Broadcast August 12, 2022
Featuring: Mollie Curry and Sara Carter

Mollie Curry moved to Earthaven in 1996, becoming one of the first village residents and getting involved in natural building. She’s taught natural building workshops since 1998, covering cob, plastering, straw bale, straw-clay, earthen paint, earthbag, and carpentry, as well as permaculture. Mollie has been involved in many of the natural building projects at Earthaven, as well as teaching and doing projects in other locations, which has informed her building experience. 

Mollie Curry shares what she learned in her nearly three decades of experience designing and building natural buildings at Earthaven and around the country.

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Working together, doing something physical that’s not too hard and not too dangerous, is actually a really great way to make and deepen connections. It is the heart and soul of natural building. It really is. And I just got chills, so you know.

Welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage Village’s living laboratory for a sustainable human future. In this episode, our host Sara Carter talks with Mollie Curry about natural building.

Arriving at Earthaven

I think it was about 28 years ago that I first came to Earthaven. I was working with the Permaculture Activist magazine, and the guy who was doing that magazine was a founding member of Earthaven living with another member. So that’s how I found out about Earthaven. 

I thought, hey, I could go and learn to build my own house because they’re starting to build things out there. I went to some meetings and stuff. I was way into permaculture, obviously, but I never built anything.

Buildings at Earthaven when Mollie arrived

There was the open air pavilion. There was an old cabin that was here when they bought the land and the mud hut had been started.  Some of the founding members had gone to a natural building class and they started building this with different building methods: cob, straw clay, waddle and dab with an earthbag foundation. They were putting the knowledge they had just gained into action. It wasn’t anywhere near finished, but it was begun. Yeah, it had a roof.

I was really attracted to building a natural building, which I don’t even know if I’d heard that term before. I’d never even heard the term intentional community before, but I just kind of fell in love with the people and the whole culture going on here and with this project and what was happening here. It was pretty awesome and pretty primitive beginnings living in a tent. But pretty quickly we built the composting toilet. One of the other first things that got built. There was a couple that built a little house called the Zen hut. And then we were starting on the kitchen. So, the composting toilet, they were building their little house, composting toilet and the hut hamlet kitchen were getting built that first summer that I was here.

Engaging with natural building

I picked up natural building pretty quickly because I was a wilderness ranger before I came here, and I did a lot of trail work, and so I had a lot of knowledge about just how physical things work, my body with tools, that kind of thing. So even though I didn’t necessarily have the exact skills, I had kind of a precursor of that kind of skill set. 

It was a pretty male dominated thing, and there weren’t very many other women here living on the land. Patricia was probably the only other one that I can think of at the very beginning, more came. But, yeah, I was involved in conversations about design and understanding what was going to happen and doing it, but not all of it. There were some personality things that caused me to focus more on the garden at times. I was just like, I can’t handle that dude. But that worked out. 

I focused on working on the mud hut, which was being built, and it was my project to finish that. That was my assigned project, but I was helping with other stuff, but my focus was on the mud hut. And so other people would walk by. There were lots of visitors coming, even at that early time, and I would be like, hey, you want to do some cob with me? They would hang out for an hour or two, and we would make cob and pile cob on the wall, and I would teach them how to do it in a very simple manner. And that was fun. 

There were definitely times where I stood around in a group of men, wonderful men, and I remember one time in particular, I’m sure this has happened to many people, where I came up with some idea and I said it out loud. We were all standing around, and then no one said anything, and the conversation went on. And then, a minute later, some guy said the same thing, and everyone was like, oh, that’s a great idea. I was like, these are Earthaven dudes, and it’s still happening. Just because we have the really great intentions doesn’t mean we can actually put them into practice immediately. But I was just kind of slack jawed when that happened. Turns out it’s a lot of work to change culture. But that’s why to be here, we got to change ourselves to change the culture.

Why Mollie was attracted to natural building

There are different reasons I was attracted to doing natural building. One was the DIY nature, especially back then. There weren’t very many people anywhere that you could just hire to do something like that. But I thought, I’m going to build my own house and I want to know how to do it myself and that way it’ll be cheaper and all that. 

I was already an environmentalist and it made so much sense to not build a building out of toxic waste, basically like vinyl siding. I worked for the Forest Service when I was a wilderness ranger, so I saw the commercial logging in the Pacific Northwest. And what was happening here is conscious management of the forest for different things. One, we were making clearings so that we could live in it, but trying to use those trees to build out of. There is just such an ecological bent to people that are into natural building. And that is the main reason. Use renewable resources: straw bales, for instance, soil from where you are or close by. You can use things from the earth that then if you neglect the building, will go back to earth without causing a toxic waste dump in the site of the former house. That really was attractive to me.

And the creativity aspect… I really didn’t know about at first, but then I found out about cob and sculptural stuff and being able to shape mud and build just about anything you want. Even if you build a conventional house, you can do cob details on the inside, like curved corners on the inside of the walls or a sculptural kitty cat or whatever you want, like shelves up near the top of the ceiling. There’s so many things that you can do with it. I’ve definitely built functional bas relief. And I’ve built sculptural bas relief. Bas relief. It’s just sculpture that is stuck to the wall, basically. I fell in love with the mud and then I fell in love with the straw also, eventually, but my first love is definitely cob and plaster and earthen paint and the clay-y stuff.

Feminine aspects of natural building

It’s very feminine as well. Working with cob. There are traditions all over the world of not only women, but men also, but a lot of women plastering and basically doing mud work. And sometimes I’ve called myself Messy Mollie because I tend to wipe mud all over myself. Not on purpose. But I’ve seen some amazing pictures of women in the southwest and in Mexico who are wearing full dresses, what I would consider fancy clothes, and not getting mud on themselves while they are plastering with their hands.

It blows my mind. Home building can be a very feminine thing to do. And I think it’s great to have both genders come together and it’s heavy work. 

Things Mollie learned doing natural building

One of the things I really learned early on is that a five gallon bucket of mud is really heavy. No reason to fill a five gallon bucket up with mud. I’m not macho. I don’t need to carry that. I can fill a smaller bucket or two people can carry a five gallon bucket full of mud. A two person bucket carry is awesome. So it’s like I might not have as much upper body strength, but I have a brain, so I can figure out how to do things that are too heavy for me, even if sometimes that’s asking somebody to help. 

I’ve learned a lot about building because a lot of natural building is just building: foundations, roofs, frames, post and beam, that kind of thing. One of the things I think is most important that I’ve learned by my experience at Earthaven is to insulate your foundations or any part that’s buried. We’re building a lot of times on hills where part of the building is dug in to the hill and there’s concrete block or some other form of water resistant material. It’s not going to rot. Insulate that or you will get condensation on the inside because of our humid climate. And that can create mold. So condensation. 

I’ve learned a lot about moisture when it comes down to it. Dealing with liquid water and humidity are huge learning curves. There’s still lots of debate even in building science about how to deal with humidity in houses, how to deal with liquid water. 

But, you know, having a breathable house, they even have recognized it in conventional building by Tyvek and all those house wraps are breathable. They’re like Gortex. They’ll let humidity out and not let liquid water in. Well, that also is done by lime plaster and earthen plaster. So you don’t want condensation happening in the middle of your wall and you don’t want it happening in the inside of your building because that part that’s underground is ground temperature. And then liquid water happens there. 

And drainage is so important. Drainage, roof overhangs. I’m a real big fan of gutters bringing water down to the ground instead of water flowing off the roof and then just blowing onto the wall or even just close to the house, making moisture around your house. You can get away with less need for dehumidification, air conditioning or whatever. If you have good drainage and there’s not a bunch of vegetation holding moisture around your house, airflow, those are some big ones. And in a place like this where we’re using solar and microhydro power. A lot of those times those systems are shared with multiple people, multiple families, or in my case, the power is shared with a whole neighborhood. We really can’t support people running dehumidifiers and air conditioners. I lived here for eleven years like that and I definitely saw mold be a problem in some cases and not in others. 

How to prevent mold without dehumidifiers and air conditioning

How do you prevent mold without having to use dehumidifiers and air conditioning? How do you prevent it from the ground up in the building itself? In the building itself and in your stuff. And air flow is big, light is big, and blocking out the humid air by closing windows at the right time, that’s one thing. And what I really saw was having easily cleanable surfaces and not having too much stuff makes a huge difference. It’s just like mold grows on dust. It will. And if you can’t clean the dust very easily because you have rough cut lumber. I lived in places with rough cut lumber. They were really hard to clean and so it was easy for mold to get a foothold, places like that. 

In the tiny little eleven by eleven hut that I lived in, the only things that molded were leather. Leather attracts moisture somehow, and mold can grow on it and otherwise I think there was just so much airflow and light in that building that nothing else really molded that I can remember. And it was totally in the shade and surrounded by vegetation. Well, there’s south facing windows that got lots of sun, even in summer.

Mold is definitely an issue, and I will say, unfortunately, in my 100-year old conventionally built house in town that I live in, we’ve resorted to a summer air conditioner. There was just mold growing on the walls in that house. So I guess my point there is it’s not unique to natural buildings. Mold will grow on paint, latex paint, mold will grow on whatever the finishes are on our wooden walls, in our house, the wooden paneling in our house, especially in this kind of climate.

Learning about the height to width ratio of a building

Well, this is an interesting one that I think that all the builder people at Earthaven learned by trial by fire or trial and error or whatever you want to call it, which is the height to width ratio of a building. So there’s a couple buildings here that have big outdoor bracing because we were like, oh, well, smaller footprint, build high. That way you don’t have to build as big of a foundation. That really makes a lot of sense to do that. But these buildings and then we wanted solar access, so they weren’t very wide. So they were tall and narrow. So three stories tall, but only basically one story deep, a little bit more than that. And that did not work structurally. So it ended up feeling like those post and beam structures were too wiggly, both for mental comfort and like, oh, is this thing going to fall down? And also because plaster’s going to break if you have a lot of movement in the building. So those braces were added after the fact of the frame going up. 

And then we did more research. Someone did the research, it wasn’t me. I was like, oh, that exceeded the height to width ratio that we should have paid attention to. And then after that I was like, oh, well, we won’t do that again. Unfortunately, both of those buildings were being built at the same time, so it was like only discovered when they were both already built. But yeah, that was a really great lesson. I love the build high thing. Take up less space, have a smaller roof, have a smaller footprint, and you have to consider that structural parameter when you’re building.

Building the road as we travel and life is a big experiment

That makes me think about a quote that I attribute to Paul Caron. I don’t know if he got it from somewhere else, but the sort of Earthaven motto of “we build the road as we travel.” And sometimes if we did a little more research into how to build the road, it would have served us better.

I would say, though, that it is all a big experiment. This is kind of my motto, life is a big experiment. Natural building is a big experiment. This community is definitely a big experiment. No matter what we’re doing, we build the road as we travel. And there was tons of research. I’m not sure if I could say it was actually pre-Internet, but it was not like it is now.

We were looking at books and getting calculations. There’s books that have calculations about spans of beams and with different species of wood and all that. So much stuff to research. So somehow that one got missed. Or maybe it was because it was on a really steep hill, it seemed like it was only two story, but then it was almost a story below it. Sure, it might not have clicked mentally, but yeah, I feel like it’s all the experiment. We do build the road as we travel. 

And also another little motto, which is what I thought you were going to say, is the wonky hut, which is a straw bale, is a great example of this one. We used to talk about making a little plaque that would say “how to do everything wrong and still have it come out right,” because mistakes were made in the building. That was the first straw bale that was built here. Well, actually, maybe the council hall was the first straw bale. I don’t know if they were. I can’t remember. But yeah, the roof overhang didn’t end up being long enough.

They added some roof on. The straw bales up near the top are kind of wonkily stacked, and it actually gives it a lot of charm and character. So it’s still a good house. It looks pretty funky and it’s still a great little house. So I’m sure it has its issues.

What was it that was hard to get into about straw?

“Oh, God, it’s so pokey, itchy and scratchy.” No, I don’t think it was that hard to get into. It was just that I loved mud, and that was the first thing that I was doing. So I really got into building a straw when I got together with my husband, Steve, and he and his wife deceased, were some of some straw building pioneers of what we like to call the straw bale revival, because straw bale building actually started over 100 years ago back in Nebraska, the sandhills of Nebraska, because white settlers, who were moving west,  were building sod houses, but the grass was not holding that sandy soil together. And that was right about the time of the invention of the straw baling machine. So a baler. So they suddenly had all these bales that were laying around and they were like, those look like great building blocks to protect us this winter, and we’re going to build a real house eventually. But then some people, I’m sure did, but others were like, this is a great house. Why do something different? And they plastered them and made them last.

Steve and I met at this event called Build Here Now, which does relate to Be Here Now. It was at Lama Foundation in New Mexico. That was one of the places I went and got some early training. I really wanted to learn how to do earthen paint. There was a woman that was going to teach it there, another friend. And I had already been teaching natural building before I ever took a class. I was like, I maybe should take some classes. I know enough to do this, but maybe not some other things to teach what I was teaching. 

We met there and ended up teaching apprenticeships there. We built a straw bale sauna and a bigger building. We didn’t design these. We just were the teachers of the apprenticeship doing the wall systems. So the roofs were already… Actually the roof was not up on the sauna. We did the whole sauna. 

You have morning circle and everyone comes together who’s at this event. It’s like a volunteer event where people are learning and teaching natural building. It’s a really cool event. The leaders of each project will say, okay, over here today, we’re going to be doing this. And it might be a straw oriented or straw bale oriented thing, or it might be putting the roofing on or something. And other people are like, we’re replastering the dew drop, which was a little office building that they had. And so there’d be a little competition between the mud people and the straw people. And they would be, “you don’t want to do straw bale. It’s itchy and pokey. Come with us and do the smooth, sensuous, mud job.” And the straw people will be like, “you’re going to get so dirty.” It was just fun and games. 

But yeah, I fell in love with straw because of its insulation properties. It’s a renewable-resource carbon sink that’s going to moderate the temperature of your building. We’re about to build a straw bale house in West Asheville, and I’m very excited about doing it for ourselves.

Mollie and Steve’s work now

We met before that workshop, but we got together several years after we met. He had a natural building company that was straw bale focused. And he had written some books and did a video, the first straw bale video. And I had my own little natural building company. And when we got together and fell in love, we decided to join our companies. We have really focused a lot on education, like teaching apprenticeships and classes and stuff, and also doing jobs. Sometimes we will teach a crew to do it, do whatever the step is. Like, a couple of times we’ve gone and just taught each step as it is occurring, like how to stack the straw bales, how to make cob, how to make plaster and apply it for each project. So we’ll go and basically consult like that. And we also do a bunch of consulting just on people’s designs. Sometimes people want to know,  they’re trying to figure out what they want to do and just having a conversation with them about the different methods, kind of the pros and cons, what might be appropriate to their situation. And then my favorite thing is doing, like, sculptural cob and plaster and earthen paint.

Partly I love doing it because it’s fun for me, but also creative. But partly I like doing it because you can do it in a conventionally built, latex-painted house, basically renovate a quote normal house. So it’s a way of incorporating the earth into a quote normal house. And you don’t have to build a whole straw bale or straw clay or waddle and dob or whatever house. You can actually bring the mud inside in a beautiful way. And it has a great feeling. Clay actually gives off negative ions and so negative ions are positive vibes. So you can really bring that into your space and transform it just by doing pretty thin plasters and paints. And if you really want to go for it, like cob details. I love the curving corners. I love just the sculptural fun stuff, like around windows or mantle pieces or that kind of stuff. You can also bring in a lot of personality into the space in that way. 

The house Mollie and Steve plan to build

We’ve been designing it for what seems like a long time. It’s going to be a post and beam, straw bale insulated, so straw bale walls, house in the middle of town in West Asheville on an infill lot. And we have gone back and forth about how big it is. It seems big, and then we’re like, but it’s not too big. But is it too big? All the design details. We’re going to have a little earthen floor in the bedroom and the upstairs, which is like a south facing thing. So it’s passive solar as much as we can make it. The narrow end, because of the lot, has to face south. So I’d rather have it 90 degrees. But that can’t happen. There’s natural building purists, and we are not that. For instance, we’re going to have a concrete basement. Some people will be like, you need to build that out of stone. It’s like, no, we’re not actually.  I’m really excited about building something for ourselves and having classes and apprenticeships that are going to help do that. And friend and family volunteer work days.

Natural building as a community building experience

Part of what’s really cool about natural building is it can be a community building experience. And I think that is another thing that really attracts me to it. My dad makes the joke about Tom Sawyer. Ho ho ho, you’re going to get people to wash your fence, paint your fence, or whatever. But people actually really want to connect in that way. And working together, doing something physical that’s not too hard and not too dangerous, is actually a really great way to make and deepen connections. It is the heart and soul of natural building. It really is. And I just got chills saying that.

Mollie’s website is mudstrawlove.com.

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Broadcast November 1, 2021
Featuring: Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati

Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati, formerly known as Dr. Rudolph Valentine, has been very committed to the integration of Eastern thought, particularly yoga and tantra, and permaculture, and all that implies, as well as it relates to healing.

Swami Ravi shares his background as a physician and holistic healer of Ayurvedic medicine in clinics in India and the US. During his medical career, he studied tantra, which he began teaching after retiring from medicine. In 2004, he moved to Earthaven, continued teaching, and developed the Dancing Shiva retreat center. 

Most of the conversation explores a holistic view of soil health, plant health, the health of people and the planet, including the implications and challenges for healing the people and Gaia.

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We  discovered that Tantra and permaculture were really based on very similar principles. My long-term interest has been in the interface between these two disciplines and all that implies, as well as how that relates to healing. So, yeah, we’re here at Earthaven, where this intersection of different disciplines is what it’s all about.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage Podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage’s Living Laboratory for a Sustainable Human future. I’m Debbie Lienhart, and today I’m excited to talk with one of our Earthaven members and elders, Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati. So, would you like to introduce yourself?

Introducing Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati

My name is Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati. And I was formerly known as Dr. Rudolph Ballentine. I’ve been living at Earthaven for 17 years, and I have been very committed to the integration of Eastern thought, particularly yoga and Tantra and permaculture. And in fact, at one point, Patricia Allison and myself offered a nine-week live-in workshop or event on the integration of permaculture and Tantra, and that was very exciting and very fun. We sort of discovered that tantra and permaculture were really based on very similar principles, and that’s what we played off of during that event.

My long-term interest has been in the interface between these two disciplines and all that implies, as well as how that relates to healing, because in my previous incarnation, I was a physician and practiced holistic medicine for 45 years before I retired. So, yeah, we’re here at Earthaven, where this intersection of different disciplines is kind of what it’s all about. And as we work toward a sustainable way of living, we need to weave in all these things that we have learned over the centuries to create something that is truly alive and enlivening as a way of life.

Swami Ravi’s journey through medicine

One of the things you bring is that you’ve been a real physician in Western medicine and then had quite a journey through different kinds of medicine. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I went to medical school at Duke Medical School, not far from here, and received my MD degree. And then I did a residency in psychiatry in New Orleans in Louisiana. Before that, I did a rotating internship where I had an opportunity to use all my skills — delivering babies, doing surgery, and so forth. Then, I did my training in psychiatry. And in the course of that, I became interested in yoga. And at that point, yoga was something really new in the US. This was 1973.

And so the only way you could really find out much about yoga was to go somewhere else to learn it. And so I ended up going to India, and that’s where I met my teacher. And I also was involved in studying Ayurveda because that was a holistic medical system.

What’s Ayurveda?

Yeah, that’s the traditional system of medicine in India, which would be comparable to Chinese medicine that comes from the culture of China. So I studied that and lived and worked at an Ayurvedic hospital for some time. And then I became interested in the integration of those things, and my teacher invited me to come back to the US. He was already established in the US, and we created a program of what we call combined therapy, which combined many Western holistic techniques, Ayurveda, yoga, meditation, and so forth. So I did that work for 20 years. And then I set up a clinic in New York City, which I ran for a number of years and then wrote a book to summarize what I had learned about how all these traditions fit together. And that was called “Radical Healing.” And once I had completed the book and could offer it to the world, I retired from medicine and began to devote my time to teaching Tantra, which was something that had been part of my training with my teacher from the beginning.

Starting to teach tantra

So I had 20 years of intensive training in tantra and began to teach. I taught at a school called the Body Electric School, which was in California. And then I taught increasingly on my own. And then I came to Earthaven and eventually created this retreat center where we’re sitting today Dancing Shiva, which is part of Earthaven and thereby had access to an environment — both a learning environment, because it’s embedded in Earthaven, but also surrounded by nature and surrounded by beautiful forests, which is the ideal place to teach tantra and the ideal place to help people improve their health. So I’ve had the joy of being here for all these years and continuing to do that.

Tantra is in one sense, you could say it’s advanced yoga, but many of the teachings of yoga come from Tantra, like the idea of Kundalini Shakti and the concept of the chakras, and really a lot of the understanding of breath. But these are what are called in India sister sciences, like yoga and tantra and Ayurveda are all so closely related, but kind of based on the same foundations and therefore really easily integrated. But that is also characteristic of most of the teachings that come out of India, whether it’s philosophy or science or whether it’s medicine or spirituality, they aren’t really so separate as they are in the west.

And that’s because the thinking in the way of dealing with life is much more holistic. They are holistic, meaning that it thinks of it all as a whole rather than separate pieces. And that’s one of our great stumbling blocks in the west is that we fragment everything in the interest of analysis, which is very valuable. But then there’s another thing called synthesis. And if you do all analysis and no synthesis, then you end up feeling scattered.

Relationship to the holistic aspect of permaculture

I’m looking on the wall over there, the diagram done by one of the founders of Permaculture, David Holmgren. He has a flower-like diagram with all the different aspects of permaculture. And there are so many. At the very bottom is holistic medicine, the foundation of it all. When we step into permaculture, we step into holistic thinking, which is refreshing.

A story from the tantra and permaculture workshop taught with Patricia Allison

There were so many wonderful events. I remember one of the participants was from a very different lifestyle, doing healing work. And somehow he got interested in permaculture. And he came and it was very difficult for him because to pull together all these different ways of thinking was almost painful. And he used to come to my place where I stayed and kind of sob and weep. And like, “I don’t know whether I can do this.” But he did. And I think changed his life in a lot of ways.

Patricia was so broad and her scope of thinking, it all was exciting for her to bring these different things together. And so we just had a lot of fun.

About building Dancing Shiva at Earthaven Ecovillage

Now you’re up here and we’re in this beautiful Dancing Shiva place that you’ve built and some other people had started some things. But you’ve done a lot with it. So can you tell us about developing this site?

For many years, I was doing weekend workshops on tantra, especially for men. And it was a life-changing experience for a lot of people because such a different way of thinking about themselves and their bodies and the relationship between sexuality and spirituality, and all of that. And the way that we did the workshops was everybody helped produce the workshop. So when we cooked meals, different people took shifts to help cook and then to clean up and then to empty the compost. And then all the things that make a workshop go.

Everyone was doing it. So we were functioning in a weekend as this little mini community. And at the end, people would always say, Why do we have to leave? Why DO we have to leave? This is the way I would like to live. And so after doing that for six or eight years, I thought, Why do we have to leave? And so maybe we can create a place where we just live that. And so that’s how Dancing Shiva came into being. We wanted to set up a place where you could live the teachings.

And then it occurred to us eventually, of course, that that’s the basic idea of a monastery. Can we live the teachings? And can we all participate in growing the food and cleaning up and cutting down the trees and hauling the firewood and doing all the things that need to be done to make life possible and still remain in that state of mind and in that environment that is conducive to this other way of living. And so that’s what we have been striving to develop here at Dancing Shiva and now are able to enjoy it.

I had the privilege of coming to a recent retreat here. Deep ecology and yoga retreat. It was a very sweet environment to be retreating in.

And so that makes such a difference. I mean, these things like yoga and permaculture, you just can’t teach them in a hotel meeting room. You can try and you can get across some of the concepts, but you can’t feel it. You need to be out in the forest. You need to be in the woods. You need to be in a place where your surroundings are supporting what you’re learning.

The relationship between soil health, plant health, and the health of people

I think the punchline, which I will give you first, is that we really aren’t separate. We think of ourselves as separate, and they’re the plants, and they’re the people. And then there’s the food. And these are different issues, but they’re not in a way. Our challenge is to put the pieces back together and try to understand it as a whole functioning system. So we know, for example, that in the body, in the human body, there are somewhere around 200,000 different proteins that need to be synthesized for good health, for really, not just to stay alive, but to have vibrant health.

The human genome only contains 25,000 genes, and one gene oversees the production of one protein. So how on earth are we supposed to get all the other things that we need? It turns out that our tissues of our body are actually teeming with microbes. Bacteria have probably, now I’m not remembering the figures, but hundreds of thousands of genes among them, because there are many different varieties of bacteria. And then in our tissues, also are fungi, and they have even more diversity and more genetic material, up into the billions of different genes. And then they are parasites, which we are always trying to identifyo s we can take strong antimicrobials to kill because we shouldn’t have parasites in the body. But actually, we should have what we call parasites. They’re not really parasites. They’re actually allies. They are manufacturing some of these 200,000 things we need that the body can’t manufacture, and so are the bacteria, and so are the fungi. So our bodies are actually very similar to the soil.

So where do we get these microbes? Well, they used to be everywhere, but we permeated the planet with antimicrobials and pesticides and chemicals that will kill microbes. And we’re always obsessed. There are advertisements on television about how you should use this detergent for your wash, because otherwise, bacteria might be on your clothes. You can’t put clothes on your children with bacteria on them.

Well, actually, there are bacteria all over the surface of our bodies and inside of our bodies. And we need a wide variety of them. In the scientific community now, and that part of the scientific community that’s studying this issue. They have developed this term of postbiotics, not prebiotics or probiotics, but postbiotics, meaning the substances that the microbes produce in our bodies that supply those other 175,000 substances that we need for good health. So the postbiotics are really where the important information is and the important functions are. So in order for these microbes in our bodies to produce those things that we need, we need several things. We need them (the microbes) and one of the best places you can get them is from the soil. So if you go out into the garden and you grow your food, you’re not just growing the food that has all this richness, but you’re inhaling the microbes that your body needs to be able to produce the things you want from that excellent food. So this is where the boundaries blur. Like, where does this organism of life stop? And where is some different thing happening? Because actually, they’re bleeding into each other because we need the food from the soil.

But we also need the microbes from the soil. If the soil has been poisoned with pesticides and is using chemical fertilizer, we won’t get that from the soil, and neither will the plants. So the plants will be lacking in trace minerals, for example. But they’ll be lacking in other substances as well that microbes are producing.

Plants and mycorrhizae

In fact, the roots of the plants secrete a sugary sweet substance that feeds the microbes so that the microbes can then feed the plants now. So where does the plant stop and the mycorrhizae start? It’s all one system. So all these microbes living in our body that need to produce all these wonderful things, they also need raw materials to produce them from. And that has to come from the plants. So what we’re eating should contain a wide variety of different plants, substances and different kinds of molecules that different plants produce.

Problems with loss of diversity

When we have a diet, like in the United States, where there are, like, six or eight plants that most of our food supplies are made from, then that impoverished source of nutrition can’t really support the work that all those microbes living in your body and your own cells are trying to do. So there’s such a loss of diversity. This is just how the world expresses the issues that… We have trouble with diversity, we can’t accept people that don’t look like us. Well, the same thing. We’re destroying the diversity in the soil.

We’re destroying the diversity in the food crops. We’re destroying the diversity of microbes in our bodies with antibiotics that kill microbes. So if you take antibiotics for sore throat or for whatever, you’re killing off a huge number of those microbes that live in your body. And then when you dump Roundup on your soil, you’re killing all the microbes in the soil. So the plants rely on the microbes in the rhizosphere of the plant. That’s the area around the root. There are these fungi that are called mycorrhizae.

And without the mycorrhizae, the plants can’t absorb the nutrients that are in the soil. So you’re cutting them off from their food supply. It takes 2 grams of roundup to destroy all the mycorrhizae on an acre of land, and we’re spraying on, I forget how many billions of pounds a year on the soils in the United States. So when we disrupt, we actually fragment nature and cut the pieces apart from each other where they can’t join and function together. Then we are creating dis-ease. There is a disease on the planet.

And there’s a disease in our bodies because we aren’t getting what we need. So we have in our kind of mania and our fear of microbes, we have been really destroying our health. And so what we need is to begin to have more respect for the integrality of nature. This is an integrated system that is beyond our current understanding. A little by little, we’re learning more and more and more, but we’re still so far from grasping both the wide scope of it and the intricacy of each detail and how everything is interlinked with everything else.

So instead, we split it apart in pieces. Well, that part, meaning those microbes, are to be feared. So we have to destroy them. Well, now this is a bizarre kind of thinking and a very disturbing and destructive way of thinking. This is what leads to wars. And so it’s the same mentality and we use that terminology. It’s the war against cancer. The war against the viruses. It’s the war against the bacteria. We’re at war. And so the war always tends to destroy both the people that you’re trying to kill and yourselves.

And so the war mentality is not where it’s at. It’s a misstep like Oops, that was the wrong way to go, let’s step back and see. Well, how can we approach this? Not as a war, but as a kind of marveling at the collaboration of all aspects of nature to create this planet. It’s so incredible and beautiful and magnificent and brilliant. And can we just be in awe of that and grateful for that? And then we can become healthy?

The relationship between human health and planetary health

In one session I gave once near Atlanta, everybody’s talking about global warming back now, people backed off and they said climate change. But still everyone’s thinking global warming. Gaia, which is the planet earth, has a fever. She has a fever because we are really hacking away at her. And we’re doing so many things that are destructive to her that she’s falling ill and has a fever. This is one angle to think about it from, which is quite valid, I believe, if we want her to be well. And here’s the whole key to this. She is us. I mean, we’re part of her. It’s not really us over here and Gaia over there. Gaia includes us. We’re part of that network of living things. And that living organism, Gaia includes us. And so by making her sick, we’re getting sick because we’re part of her. Yes, it’s all one challenge. And to think you can address climate change without addressing what are you doing to the fields of the agricultural lands of the whole planet? When you’re dumping poisons on the land and you’re killing off the microbes?

And how does that affect what goes into the air and the levels of carbon dioxide. Plants take carbon dioxide and make oxygen. But when you spray herbicides on the land, it kills the plants. So the plants can’t convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen. And then we say, oh, we have rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Well, could that be that you’re killing the plants that used to convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen and water? Maybe that’s such an obvious point, but that doesn’t seem to get into the discussion.

Part of our fragmentation, our fragmenting tendency is that we look at every issue as an isolated issue, and we don’t see how all the issues are interconnected. “That’s just too much. Can’t deal with that.” That cripples us in our attempts to really do something productive and constructive for our health and for the planet’s health. And the two are the same.

So when we talk about nature now, people are talking about forest bathing, like using connection with the forest as a healing process. Well, yeah, it really does work but we are making the forest sick. So we have to heal nature before nature can heal us with the efficiency that it could because we are damaging it. So it’s a self destruction thing because the whole thing is us. And yet we’re destroying it. And we think that that makes sense, but it really doesn’t.

So we have to kill the viruses. Well, guess what? Viruses are not alive. Scientists have been saying that for a long, long time. They’re not living creatures. There’s no life in a virus. You can crystallize it and put it in a jar and come back in 100 years and it’s still there. Viruses are not living entities and so we have the idea that the viruses come in. Now, I don’t know who came up with this way of thinking, but the viruses come in and they sort of take over the cell and make it produce more of itself because it can’t reproduce because it’s not alive. Well, how can a non-living thing try to take over your cells? I mean, what would that mean? How could it have the intention? But we project onto the viruses, these monsters, and they have ill will toward us, and they want to destroy us. But they’re not even living things. They’re just a chemical compound.

So this is a bizarre kind of human tendency. And the technical term for it, of course, is paranoia. There are these little things out there. They’re trying to kill me. Well, I don’t see. Oh, they’re out there. I know they are. And they’re trying to… That’s called paranoia.

So our paranoid tendencies have led us to destroy a lot of nature. There’s a fear of nature. There’s a book called “The Problem of Civilization” by Derek Jensen. And he says that we, particularly people in North America, we have a fear of wild nature, like the dark forest. There’s evil things that go on there, and it swallows you up, kills you. And so we have been dedicating ourselves since we landed on the shores of Massachusetts or wherever it was, Plymouth Rock and so forth to conquer nature.

Well, what does it mean to conquer nature? We are part of it. So we’ve really destroyed a lot of the integrity of the life forms on the continent and out of fear and projecting that fear. So fear is not the answer. And war is not the answer. That’s a bumper sticker that the Quakers will offer you if you want one. War is not the answer. War has never been the answer to anything. So, yes, we need to step out of that paranoid position, that paranoid place, into more of a sense of awe and respect and cherishing the richness of the nature that we are and that we inhabit. And we are because we are the one big system that’s called nature.

Programs at Dancing Shiva

We have a website, dancingshivatantra.com. You can find all the information there. You can also email us at dancingshivatantracom@gmail.com. We are offering all kinds of programs on the interface between deep ecology, permaculture, yoga, meditation, and tantra. And we have programs at all kinds of levels. We have entry level programs. We have an advanced program, a three-year program for training teachers to teach this. And we’re in our third three-year iteration of that.

We are here to work along with our other neighborhoods at Earthaven to try to offer the world a sustainable future and see if people will become as fascinated by that possibility as we are. We also have some online offerings and we’re organizing more.

This podcast is produced by Earthaven Ecovillage’s School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina.

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Released June 28, 2021
Featuring: Paul Caron and Diana Leafe Christian

In this podcast, Earthaven co-founder and village philosopher Paul Caron shares how he got involved with the other Earthaven founders, innovations in round-pole timber framing that enabled building Earthaven’s iconic Council Hall, and what the Earthaven project is all about for him.

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Introduction

The main thing that we’re doing and trying to show people isn’t growing organic food, it’s sharing resources, coming together as a group and deciding how to make our lives better by cooperation. This is the thing that our culture is constantly tearing down in order to sell products to more people.

Hello and welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage’s living laboratory for a sustainable human future. In this episode, our host, Earthaven member and communities expert Diana Leafe Christian talks with Earthaven co-founder and village philosopher Paul Caron about the origins of Earthaven Ecovillage and the design of our iconic council hall.

A bit about Paul

Well, my name’s Paul Caron. I come from Michigan originally and I’ve moved around quite a lot. My life story is a bit complicated, but for a long time, I had  making a community in mind and mostly the choices I made in my life are to that end.

How Paul helped found Earthaven Ecovillage

OK, so first I came to this area already with starting a community in mind, and I had had been actually thinking about this for a long, long time since I was about 20. That was in the early 80s. And I moved into a community that was already formed, which was up the hill from here, and the vision there was “let’s all buy land together because it’ll be cheaper.”

But I had a different idea. Something more public and more radical. And there were several other people that were more of the page that I was, but because of the way it was set up, there wasn’t a way to actually do what I wanted to do. But we did hike around and there’s a hiking trail that comes through this land goes down the hill around and up the other side. And as we would hike through here, I was like, this place seems like the possible place for this vision and then I met people from Earthaven who were  already formed as a group and they were looking for land. They didn’t own land, but they called their forming group Earthaven.

They had been through several iterations of people and had gone through lots of preparation about the vision and the agreements, which is a good idea if you want to form a community to do all that first. The worst thing to do would be to buy land and then try to figure out what you want to do.

People from the group came and looked at this land and they were somewhat unimpressed because they had seen many pieces of land and they had a pretty strict list of what they wanted and what they didn’t want. One thing that they wanted was cleared land and structures, which this completely isn’t. There was one hunting cabin with only three walls. And what they didn’t want was neighbors that drove through, which we do have. But one thing that they wanted was good bold water. That’s how real estate people talk about streams. We have really nice water here.

They had seen many pieces of land, I don’t even know how many hundreds over a four year period. And they had never found anything that was exactly right. And the group was to a point, I believe,  where if they didn’t do something pretty quick, it was going to dissolve from lack of momentum and not finding that land.

Valerie Naimen, who was kind of the leader of the group, a person who had initiative and also freedom since she had real estate and didn’t have to work a job. So she pretty much led the land search and did a lot of tracking around. That’s why they were able to inspect many, many pieces of  land because they had someone full time trying to find this land.

There was the community next door, some of us who were into the more what you would say, eco-spiritual persuasion. The other people were just more like mainstream work-a-job-living-in-a-house types.  We started having a solstice and equinox round of gatherings that we would do consciously every solstice and equinox, a whole bunch of different people in that group. So it was like a whole weekend concentrated group ritual, you know, a party basically, and learning how to do that, not really trying to follow any particular tradition, but just putting our own ritual together. Well, just about in the middle of that whole thing, I hooked up with Valerie of the Earthaven forming group.

That ritual cycle was extremely magical and a lot of beautiful, intense experiences were had by all. Well right in the middle of that we started negotiating to buy this piece of land. We basically had to convince a group of heirs, so it wasn’t just one person, but it was a group of heirs, some of whom wanted to sell the land, some of whom wanted to keep the land. It had been on the market and then it was off the market and the older heirs wanted to sell it and the younger heirs wanted to keep it.

And so it took a while. But what happened was Valerie actually sold her house and moved into an Airstream on the border of this land on another friend’s property that bordered this land and put down an escrow and made an offer. And she did this personally.

You know, who’s in, who’s out. And also, it’s ten thousand apiece today, it’s 11 tomorrow. And this was very effective. Nine people put up money. This was September 11th of 1994. And by the end of the year, which is when we closed the deal, we had 14 people. And so we put out a big down payment and started buying this land.

Developing the land

So when you folks bought the land and now we have a physical Earthaven not just an idea of that name, but a real life property and people. The first thing to do was to develop the physical infrastructure, roads, bridges, footpaths, buildings, and my understanding is that you have been instrumental in this all along. You’ve been engaged in the spiritual and organizational and every other aspect of life.

And you, Paul, have also been perhaps the first and most significant person working on physical infrastructure. You build roads, you build bridges, you build buildings. So one of the rumors about Earthaven is that you were instrumental in the design of the council hall, our main meeting hall and the design of the whole community center complex. Would you tell us about that?

Yes. So the year before we bought this land, some other land was bought that borders both the community I was in, Rosy Branch Farm, and and this property that was with like minded people that were also friends of mine. And so that ritual cycle that I was saying about before we had the last installment, we did that for two years, so we had eight rituals.

The last installment was done on that other piece of land. And during that time, I started thinking about this whole community complex and I started thinking about a community building. And originally I was thinking post and beam. And mainly my vision was about using peeled poles, round poles, instead of square timbers.

Inventing a system for round-pole timber frame construction

And the thing is, because it’s a juvenile forest here, there’s lots of poplar trees that are about the size of a post and beam, which is about a foot thick or so. But if you cut it into a square post, they’re not big enough yet. But if you use the whole thing round, yes, it’s big enough to make structures out of. And so therefore, I started focusing on a system that would that would be able to do this.

Well, as you can imagine, making mortise and tendon joinery, etcetera on round poles is not the same as on square timber.

And so I had to invent a system. To be able to do it, repeatable cuts, where if things are square, you just measure and everything’s square. Then the other thing is that because in a round pole situation. What the system ended up being, is that the only straight line that you really have is the center line of the round pole.

So if you can put the round pole in a situation where you know where the center line is, like a lathe. then you can measure from that center line and make repeatable cuts and measure angles and do everything. And the other thing with that system is that 90 degrees is no longer a special angle. So you can make post and beam frames that aren’t all square, which is so satisfying to me because I was completely bored with square even numbers and all this, so the first idea I had was a big square timber frame and I mapped out a structural grid for it and everything.

But we had to go through a decision process, a design process to figure out what this big building was going to be our community center where meetings would be.

Well, and just like this is the thing. Valerie had done lots of research into communities and had come up with this fact that exists, which is that people who get a piece of land, if they just go start building houses and figure they’ll build the community center later, they never, never do it.

One of the main agreements that we had in the first was that we would wait to develop individual home sites until a certain amount of community infrastructure was finished. And we thought, well, a year or two we’ll build this community. But anyway, so the first thing we did was,  we surveyed the land. That was the other thing. It was we won’t start building houses until we have a total site plan for the entire property, a permaculture-based site, because several of the founders were permaculture teachers and designers.

Envisioning the community building

And the the intention of the community was to be a permaculture demonstration. So, anyway, what we did was we went out to Hunting Island in the fall. I think it was September or something like that, August, September, late part of the summer, early fall and Hunting Island at that time, I think it’s not that this way anymore because of the hurricanes took the beach away. But when we went there, there was a really wide beach.

And out on that beach, we basically drew in the sand a plan for a building and, you know, walked around in it, figured out how big the rooms have to be, blah, blah, blah, etc.. Well, we got back here and then we drew it all up on paper and then we started talking about it. And there was a crisis of confidence in the group because most of them were not builders and it seemed like too big. Too complex of an idea, and we got, like, paralyzed.

Well, so what happened then was in the meantime, in my mind, I had created this idea of the ultimate meeting hall. So what we were going to do with this other building was have a smaller meeting room that would do for now and some other facilities, office and stuff like that, and so then when we got to this place where we just, you know, it was kind of hard to figure out how to go forward.

Designing the Council Hall

Well, the thing is, we didn’t have any money. We had spent all our money buying the land. I mean, we bought this land for four hundred and twenty and sixty eight thousand dollars plus interest.

Ultimately, I think we paid about 570,000 dollars and we did this in seven years. Yes, it’s actually pretty amazing. But anyway, that’s another whole story. So when we got to this point where we couldn’t decide how to go forward, I brought forth the plan for the ultimate meeting hall, which was a round building, very simple to build, because it only had three parts. It had posts, it had beams. Some of the beams had crisscrossed, you know, diagonal knee braces and some didn’t.

And that was all. And so we cut down a lot of poplar trees and we peel the bark off of them and we made all the parts.

Oh, yeah, 13 posts, so the thing about 13 is that I was bored with even numbers and so 11 was too far, the span between. To divide a circle into 11 was about 11, 12 feet or something like that.

Well, the circle was 30 feet in diameter where the poles were that right? Thirty five, 35. And I think you have said in the past that ergonomics about how people meet in meetings is they need to be able to see each other clearly. Yeah. And so across that much span with chairs put in in from the circle of pillars is about the right amount to still identify people. But you can get the maximum amount of people around the circle.

I believe that I got this from one of the patterns in a pattern language by Chris Rog’s, right where there’s a distance beyond which you can’t recognize the facial expressions of people that well enough to have a meeting.

So anyway, we designed the the circular building based on that. Anyway, so 11 was too big and too far a span between and 15 was too small, so it had to be 13 and that’s what we did.

Well, what happened, my original design had like a… So the circle of pillars goes 15 feet high and it has four feet that sticks above and then beneath. And there’s windows around the upper and then below those windows, a roof goes out to a wider circle, circular wall. But I originally thought it would go all the way around. But then in the committee that we were actually finalizing the design, someone suggested, well, wait a minute, it should have more windows on the south for solar gain.

Yeah. And so and then I was like, oh yeah. So we can just, you know, make the five sections that face toward south be… No, no. And so I call that the wings.

The outer circle of more space outside the pillars around the back, the north and west and east are the wings. Yeah.

Yeah. And actually all the time I actually was thinking of the play of the space as a theater.

Like in theater. In the round. Yeah. Like a dinner theater place where people are having dinner in the wings and looking in the actors doing their act.

Exactly. And so we haven’t done this yet. But we will, we may in your lifetime and mine. We’re going to have theater in there.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I  mention this at every opportunity.

We can keep the dream alive. So we now have this beautiful, beautiful community center called the Council Hall, and it’s largely due to your planning.

Well, yeah, I did plan the thing and I supervised the construction, but I barely did any of the work. I mostly just waved my arms around.

About Earthaven as a demonstration that something else is possible

Well, you have you had visions back then and you helped to manifest your visions with the help of the forestry co-op and before that, just general labor making the council. You have visions not just physical, but philosophical and in other ways for the future of Earthaven too. Would you share that with us?

Well, the thing about the community that I want to make clear, which I also mention at every opportunity, is that this is not just a place for us to have a nice life in the woods. It’s about it being a demonstration so that people in general can get the idea in their head that you don’t have to go on the mainstream path and just do what everybody else is doing, which seems  to be unsatisfactory and seems to be what many people think is their only option because they haven’t been to a place like this or the other ecovillages out there.

And so it’s meant to be a demonstration that something else is possible. Well, the reason why we need something like this is because our mainstream culture is unsatisfactory in certain ways. Basically, the idea of happiness and success is about consumption of luxury goods. Well, this is an elite activity. You can’t have everyone consuming luxury goods. We don’t have enough earth to satisfy the number of people that we have in that way.

The other thing is it isn’t really satisfying. In other words, consumption of luxury goods satisfies you in the moment and then makes you desperate later on because you want yet more. Because what the culture is telling you is buy things, then you’ll be happy. Oh, wait, you’re not happy now. Well, just buy some more.

So, well, the thing is, it’s like people don’t have a model that suggests that there’s some other satisfaction.  It’s like the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness is a well shared cliché, but people don’t think deeply about it and they don’t really believe it because they don’t act on that.

So I think what you are sharing with us is that living a satisfying life in the good company of friends on land you own and control the destiny of and you can fulfill your shared values, tends to bring more happiness than buying yet the latest toy?

Well, yeah, the idea part of our founding documents uses the the phrase “elegant simplicity.” And it basically is the satisfaction of living together, sharing resources, having a common culture which yet allows enough individuality for everyone. I mean, this is a dance that we have to do. It’s basicallythe main process that in reality is going on. That’s the dialectic between the individual and the universal.

So we are doing community activities well. We also need to balance that out with just living our lives.

Yeah, well, and for that reason, we chose not to be an income sharing commune type community.

The economic system here is called independent income. So we just have certain things that we all pay together to have done together and then the rest of our lives are whatever we want to do.

Yes, we each earn a living and save money or spend it or share it or borrow it or loan it as we wish, but we pay dues and fees to Earthaven. We take care of the roads. We take care of the tractor. We take care of the community building. And you know a lot about this. And you’ve helped shape what this place looks like.

Paul’s visions for the future

Once you told me that everywhere you look at Earthaven, you see what could be there and what might be there in the future and what you would like to hope that could be there and that you want to help make happen.

I have visions. I have visions for every part of this land, and they’re not necessary. I mean, you know, it’s all optional. This whole thing is optional. That’s part of the point of it. We were hoping that people can see this and then look in their own lives and go, what options do I have? So it’s not like we’re trying to tell everyone how to do it. Basically, we’re just trying to tell everyone that you can do it.

And you figure out what you need to do. The other thing I say is that ecovillage needs to come to every city block. This is not a rural hippie in the woods type thing. We’re doing this because it was the easiest thing to do when we were doing it.

And, you know, it’s sharing of resources, coming together as a group and deciding how to make our lives better by cooperation.

Thank you for listening

Please visit our website at earthaven.org and sign up for our newsletter so you know what’s happening at the ecovillage. This podcast is produced by Earthaven Ecovillage School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

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Broadcast March 29, 2021
Featuring: Zev Friedman and Diana Leafe Christian

In this podcast, Zev Friedman shares how he started living and teaching permaculture at Earthaven Ecovillage, and then how that led to forming Co-operate Western North Carolina (Co-operate WNC). Along the way, Zev shares examples of different types of permaculture and the work that Co-operate WNC is doing.

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Earthaven is my own personal greatest training ground for cooperative living, because what we’re doing here is mutual aid. So to be able to be here and learn those lessons in a day-to-day way and then apply them to a larger social context has been a real honor and gift.

Hello, everyone, my name is Debbie Lienhart from the School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage. Welcome to the Integrated Living Podcast, where we explore integration within ourselves with the people around us and with the planet. In this episode, host Diana Leafe Christian talks with Zev Friedman.

Hi, Zev.

Hi, Diana, would you please tell us your whole name and introduce yourself as a person here at Earthaven and who teaches for SOIL?

I would be happy to.

My whole name is Zev Hayim Segal-Friedman and I live here in the Hamlet neighborhood at Earthaven. Very happy to say that. And I grew up here in Western North Carolina, one of the few people I know who lives here, over in Silva in Jackson County in a four-acre kudzu patch, where I moved with my parents when I was two years old in 1983. And I’m now running an organization called Co-operate WNC, which is a regional mutual aid network.

What does WNC stand for?

Western North Carolina.

So your organization is Co-operate Western North Carolina.

Right.

And what does it do?

It’s a regional mutual aid network. We coordinate different informal community groups, organizations, and households to cooperate and share resources and knowledge and develop long term relationships for a regenerative future.

So you are a permaculture teacher, you teach it, you design landscapes. You’ve been doing this since before you came to Earthaven in 2013. You’ve taught it here before you moved here.

That’s true. Taught it here since then.

Can you tell us how you moved from teaching permaculture and designing landscapes to Co-operate WNC?

Sure. So we’re going to take about six hours now, right?

No, we’re going to take it a little chunk at a time.

Okay. Yeah, well, to really answer that question, I have to go back to how I got into permaculture itself, because permaculture is really a strategy for me. To meet kind of a long term sense of mission and purpose that I developed in my own life when I was starting around when I was 17, but also with my parents because I grew up in a social activist family and kind of got these values of examining how we are human and what we’re doing here at an early age.

But then when I was about 17, I started to have experiences myself that led me to both witness the beauty of ecosystems and human cultural diversity on the planet and also feel the grief of loss and destruction of those systems and peoples and places. And I began to recognize I wanted to be part of keeping the beauty alive and slowing the destruction down. And so I started seeking then for ways to do that. And permaculture was was the best thing that I came upon.

Why is that? What is it about permaculture? Did its basic principles or practices drew you to it in order to fulfill those values?

Yeah. Well, I think that one thing is I was in the environmental science program at UNC Asheville, and there are all these academic formalized approaches to dealing with environmental problems, and they were very nonintegrated and non-grassroots. And permaculture I came to understand as a very people-owned approach to earth healing and cultural healing, something that we can actually do with community control at a community scale.

Could you tell our listeners the basic what it is, how it works of permaculture to give a basis for where else we’re going to explore in this talk?

There are a lot of different definitions coming from different directions. But one definition I like is from my old mentor, Chuck Marsh, who used to live at Earthaven. He has now passed. He was my business partner too, and his definition was permaculture is a design system for creating regenerative human habitats. And I like that because what that emphasizes is it’s a design practice. It’s a way of looking at any system, whether it’s an economic system or a landscape or a business or a family or a community, and using a certain set of design principles and approaches based in ethics, which people care and earth care and sharing the surplus, and then design that system based on a set of ecological principles.

Could you say more about why people tend to associate permaculture with gardening and give some examples of applied permaculture design in some of the areas you just mentioned?

Yes, well, I think that in the U.S., because permaculture is a global movement and by the way, really closely tied with the agroecology movement, which is more owned by people of color and indigenous people around the world, permaculture has tended to be a pretty white movement. But in the U.S., I think it’s come to be associated with gardening. This is actually related to your original question of why Co-operate WNC and why mutual aid, because we have a very fragmented society in the U.S. and the types of change that we need, in my opinion, to have a really regenerative human future are so deep that most people who are in privileged positions aren’t willing to consider that type of change.

And so gardening, something that’s just a gardening system, is an easier bite to swallow for a lot of people. Oh, I can just change the way I manage plants. But actually, permaculture is about redesigning the entire human approach to life.

So white people in general, in your experience and the experience of permaculture designers in the U.S. Are more willing to look at the oh, let’s garden in a different and better way aspect of permaculture, then all the aspects which you and your colleagues are wanting more people to take a look at.

Yeah, I think so. And because the other aspects ask more challenging questions of us and make deeper transformational demands for our lives and our communities. And so, yes, I think that’s true. And I’ll say, though, that things like the COVID-19 experience that we’ve just been through as a society and other emerging crises are putting some cracks in that and causing more people to consider deeper types of change. So that’s opening up more of a more of a pathway for the kind of social and economic transformation that I think has also been a part of permaculture from the beginning.

Could you give some examples of applied permaculture design, say, first in economic or social realms in the United States. Just pick one and then you could tell us some applied design and then maybe the other, because I’m betting people can picture permaculture-designed gardens, but they may not yet be picturing what you know about.

Yeah, and that’s another thing I’ll say is that is it’s easier for us humans to imagine what we can see. And so that’s another reason why gardening has been the more adopted layer of permaculture. So I do think of the landscape systems as a training ground. If we can see the interconnection between plants and fungi and animals and water systems, it makes it easier for us to think about the interconnections between human communities and so on. So your question examples.

I’ll speak first to kind of a visible, tangible ecological example, one that a lot of home gardeners are working with is if you have chickens or ducks. You can design the system around them where the chickens or ducks are integrated in a run along the edge of your property, for example if you have an invasive plant problem coming in from the edge, you can create a long, skinny run along that edge with fences on both sides.

And the chickens, especially chickens in this case, patrol that and they scratch things up, dig up the roots of the plants that are trying to come in from the edge and can act as a biological control. Then you can plant elderberries and mulberries. In that run, the elderberries and mulberries shade the chickens, which keeps them more comfortable in the summer. They provide fruit for people, they drop extra fruit for the chickens, and then you can put wood chips around the mulberries and elderberries and dig shallow pits so that when heavy rains come, you fill those pits with wood chips inoculated with a certain mushroom species and the rain percolates into those pits, feeds the plants, filters the water, makes edible mushrooms, which also make food more food for the birds.

And so it’s an integrated system that includes animals, fungi, and plants in an interconnected food web that makes more yields and health than any of those things, would alone.

So the combination, which is the permaculture design of this particular home site from invasive plants strategy, not only does that, but it provides you with mulberries, elderberries, edible mushrooms and eggs and chicken meat, if you are an omnivore, and water filtration and you have fun creatures to look at. And the manure that you can use in your compost bins to create compost with.

Thank you for that example.

So then going to a social example, I’ll give one from my own work because that’s what I’m most familiar with. In 2011, we determined that permaculture design classes, which were what a lot of us have been teaching, are these big 16 or 20 day classes that are a big commitment and expensive for people to join. And a lot of people are saying, I can’t sign up for that. So we did a big survey, my colleagues and myself, and took feedback on what would help and people said we need something cheaper and we don’t care about certification.

And so what we actually did, we went back to the drawing board and we said, all right, where are the different groups that could be matched up and make this work? And we came up with was this thing called the Permaculture in Action Class, where we teamed up with land owners who we had done permaculture designs for, and they paid into the class. And then we had teams of 20 people who are enrolled in the class come and do work installations at their projects.

And then we had a team of five apprentices who had been working with us for a year who acted as the crew leaders. So through all of that, the students paid some money, but not as much, and the landowners paid money and the apprentices got a little money and exchanged education. We got paid for the for the work. The landowner got a low cost installation. It worked out for everybody, got a bunch of things done and so I would call an example of the kind of more invisible layers of how permaculture work is done.

But of course, it was integrated with the visible as well, the installation of permaculture systems.

So in this case, as with the chickens and all those yields, mulberries, manure, eggs, no invasive plants, there were multiple benefits from the same well-designed action, the benefit of the land owner getting a permaculture design and work on their home site.

The apprentices got some experience designing and working with people in applying permaculture design. The people who wanted to learn permaculture less expensively and didn’t care about a certification, they just wanted to learn it. They got to do it for less money and then get hands on.

Yes, and the permaculture trainer got income and all kinds of yields.

We actually sat down and listed like 20 different benefits and yields that we received from it at the end of it.

Thank you. Thank you for that example.

Yeah, you’re welcome.

Can you give any other examples, if you wish, of social permaculture design and economic permaculture design?

Well, I think where I’d like to take it, is how we got into Co-operate WNC and the mutual aid work, because you said there’s this thing in systems thinking in which permaculture, by the way, is, of course, sister of or some kind of relative of systems thinking, which everything we just described is systems thinking. It’s not thinking of people or plants or anything as an isolated element. But how does it all work together in a food web?

Well, let me just ask you something before you go to that where you were going. So that our listeners can get a picture of a system, it’s not a thing or an action. It is a collection of things and actions that together give you more as a group or as an individual than you would have had if you had any one individual thing or action. And one example I’d say is our chicken patrollers around the edge of the property. And another example are those apprentices, the landowner and the permaculture students in the permaculture training all benefiting from that design. So it’s applying design to things and actions for great beneficial results to everyone involved.

Yeah, OK. Yeah. And and one of the one of the kind of facets of systems is understanding nested systems, which means which nested means like a like an egg nesting and in, in a nest. But there are different scales of systems that are inside of each other like a common ways to think about it is an organ in my body. My lung is a nest, is a system in itself. It’s also part of my whole body, which is a system.

And then I am part of my family, which is a system and also Earthaven, which is a system, and also the United States and there are other levels between that and so and inside a lung, inside a set of three lungs and trachea are smaller systems, the alveolar system. And the blood exchange system. So little systems are nested inside bigger systems. And the whole thing is a pattern of systems. And for those who look at strange, amazing mathematical art like fractals…

So you were, I think, going to tell us a little bit more about how you came to be fascinated with, intrigued by and wanting to create Co-operate WNC.

Yes.

And and that’s about kind of understanding scale and nested systems, which is that I started to see through my permaculture work that I was saying earlier, there’s this fragmented society in the U.S. And many people unwilling to make the short-term changes that could be called sacrifices that are necessary for a long term kind of wellbeing. And I see that fragmentation as the single biggest barrier to the type of transformative ecological healing and other kinds of healing that we need locally and and at the national and global scale.

And I really came across that in my permaculture work because I was usually working with nuclear families who hired me to do a permaculture design or installation and most of the students in classes, nuclear families and people would learn all these things. But the thing is, permaculture is a multigenerational project. And it’s a human transformation project. And it’s impossible to do as an individual or as a nuclear family in a meaningful way because we’re nested in these systems that are heavily weighted against it at every level. I discovered that I would do a permaculture design for a nuclear family, a couple, and we would come up with this 125 year vision for their property. But then they’re both working full time jobs and their parents live in other states. And besides, they don’t have enough support for their relationship because they’re living on a farm by themselves and all kinds of things in their personal lives would break down in their attempt to even enact something like that.

So I started to see that we needed support systems and a greater set of skills and culture around cooperation to have any chance at enacting the kind of grand vision of permaculture.

So what I take from what you just said is that the example of that couple on the farm by themselves with their parents in other states and they each have a full time job, is that even though they paid for, got interested in and were probably excited about the 125 year plan through multiple generations of how to grow and develop multiple interacting nested systems for higher yield on their farm, they didn’t have the time. They didn’t have the extra people. They didn’t have the other generations.

They couldn’t possibly predict what would or wouldn’t happen in the next 60, 70, 80, 100, 125 years. So without the nested social support system already in place, how can they possibly do that? Permaculture design.

And that’s what you noticed and got you going on this.

Yeah, and then looking around us and at the history of humans and human cultures, what stands out is this. Experiment in nuclear family living, in isolated living, is a very recent experiment. It’s enabled by the industrial revolution and it’s basically failing and having dramatic impact on humanity through.

You can see it through depression, rates of depression. You can see it through all kinds of social breakdown. And so, but alternatively, if you look at the history of cooperation and how we’ve organized ourselves in communities at different scales for for our entire existence as a species, that’s how we survived. That’s how we dealt with the complexity and unexpected twists of life. And so I started studying that. And then I had this one particular visit that was really formative for me. I had the honor of visiting this group of indigenous people in northern Oaxaca, in Mexico and north central Oaxaca, with the Mixteca people in Yukuyoca, which is a village that’s a part of a group of 12 villages with a multi thousand year intact mutual aid culture living in the same place for thousands of years through the Spanish invasion.

And there I got to I was actually there studying kind of agroecology practice, milpa farming. But what I saw, I got more than I bargained for, was that they had this very intact type of cooperation and mutual aid, a whole vocabulary around mutual aid like like the Inuits have around snow, all the words for different snow. These folks have 10 or 12 words for the different organs of mutual aid and they’re in their culture. And one of the things they were doing was they were starting from seeds and planting 700,000 trees a year among this cluster of 12 villages with 75 to 150 people in each village based in their own cooperative financing of the project to reforest this desertified landscape around them that had been created through Spanish logging of the area. And so when I saw that and all the ways they cooperated, not just on farming and agroforestry, but also on taking care of the elderly and the children and training people for schooling and dealing with health issues, I was blown away and I was like, wow, this is a tangible example for me of what mutual aid culture could look like.

That was in early 2017. I came back from that with with a sense of clarity and determination around, I think this is the direction we need to go, in our own place in society.

If I had had that experience, I would have been blown away, too. Did you say 700,000 trees a year, 150 people in 12 villages of all different ages because it’s multigenerational villages?

Yeah, yeah. And they were increasing the rate when I was there, so it’s probably more by now.

So did you see those trees doing what trees do when planted in desert landscapes, which is changing the culture, changing the moisture level and then acting as shade nurse plants for little plants to grow under their shade and then re populate the area with actual growing plants?

Yeah, we could really geek out on that. I saw some amazing things in that regard. Really quickly, it was part of a 30 year farming cycle, land management cycle they had, where they were planting alder and pine trees and then they would grow those for 30 years. Alders or nitrogen fixers, which improve the soil, and then they would cut the trees down and then grow milpa, grow corn, beans and squash, anapolis cactuses, edible cactuses, in those spaces, and agave.

And then after some time, they would come back and plant trees in that same spot. So it was a long-term mosaic of landscape management. And I got to put my arm into the soil in one of the places they had planted 27 years before I was there and there was there was like ten inches of dark black topsoil there, whereas 100 feet to the west there was no topsoil. It was literally limestone with a few cactuses. So I got to see the impact of that planting, it was very impactful.

So you came back to the U.S., fired up with the idea of, OK, what can we learn from this and how can I help this happen?

Yeah, exactly. And I’ve been reading about the history of of cooperatives and mutual aid in the U.S., which is a very grand history for anyone who wants to dig into that. And it’s the birth of the credit union movement in the U.S.. The birth of the unions in the U.S. Came out of mutual aid societies. And I said, wow, there’s a lot here. And specifically around farming and agriculture. There’s there’s a huge history in the U.S. and everywhere of cooperatives in organizing agriculture and organizing farming systems between communities, the Grange in the U.S. is an old mutual aid society that focused on farming. So yeah, and that’s where Co-operate WNC came came from. As I said, let’s make these linkages between the economics and getting beyond nuclear families and the social situation that we’re in, including institutionalized racism. Let’s make the connections between those things and ecological healing earth care and agroecology systems with physical stuff that permaculture does.

Let’s make those connections more visible and more explicit and use cooperation and mutual aid, financial arrangements and grassroots organizing to support the type of long term permaculture work that we that we know we need to do.

What kinds of projects is Co-operate WNC taking on here in this region of Western North Carolina?

Well, we’ve got several really exciting things going on. You know, one of the big things is, we’ve forgotten this stuff as a culture, even about cooperation, so, again, it’s hard to imagine what we can’t see. And so a lot of what we’re doing at this time is some foundational education and training around cooperative history and possibilities and tools and techniques, now serving a lot of educational gatherings, learning circles, we call them. But we do have several programs that are actively doing stuff, including community savings pools development, which is a cooperative financing technique from from New Zealand.

There are variations around the planet. But in this one, 15 to 25 people get together and pool their savings and then make proposal-driven loans to each other for starting a farm or starting a business or paying off debt or paying the down payment on a house, different things like that. So it’s a way of cooperative refinancing stuff.

Does that mean the 15 or 20 people create their own little tiny bank and they are the ones who invest in it and fund it, and they’re the ones who can get a loan from it with each other as the people who help decide which things we’re going to fund. And then when they pay the loan back, they’re more likely to really want to do so because it’s peers and colleagues who loaned them their own money.

Yeah, it’s kind of informally like that. We are using an actual established bank to hold our money, but then it acts that way. We get to choose among ourselves what we lend money to with zero percent interest to. So far we’ve gotten three of them going and including one Earthaven and there’s a staff person, part time staff person who is helping to train people and has developed a training program for that.

And they have over 120 of them going in New Zealand. So we have some mentors over there who we’re talking with and learning from. And so that’s really exciting. And that ties into a lot of this stuff because that was a big barrier I ran into in permaculture work I was doing was, how do you finance all the good ideas? And here’s one way, right? So that’s one of our programs.

Another one is the WNC Purchasing Alliance, which is a cooperative bulk purchasing initiative that is connecting up different organizations and community groups to bulk buy all kinds of things that we need – foods or equipment, environmentally friendly cleaning supplies, farming equipment and supplies to get the costs down, but also to allow us to direct money towards locally owned producers and businesses.

So it’s a powerful way of kind of changing some of the economic dynamics.

So does that mean you’re doing the stacked functions of many different things coming in and many different benefits going out, which is part of permaculture design, as I understand it, so that people are putting money in to helping local businesses provide them with cheaper goods because they’re bulk there, but in bulk, the volume discount and distributing these goods among the very people who’ve been funding this? So they’re buying, but in a group, what they need and helping local businesses?

Yeah. Plus the connection socially of getting to know these other people and finding some friends and colleagues and allies.

Yeah, that’s huge. That last thing is the relationships. And that’s a big summary of everything we’re trying to do is to take things away from the transactional type of of economics that the industrial economy demands of us, where we treat other people or communities like mechanisms for our own devices, like buy and sell.

And we don’t care about you as a person and move that into relational economics, where every economic transaction becomes an opportunity for deepening trust and relating for other types of working together along with the economic transaction.

It sounds like what this is doing is recreating connections between generations and between neighbors, which is maybe how humans used to live before the relatively recent invention of giant cities, suburbia and the nuclear family that you alluded to before, to sew up the ragged sleeve, I’m quoting Shakespeare here, of a frayed sleeve of culture ,to reweave it, it sounds like.

Yeah, I think we are trying to do that.

Well, would you let our listeners know how they can learn from you through soil? I think you do offer various different kinds of classes online and in person through the SOIL organization.

Yes, we’re working together to put several different classes together related to agroforestry and to cooperative agriculture and cooperative organizing. So check out the SOIL website at schoolofintegratedliving.org for that and also for Co-operate WNC. We’re a nonprofit mutual aid network and that’s www.co-operatewnc.org. And check out our programs there and you can sign up for our newsletter as well.

And just one more word on that, which is Earthaven is my is my own personal greatest training ground for cooperative living because because we’re doing it here is mutual aid at different skills and in different ways. And so to be able to be here and learn those lessons in a day to day way and then apply them to a larger social context has been a real honor and gift.

Thank you so much then.

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website at Integratedlivingpodcast.org and sign up for our newsletter so you know when new podcasts are released. You can also browse the School of Integrated Living upcoming online and in-person class offerings. This podcast is produced by the Culture’s Edge School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

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