A Training Center for Ecovillagers

by Albert Bates

I F THE INCREASING CONCENTRATION of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is trying to tell us something, it must be that the planet needs fewer people and more trees. Still, it is one thing to teach birth control in the Third World and another to teach Americans to live more lightly on their own land. Every year I see more subdivisions, malls, and mansions springing up where woodlands used to be. Down here in rural Tennessee they are spreading like the Internet across century-old hayfields, soldering Nashville to Birmingham in a giant circuit board of prefab housing chips.

But there is something of the village culture still left down here. Old men still sit in rocking chairs around wood stoves in the hardware stores and garages, whittling and telling yarns. At shade-tree jamborees there are plenty of fiddle-banjo-guitar-mandolin quartets with age spans of 80 years or more. Will those things disappear when the old garages are replaced by plastic-logo'ed automated fill-ups and the shade-trees are cut to make room for manicured subdivisions?

In our Ecovillage Training Center concept, we hope to create a "total immersion school" that will co-evolve designs to move us all toward more sustainable--maybe more human--ways (again). We try to bring together First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlders to harmonize their visions. We want to create a holistic, "comprehensivist," hands-on curricula that makes learning fun, and inspires as well as teaches.

Since we broke ground in July 1994, we refurbished and painted our old farmhouse, which we call the "Inn," putting in 30 beds, renovating plumbing, heating, and electrical systems, and constructing large decks on east and west sides. We replaced aging refrigerators and other appliances with energy-saving devices, installed fans and insulation, and downsized our total energy draw by 50 percent, even while increasing population load fivefold. We created a four-acre edible landscape, established two frog ponds and a fish pond, transplanted water plants from nearby threatened wetlands, and installed climbing trellises.

We designed and built a large organic garden, enclosed and protected from deer. We inoculated the tops and stumps of storm damaged native oaks and poplars for continuous production of forest mushrooms. We sawed up the downed tops at the nearby Amish mill to make decking and timbers. Between the garden and the mushroom farm, we harvested so much produce last summer that we were able to sell it to health food stores in Nashville.

We designed and built a 20-foot-diameter yurt and hosted a two-day yurt workshop. We also designed and constructed a 300-square-foot strawbale cabin and hosted a three-day strawbale workshop. This year we plan another strawbale workshop to add a composting toilet to the cabin.

We added gutters to all of our roofs, directing rainwater to one or more large cisterns. Cistern water is channeled to the spigot and drip irrigation system in the organic garden. Cistern overflow, and overflow from the solar showers, is channeled to the swales above the garden and into the ponds.

We designed, sited, and constructed the first kilowatt of an eventual 5-Kw solar electric system to power lights and appliances, inter-tying to our local utility grid. We installed solar water heaters on the roof of the Inn. And, yes, we hosted workshops on photovoltaics and solar construction.

Next to the Training Center, we created a one-acre living laboratory with students from the Farm school helping a visiting forester to inventory all observable biota. We'll be watching that space as the center develops, to see how our activities affect it. The goal is to increase biodiversity by the way we integrate our designed habitat into the natural surroundings. If it starts going in the wrong direction, we'll have to redesign.

Since we opened, we've hosted three permaculture courses, a midwife conference, a Native American spiritual gathering, several environmental activist retreats, and numerous tours of school students from around the country. We hosted three 10-day summer camps and a two-day Kwanza celebration for 30 homeless and underprivileged children.

If it were up to the handful of us living in The Farm community to try to do all of this, it would have taken much longer, at best. The real bedrock of the project are the volunteers who come to us from a variety of different backgrounds but share a common vision.

Last January, in the middle of the Blizzard of '96, a group from the Lothlorian Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, showed up wanting to help. We usually charge some small amount for room and board. They were asked to contribute daylight hours to community service work.

They plastered inside the strawbale cabin, trenched a water-line, hauled stone, repaired our four-wheel bicycle, built new compost bins, fertilized the yard shrubs with compost, painted the solar shower, and planted trees. Then they repainted rooms in the Farm School, remade clay for the art class, hauled trash and manure from around the barns, split wood, and planted more trees.

In the process they got to meet a lot of people and join in the daily life of the community, whether it was molding clay with teenagers or sharing a cup of cocoa at the Farm Store.

Our plans now call for refining this volunteer program to give formal college credit for internships and to permit extended working visits between our regular courses. We also have an ambitious schedule for courses mapped out, including beginning and advanced permaculture design, organic gardening, vegetarian cooking, natural healing, and sundry construction crafts.

Last October two of our staff attended the first International Conference on Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities, at Findhorn, Scotland. There we met with community planners and communitarians from 40 nations. As Ross Jackson of Gaia Trust writes in "The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN)" (p. 37 ), we all see regional networks as the key to organization at the grass roots. We made a pledge in Scotland to help coalesce one or more regional networks in the Western Hemisphere. When we got back home, we had to set about figuring out how to do that.

What we came up with was The Design Exchange. The Exchange has various aspects, all of them related to building a "sustainable living" movement. One aspect is publication of a printed newsletter to provide lively coverage of ecovillage network activities. Another is the creation of a web page to slip into international wordstreams and make contact with like minds while avoiding postage and paper. Recycle electrons, not trees!

A third aspect of the "Exchange" is face-to-face contact, and that will include seasonal events and regional gatherings that bring us together to discuss our common future. If you would like to be a part of this dialogue, please contact us at ecovillage@thefarm.org or Box 90, Sum mertown, TN 38483. Those addresses will also work for getting information about our upcoming courses.

Also watch the "Ecovillage Report" and "Community Calendar" columns in this magazine, and we'll keep you posted on opportunities to learn and to work together at the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm.