ABOUT US
'The Earth Student' is an educational platform created to bring you into deeper relationship with the Earth. By spending more intentional time immersed in Nature, we naturally come into deeper intimacy with the world around us. We feel this is what is greatly missing in our modern society.
Many people spend the majority of their days indoors, and wonder why they experience anxiety, depression, & stress. We have seen that the more we are outside, the more we develop a desire to care for that which nurtures us. We share this from personal experience, having both grown up in urban environments. The offerings we facilitate are meant to bring us all back into remembrance of what our Ancestors knew long ago: the Earth is sacred, and we must care for it.
We strive to be a source of inspiration in these challenging times as well as provide educational solutions to the disconnection with Nature we see in our world.
Michele Bumbier studied Horticulture in 2011 but felt deeply unsatisfied with the education system. She ventured off to study permaculture with the Green Education Center where she fell in love with regenerative food systems. From there she started working with Fleet Farming, an urban agriculture initiative in Orlando, Fl. Hungry for more, she found the Florida School of Holistic Living where she studied herbalism, and went on to teach a variety of gardening classes. A deeper calling took her down to Peru where she was immersed in a culture that deeply revered Nature. This inspired her journey back home to teach gardening & herbalism to the youth at the Living School & The Inspiring Minds Day School. She is currently a Gardening & Practical Arts Teacher at the Waldorf School of Palm Beach. Her greatest calling is two-fold: to tend to the Earth as a form of devotion and to guide others to remember their Earth-kin through immersive and interactive education.
Ralph Steven has been learning from the plants since 2009, first entering into the world of botanical mystery through work in the kitchen by alchemizing plants to create nourishing meals. Eventually, he found the Florida School of Holistic Living, where he studied herbalism and simultaneously created his first food forest project, at the Bumby House in Orlando, Florida. A Deeper calling lead him on a trip to Peru, which ended up becoming his home for 2 years, learning deeply about the plant traditions of the Amazon and the Andes. He travels back every year to visit his teachers to keep learning. He returned back to Florida in 2015 to continue working with the plants and the people of the humid sub-tropics where he currently resides, nestled somewhere between his Nikon F3 and his Taylor guitar. Presently, Ralph tends to various garden spaces and never stops propagating and seeding plants!
