Ozearth Blog

I’m going to try not to cross-post content too often, but sometimes something is too germane to resist.

Thanks to Alex Steffen of Worldchanging: Bright Green for this insight into my objectionable objections dilemma.  He writes:

Some older environmentalists (most prominently, James Lovelock) have suggested that the fact that no future now awaits us in which our planet is not greatly depleted means the game’s over. Lovelock in particular seems to enjoy saying it’s too late to do anything to save humanity, …but he’s not alone among his generation. These “it’s too late” doomers look ahead and see a world full of deserts and empty oceans, dying forests and dead coral reefs, and they say, “we tried to warn you…” and walk away.

The problem is, the children of 2050 will look at that future world, with all its problems, and see home: and they’ll look at the choices they have in front of them, and see the future. And since the choices we make in the next forty years will decide what choices our descendants are left with — a thriving society engaged in centuries of restoration and planetary repair, or a gradual desperate retreat towards the poles — giving up now because we don’t like the choice set we face is pathetic cowardice.

In fact, it’s worse: the writing off of the future (especially on the part of those who bear the responsibility of cultural authority) actually directly supports the work of those who are destroying the future; those that are stripping every last shred of profit from the planet’s biosphere while they still can. The idea that there is no future is a club used to beat people into submission and acquiescent participation in the unthinkable.

The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I’m more and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we’re on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.

… The irony is, we already have the ability to solve or at least address the planet’s most pressing problems. We don’t have every solution we’ll need, not yet. We do, though, have the technological capabilities, the design genius, the scientific ingenuity, the entrepreneurial zeal, the policy acumen, the community-building skill, and the educational and cultural wisdom. It is not that we are not capable of sustainable prosperity. We have never had more or better ability to build a better world. What we seem to lack is a belief that we can actually use those powers to change anything, and we lack that belief precisely because the future has been ripped out of our cultural debate.

That’s why if we care about the planet, the most important thing we can do is start showing how good a future we still can have. That’s why, right now, optimism is a political act, and a radical one at that.

See the full article here.

Speaking of optimism, I read in the comments for Alex’s post that Lovelock hasn’t actually “walked away” – in fact, he’s working on a project called A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Gaia, described by his collaborator, Andy R Worboys, as “An independent feature length documentary that aims to set out his ideas for our future. A positive look at what can be done and what we really can do to make our lives better”. Watch this space.

So, I will be endeavouring to keep my substantial chin up!  Hope your chin’s up too.

Today has been a true and good day! A really, really restful, heartening day…

I made Helen trousers: she is wearing them now (as she listens, tearfully, to a street recording the Washington Post made of Joshua Bell playing Bach partitas in a Washington DC metro station. No-one noticed this exquisite music, no-one stopped, he made about 34 bucks for the hour… See article & video here.)

Our Polish boys are one day away from completing a large project in Amsterdam (oh, we need to tell you about the 5 or 6 or 7 or so Polish blokes we have living in our attic…)

Helen ordered ten more 10:10 tags. Just so we have spares. We want to embed at least one into the wall of our superadobe home, when we make it! Like a blessing.

Also, I got a reply about the Growing Power intership in Milwaukee.  They will arrange for me to do my ‘trial period’ somewhere in the Netherlands: then they can give me a definite yes or no about working with them for 3 months as I pick their brains, gain experience, network my little ass off.  So, that is great progress.  Now to pin-down Cal-Earth and Earthships: I will be a lot more confident about building a house from scratch with a little more specific hands-on experience in the methods!

But the nicest, bestest event today was this: we got a mention in Franny Armstrong’s fortnightly email and a page on the 10:10 site – look here!! How’s that for stamping accountability all over our plans for 2010 and beyond!?

Here’s what Franny’s email said:

We received two amazing emails this week. The first from a survivor of the famous plane which survived flying through volcanic ash in the ’80s and is now round loads of people’s necks as the aforementioned highly fashionable 10:10 tags (speaking of flying, we decided yesterday that nobody will ever take a flight for 10:10… Hmmmm, I can see us living to regret that pledge when Obama signs up and invites us to the White House for drinkies):  ”What appeared to be a mist started to fill the cabin and the stewards started to check the galleys etc for the source of the “smoke”. Then things went unusually quiet, the plane took a steep dive, the cabin lights went out and the oxygen masks appeared from above.  It occurred to me that things were not quite right but being my first flight, I was not overly bothered….  I am excited by the prospect of getting a piece of the plane to wear in a good cause and as a reminder to live every day of this life as if it was the last!” – Bruce A Taylor (Read the whole email here)

The second amazing, but not very fashionable email is from two people who, after watching our Stupid film, decided to do more like 90:10 than 10:10:  ”For at least a year, we had already been suffering accutely from truth-fatigue: that desperate mixture of rage, betrayal, grief and gut-numbing guilt.  Now what? First, we named 2010 as our year of no-bullshit-change. We are leaving our nice jobs as a gardener and a professional singer. We’re crapping ourselves, but we are hugely excited too. It’s not a retreat to the mountain, we’re not hiding: we intend to change every tiny aspect of our lives, to find integrity, to transform our crippling truth-fatigue into carbon-capturing, soil-building, food-producing honesty.” – Chloe and Helen. (Read the whole email here)

That’s about it from me. I’ll be back in two weeks, by which point we’ll know who’s running the UK for the next five years. Quite important really, as the next five years are the very end of the time when we can still stop the worst impacts of climate change (clearly we should have started tackling it in the 80s, when we first knew how serious it was, but that’s another story/tribunal)… and seeing as the UK is one of only a few countries arguing for a strong international treaty, what happens here could have huge ramifications for our future on this planet… So quite important the right people (or at least not the totally wrong people) win the election… Don’t forget to vote.

See you,

Franny

There was a ‘fashionable’ thread running through the rest of the email, by the way: so we were incredibly chuffed to be tagged ‘not very fashionable’; fashion sucks!

So, do VOTE. Send in a torrent of climate-accountability questions to your MP. Bombard them, again and again and again. They will not act until they think it is in their career interest to act – that is in our power.

Love C

So, another thread of our action toward a more sustainable life is… sewing!  For about 15 years, I have been a second-hand shop addict, getting the huge majority of my clothes (and other things) very cheaply from charity shops. There is a great tradition of bargain hunting in the UK: a sense of delight in getting a great pair of jeans for three quid and boasting about it. I think that is why we have a national addiction to car-boot sales too – it’s how we assuage our hunter-gatherer instinct! We peel our eagle-eyes and pit our wits against the other snoopers…

However, second-hand hunting has proved insanely difficult in Holland;  that make do and reuse culture is almost non-existent. Everything is pitched into the tip before it’s barely warmed up, because a bigger better one is in the shops.  The huge windows used to be about Calvinism, proving your good character: now they are the showcase to show off consumerist-one-upsmanship: look what I’ve just got! (Helen reminds me not all Dutch people are into conspicuous plastic crap consumption & that I mustn’t generalise!)

Anyway, back to  the sewing: during the last two days, I have made Helen two shirts. One in 90c/m calico, the other in a 2E/m wine-red cotton.  Next will be trousers, more shirts, jumpers and skirts.

Why make our own clothes?!!? Well, there are a few reasons…

* to get the kind of well-made clothes we like, at a more reasonable cost

* to know we are not contributing to human slavery in sweatshops

* to stop our contributions to the insanity of homogenous high street retail corporate stranglehold on another aspect of our lives

* because ‘fashion’ sucks – it is another spell that binds; another layer of cement that makes us believe we cannot be self-sufficent

* because we think cycling to get cotton from a massive bolt involves fewer fuel-miles than taking that fabric to the sewing halls, then packaging it, then taking it a depot, then taking it to a shop, then buying it and taking it home (via the car) in another plastic bag.  To be chucked out when the fashion changes the next season.

* we have begun to find out the devastating ecological cost of cotton & viscose, etc. In terms of farmland ruined, huge herbicide and pesticied dousings, and water wastage to name a few. The cost to the health and well-being of Indian or Chinese or other workers is also extreme.

* and finally, because we get a kick out of saying ‘I made that myself!’

So the next step would have to be sourcing local hemp or cotton fiber produced organically, with no chemical input. That is our goal. We’re starting with making our own togs from now on. (Wait until I post about sea-salt making, which I’ve been researching. Cannot wait to try that on a scale large enough to serve the local community, as well as ourselves: for all that preserving!)

Adios for now,

C xoxo

Our policy at OzEarth is to be positive. We want to be solution-oriented and optimistic.

Sometimes, however, the reactions of people to what we believe the future holds, and what we’re planning to do about it, are often so scornful that it hurts.

Admittedly, and against our better judgement, we proselytise. Sometimes we are emotional (or, as some have put it, “hysterical”). Frequently, we are repetitive. We cannot be silent, in spite of ourselves, fully aware that to mention the action needed to secure any kind of future is just as likely to alienate and annoy as it is to enlighten. We are voices in the desert because everything is at stake.

Here’s a sample of the sort of thing we get to hear in response:

• None of the crises you anticipate are realistic or will happen
• You only think they will because you’re loonies
• If you’re right we’re all doomed, why bother trying to do anything -  just ‘enjoy the ride’
• Corporations aren’t really such bad guys, and only crazy conspiracy theorists think they are
• Scientists will fix everything
• ‘Green’ is my dream too, but it’s impossible (true enough, if you’re unwilling to change any aspect of your life)
• Ordinary people (read: pairs of thirtysomething chicks) don’t have the kind of expertise it takes to build a system which will provide everything we need
• A subsistence life is boring and full of privation
• I couldn’t do without my health care and internet, so that life’s not an option for me
• It’s all very well, but what happens when the money runs out?
• Even assuming you could make what you say happen, I wouldn’t be able to live in comfort while the rest of the world was doomed
• All that’s going to happen if you set this up is that someone will come and take it away from you by force

I am out of ideas as to how to deal with denialist, defeatist, hedonistic, self-deceiving excuses. Worse, I find myself in a judging rather than a compassionate place.

I would like help…  How do you answer these objections? Are there answers? Is there a better way of getting the message out, so that it’s more palatable; so that it inspires action?

Love to hear from you.

Cheers

H

Hello all!

Yay! Our lovely little 10:10 tags, made from the luckiest Boeing 747 on earth, arrived this morning. Only 48 hours after I orderd them on line (for a measly, incredibly fair £2 each!) You can get one here!   Helen is wearing hers as a necklace nestled beautifully in her cleavage and I’m wearing mine dangling from a silver bracelet!

Everything about them is well designed: the metal is cut and finished beautifully.  The pink small cardboard card it came on has a superb jet logo, with the barcode flairing away from the wings as the ‘contrails’.  Lovely touch.

A very present reminder about the ecological disaster that flying is causing in the upper atmosphere.  Our personal soul-wrencher – for we each have to make one last, long flight (to get to Australia, to stay.) We were incredibly impressed by Patrick Whitefield who now point-blank refuses to fly – he says he cannot justify it for any means or any reason. If he is asked to teach a Permaculture course, he travels by train and boat. If he cannot find those ways to go, he declines.

So, get a tag!
Much love
Chloe.

See also:  Leg 1: Permaculture for how we’re going to build and grow sustainably.

This entry is about power and machinery.

Just because we’re in favour of localised systems and living simply, it doesn’t mean we want to do everything the hard way. In fact, we’d prefer to be as lazy as possible, within the bounds of still being able to give back more than we’re taking from the world. We are, in fact, fiercely pro-technology. What we are is anti-industrial. We think that an industrial framework which promotes centralised mass manufacture of anything is outdated, world-killing thinking.

This may seem like a contradiction; it’s not. Technology that is implemented sustainably, renewably, and on a small scale, is very important to what we’re planning. When we say small scale, we mean bicyclable: that is to say, you can ride your bike to it, and you can ride your bike to everyone who’s using it. Things like water pumps, trucks / tractors, wind turbines, and information sharing networks, will all play a big role in the plan.

Why we don’t trust centralised structures

There are two main kinds of centralised structure which are relevant to this entry: government and private enterprise.

In the case of government, we think there are major limits to what big government can actually achieve. This is because politicians are mainly concerned with surviving in government beyond the next election; so what gets done is typically what’s popular or what will appease the powerful, rather than what’s good or important. We see little evidence that political parties of any stripe have the slightest eye for the long view or for the urgency of the issues which occupy C and myself. We think that there may yet be some benefit to engaging local government (as recommended by, for example, Geoff Lawton here) to try and implement some local Transition / Permaculture / LETS sort of initiatives, but we think it’s a pretty unwise idea to rely on any more centralised source of welfare, infrastructure, security or stimulus for innovation, because – frankly – we fear these things will dry up and blow away as soon as the going gets tough.

The other set of big centralised structures is the private sector. At the moment, we rely on centralised sources for our food, water, clothing, power, building materials and machines, and we hate it. The move to Tasmania will give us a wonderful opportunity to be free of many of these ties.

We want this freedom because we believe that corporations can’t be trusted. They can’t be trusted because their financial, procedural and personnel structures can’t be known, and they are specifically set up so that no single person of group of people can be held accountable for any damage they do. All we can know for certain about any corporation is that its prime responsibility is to the profits of its shareholders. We aren’t saying that every corporation is evil, but there are an appalling number of examples which bear out our fear that a lack of personal accountability, coupled with the will to profit, gives rise to corrupt, exploitative and polluting business practices.  If this all seems far-fetched, we invite you to watch the movie-length documentary “The Corporation“.

We’ve talked in previous entries about how we plan to meet our food, water and shelter needs with minimal recourse to current industrial structures. This entry is about machines and power.

Machines

A lot of the things we want to do will be greatly aided by machinery. Establishing a Permaculture garden will involve importing manure and digging swales, which suggests the need for a truck and /or a tractor. Building our shelter, even if we’re using only onsite resources, will still require enormous amounts of lifting, transporting, digging etc – which again suggests at least a tractor. Clothing manufacture will be a lot easier with some kind of spinner and loom. Processing food for storage might also be a lot easier with machinery of one sort or another.

Another thing to consider: we will certainly start out with a lot of machinery, but what happens if things break? What happens when the batteries fail, or the solar panel falls apart? What will we do when the spring in the gas compressor snaps, or the tractor tyres are so perished that they’ll no longer inflate?

In order to remain truly independent into the future, we need to do two things:

• Start out with technology that will be repairable in a post-collapse environment. Essentially, in terms of the above examples, that actually translates to “don’t have solar panels” and possibly even “don’t have batteries”. More on this below.
• Develop the capacity to make replacement parts for that technology.

We’ve been following the work of Open Source Ecology with great interest. Among other innovations, OSE has come up with a number of cool designs for things like self-build tractors with modular power units. Their other ideas include an automated compressed earth brick press, a sawmill, a programmable torch table, modular greenhouse and housing units, a forge, a lathe, an adaptation of a 3d printer to produce plastic parts. They also have a varied toolkit in development for producing power – everything from pyrolysis to solar combined heat and power. The OSE model aims to be modular, infinitely replicable, and to produce everything anyone might ever need, not just for survival but in order to actually thrive, on a local scale.

What’s particularly appealing is not just the goodies that OSE is developing, but the fact that their design brief is for small communities, coupled with their core Open Source philosophy – a free exchange of information, available to all, to be adopted and adapted at will.

So impressed were we by the OSE concept that we were on the point of becoming financial supporters via their crowd-based funding system, but then some really odd blog traffic from their site prompted me to dig deeper…

It is with quite some sadness and frustration that we’ve concluded, having read the forums, that while OSE has some extremely compelling ideas – in fact, it seems to us to be one of the only outfits addressing the whole spectrum of developing appropriate technologies for small resilient communities – the execution of these ideas seems to be stymied at regular and alarmingly frequent intervals by ideological and personality conflicts. We do continue to hope that these issues will be worked out in the future, and will put our money where our mouth is as soon as ever we’re confident that they have.

In the meantime, we would be delighted to hear about other outfits that are attempting the same sort of thing – locally-based technological independence.

Power

Solar

We’re more and more inclined to focus on passive rather than active solar systems. Our home design uses solar passive and thermal mass techniques for comfort in both cold and warm weather. We may also incorporate passive solar hot water heating pipes into our design. We also have plans to extend our growing season with some sort of greenhouse solution.

Why not solar panels, like on an Earthship? Well, the more I’ve read about the inefficiency, embodied energy and expense of PV technology, the less convinced I’ve become – particularly in Tasmania, where insolation isn’t at the fabulously high levels you see in other parts of Australia, it can well be argued that PV systems just aren’t worth it. I live in hope that microdot or some other much-touted technology will take off, making PV power cheap and readily available… I have a similar hope for non-polluting, high-capacity, long-lived batteries. But should collapse occur before these technologies have matured, we want to have other, more low-tech options.

Wind / hydro

Wind power has the advantage over photovoltaics that it’s relatively low-tech: you can build a wind turbine yourself out of scrap metal. No, it won’t be as efficient as a highly engineered, centrally-manufactured one, but we have heard of home designs that have produced power whenever the wind blew, without maintenance, for 20 years. That’s the kind of design we want.

Hydro is interesting for similar reasons, plus one other really significant one: hydro operates continuously, whereas wind power needs batteries in order to be continuous. Now, I have no doubt that we will be using batteries, but it’s something we’d like to move away from as soon as we can lay hands on lower-tech, lower-embodied-energy, less polluting, longer-lasting alternatives. Input is more than welcome.

Compost

Jean Pain‘s amazing compost heap produced not only plentiful, continuous hot water (enough to shower under and also to heat his conventional home for a year and a half), but also produced gas for cooking and fuelling his car. He did this using a chipper, some black hose, a metal canister, and some tyre inner tubes. His process is documented online here.

This, again, has the virtues of low-tech, continuousness, and that greatest of all Permaculture goods: multiple outputs, in the form of hot water, gas, and wonderfully rich compost at the end of the heap’s heating cycle. Better still: methane gas is a storable resource. We are aware that methane has attendant issues (it’s a powerful greenhouse gas, and of course its combustion, as well as the process of composting in general, produces CO2), but our plans certainly involve sequestering enough carbon through other activities to more than offset the CO2 produced by our gas use.

We have been fantastically inspired by his system and will, at the very least, be heating our water using compost.

Hello Everyone!

It’s Earth Day…  Hope you did something refreshing to celebrate!

Helen and I  signed another Avaaz petition. Avaaz ROCKS – they are super organised and are getting superb results, on things like keeping the worldwide ivory ban, trying to stop the reintroduction of GM into Europe, campaigning against human trafficking, stopping corrupt politicians allowing new pulp-mills, voicing against anti-gay laws in Uganda…

Currently they are trying to stop whaling restarting globally, by getting 100,000 signatures.

Please sign up with them – they make it so easy to add your voice to each campaign – it takes about 10 seconds! And it changes the world!

So, happy Earth Day, love from us

C & H

Wow! The guys at 10:10 are totally on the ball: less than a day later, I have recieved a lovely, lovely reply today from Madeline at 10:10, saying our letter was encouraging.  She’s passed it onto the whole team and forwarded it to Franny.

Franny Armstrong! One of our total heros.  Look up ‘action’ in any dictionary and see her face!

It reminded me of  when Helen answered our phone and said, ‘Patrick Whitefied! Hello! Good grief, helloooo! I was not expecting to hear from you in person…’  She did manage to gather herself together and sound almost normal after that! (Patrick Whitefied is the UK temperate climate permaculture specialist and Helen is doing her Permaculture Design Course with him in June).  Or the time when she spoke to another of our total heros, Geoff Lawton, from the Permaculture Research Institute: he too was delightful, utterly self-effacing and so practical.  See Greening the Desert on Youtube.

So, that’s cheered us up no end today!

C

Hello everyone!

Yesterday, I wrote to the 10:10 campaign, to let them know how inspiring their work has been to us. I was buying two of their 10:10 necklaces on-line, made out of a recycled Boeing 747 (‘The Spirit of Edinburgh’, which lost all four engines when it flew through a volcanic ash cloud and yet survived! See that story here) when I saw they were asking for feedback on the carbon-cutting changes 10:10 had inspired in people’s lives. I thought they might be chuffed to know what our actions have been/will be!

The amazing human dynamo, Franny Armstrong , is the creator of 10:10 and the director of the film, ‘The Age of Stupid‘, made by spanner films.

So below i’s a slightly better edited version of what I wrote (minus the typos that mortified Helen!)…

All about Truth-fatigue.

Late in 2009, my wife and I watched ‘The Age of Stupid’, brought to us by our visiting 68 year old friend, the redoubtable Tim. As Pete Postlethwaite’s character ‘switched off’, we sat utterly deflated, filleted like a pair of endangered ocean fish. For at least a year, we had already been suffering acutely from truth-fatigue: that desperate mixture of rage, betrayal, grief and gut-numbing guilt. Truth-fatigue is a sleep-gobbling despair which threatens to suck the remaining life out of your lungs, leaving you weeping on the floor. It happens to each person as they truly realise and accept the extent to which we humans have screwed things up. ‘A plague,’ you whisper in disgust, ‘We are a plague, a terminal cancer: the earth cannot survive our gross negligent stupidity.’ Our greed is grinding wisdom and hope into dust; a holocaust sacrifice of the planet.

You change your behaviours: consume the minimum of everything; recycle; give up the car; cycle; tell everyone you love that time is running out. The last few centimetres of sand in the hourglass are pouring away. Like a movie; person walking along, sunny sky, pleasant music, all is well. Cut to juggernaut just as the brake cables snap. Cut back to happy, confident walker, big smile, blue sky… Music tempo speeds up… Innocent face, now speeding juggernaut… Gormless face framed closer, juggernaut bearing down… Music reaching fever pitch, adrenaline pumping. Huge shadow engulfs clueless smiling idiot… Imminent wipe-out, so you scream…. ‘Look up! LOOK OUT! RUNNNNN!!’

Everyone shrugs, ‘What juggernaut?!’ Roll their Gucci-clad eyes. Your hope evaporates at the total point-blank refusal of everyone to change; at their aggressive apathy when the utmost, utmost urgency is the only sane option. The shit has been spattering off the fan for decades; no-one admits the denial they’re dripping in.

You decide on more drastic action, because every single thing you do sears away your integrity. Truth-fatigue crackles, a deafening white-noise: ‘You are the problem! Don’t bother foisting blame at government, at corporations – you buy into all this shit!’

Every tiny aspect of your life is an eco-bind. You use power (albeit from a ‘green energy’ supplier) but it comes a long way and relies on that same insanely wasteful centralised grid. The water grid leaks like a colander, gobbling power to pump its chemical billions of gallons, only to be poured down the drain, whilst the land is parched. Your toilet uses gallons of drinking water, mixing grey with black, a poisonous waste of resource. Your house is an enormous carbon-leaking toxic box. Your jobs are lovely, but a distraction – doing nothing to future-proof either you or your community. Your food has been manufactured into barely recognisable tan muck, packaged in miles of plastic, dripping with fossil-fuel carbon. Farms have lost their soil, so soon there won’t even be crappy chemical-laden food. You wipe your arse on pulped virgin rain-forest. Care of your pets translates into the equivalent of a SUV annually. Etc, etc etc.

Tired. You are dog-tired. Every new thing you learn adds to your bone-sore, heart-seeping tiredness. Today, only 350 Mekong tigers left – soon to be shot to extinction because men worry about their small penises. The polar bears are starving. The plastic vortex in the Pacific can be seen from outer space. GM is spreading, another plague, across the earth. The planet will hit a 4 degree temperature increase in 50 short, short years. It’s too late – we are beyond screwed.

Our 10:10 action:

Too late, but you still have to try. You live, you breathe. Now what? We are in our 30′s – we hope to have a long number of years ahead to make a difference. So, here’s what we are doing in direct response to watching ‘The Age of Stupid’ and to the challenge of 10:10.

First, we named 2010 as our year of no-bullshit-change. January 2010, we booked into Permaculture Design Courses, and wrote applications to intern with Cal-Earth, Growing Power and Earthships. February 2010, we bought a section of forested mountain land in Tasmania: for a third of the price of a London flat, 35 hectares of forest is now protected and won’t be cut down for toilet-roll by the pulp-mills threatening to destroy Tasmania’s virgin forests. (Up yours, Gunns!) March, we bought the name ‘ozearth.org’, for we have a carbon-sequestering plan! We’re selling up or giving away everything we own: our house in the Netherlands will soon be on the market too. We are leaving our nice jobs as a gardener and a professional singer. We’re crapping ourselves, but we are hugely excited too.

It’s not a retreat to the mountain, we’re not hiding: we intend to change every tiny aspect of our lives, to find integrity, to transform our crippling truth-fatigue into carbon-capturing, soil-building, food-producing honesty. We will build a small Cal-Earth house from mud. Grow all our own food, catch all our own water, capture all our own energy. Use our shit to make gas to cook our dinner. Heat our shower water by compost-heap power. Use solar-gain to have a home that creates its own heat and cooling. As we go, we will teach other people how to do it too, by running internships in natural building, in zero-carbon food systems. We will form a partnership with millions of worms to grow new life-giving soil. We will start a native tree nursery, to help reforest barren human-made dead-zones. On line, we will document how we do it, all the triumphs, all our gut-crunching stuff-ups.

Most days, we are daunted by the scale of our whole 10:10 grand-plan; our lack of expertise; our lack of funds to pull it off; the sheer back-busting work ahead. Even the number of hoops we still have to leap through to pull off extricating our lives from Europe is overwhelming: our minds are like whirlpools, juggling details, faced with mountains of red-tape and paperwork. Letting go of things hurts, carries its own griefs; you have to learn the difference between the past and possessions and letting it all go, to make room for what truly constructs a new sense of self.

What gives us the energy? The motivation? The knowledge that very soon we will go to bed exhausted in a good way, a satisfied way. In one or two years, we will be able to look at our reflections in our duck pond without being crippled with guilt: for we will be working within the limits of what Gaia/nature/our planet abundantly offers. Not making excuses. 10:10 will have changed our lives indescribably. 2010 is the year we will look back on as the year we rewrote our future…

We will keep you informed! Love and utter kudos and respect to Franny and the team,

Chloe and Helen.

xoxo

So there’s my cathartic letter to the fabulous, hard-working, courageous team 10:10. Please support them and let them know what you are doing too!

Love

Chloe

Would you believe it! Volcanic eruption interrupts play!!

All that angst about flying to Morocco verus the long-term good of gaining my PDC training was wasted energy!

Like many thousands of others, the ash cloud has foiled my best laid plans (sniff-sniff). No Morocco trip for me, alas! Am chatting to PRI to see if I can do one of their courses later in the year (Jordan?), or early next year in Australia (Melbourne, with Geoff Lawton and Bill Mollison?).  Rachel at PRI is being wonderfully reassuring, telling me not to worry about losing my course fee.

So, I will have to be patient about having those magical letters after my name…

Disappointed of ash-cloudville

C