

Types of courses offered

Permaculture Design course
Earthship Internship
Therapeutic Clowning Course

Teton Valley