Courtney Brooke

Ancestor and Former Faculty

Courtney Brooke was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work was to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world addressed 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 was guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers were the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. Courtney Brooke was also a great teacher herself and touched thousands of people all over the world through her work in permaculture, community, young women’s rites of passages, placenta and birth work, healing ceremonies and rituals, yoga, and Deep Ecology.

Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke was passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. Earthaven Ecovillage was the last place she called home, where she served in a multitude of leadership capacities, tended the land, raised food, participated in communal ritual agriculture, swam in wild water, enjoyed the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tended her own wild Hearth. She loved 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.