Doniga Markegard Builds Bridges with
Permaculture and Nature Awareness

Doniga Markegard never felt comfortable inside a classroom. From an early age, she preferred to learn by exploring in the forest and identifying plants in her mother’s garden. She ate chickweed with delight and considered her horse to be her best friend. Today, Doniga teaches permaculture design, tracking and wilderness survival skills, runs her own land management consulting business, directs Peninsula Permaculture and is the founder of Earth Action Mentor. Doniga is also a Gaia University associate and has already helped GU create a Diploma of Applied Permaculture Design. She’s raising three children with a fourth on the way, yet still finds time to help her husband run their family’s cattle operation, Markegard Family Grass Fed, from their ranch in Half Moon Bay, California, USA.

As a young teenager, Doniga traveled from Alaska to Guatemala searching for her identity and purpose. Ironically, it was upon her return, when she heard about Jon Young’s Wilderness Awareness School, that she knew she had finally found what she was looking for – the mentoring to support deep nature connection. Doniga joined the school as a full-time student, and along with a small group of teenagers, was mentored by Young, who revealed the arts of tracking and wilderness survival. Doniga was the first female graduate of the 2000-hour wilderness skills training program.

Excelling at nature awareness, Doniga advanced to teach programs with Young as well as his mentor, Tom Brown Jr., a world-renowned teacher and author, at the Tracker School in New Jersey. She also became the student of Gilbert Walking Bull, a Lakota elder and medicine man who introduced her to ceremony and taught her sacred songs and new ways of connecting with nature.

During a solo journey into the forest, Doniga received a vision that the land needed to be healed. It was around this time that permaculture came into her field of awareness, and to Doniga, the connection was clear. She sought out opportunities to trade her skills in tracking and wilderness survival for an education in permaculture design from leading teachers such as Starhawk and Penny Livingston, weaving permaculture’s learn-from-nature design methodology into her work and world-view.

Doniga went on to study sustainable community development at Prescott College, where she added the ability to bridge communities to her skill set and vision for her life. Testament to this, she married a young rancher and helped him convert his livestock operation into a demonstration of how animals can be integrated into a landscape such that they increase the health and biodiversity of the land.

The launch of her permaculture design and land management consulting business, Designs by Doniga, marked Doniga’s transition into making a living as a designer. Her services range from designing and installing organic and sustainable landscapes to native grassland restoration. Through this work, she often brings permaculture and holistic land management to an industry – cattle ranching – that she might have criticized earlier in her life. Here, her gift as a bridge builder has an important impact on the land, as well as the people who tend it.

Doniga values the “start small, start somewhere” approach. She explains that to regenerate land, what’s needed is a thriving system that functions as nature does. At the same time she cautions that although you can read all kinds of books about it, it isn’t until you get your feet wet that the work truly comes to life and you begin to discover “what really works where”.

For all that Doniga has going for her, a big missing piece has been how to better integrate her many professional and personal projects. Her Gaia University orientation enabled her to see that all of her projects – for-profit, non-profit and family – are interconnected and interpenetrating at a deep level. Having realized this, she is cultivating her ability to bring this understanding to life in the ways in which she manages and documents her processes.

Gaia University’s integrative perspective has also helped her to fully understand an earlier teaching Jon Young offered in the context of tracking: when you integrate your feelings and emotions with your observations, you are provided with a clearer sense of what is around you, which allows a bigger, clearer picture of what’s happening to be recognized and incorporated into what you are doing and the direction you are moving in to do it.