Good news at Lammas re building control

from the Lammas newsletter:

It seems that there may be a solution emerging in the stand-off between Tir-Y-Gafel residents and Pembrokeshire County Council Building Control department.

Following much work from both sides, on Monday 23rd January at Haverfordwest Magistrates Court the Council agreed that Paul and Hoppi Wimbush (of plot 6) were now fully compliant with Building Regulations and all charges against them were dropped.

Schedules of works for the other two plots with legal charges against them (Simon Dale and Jasmine Saville of plot 7, Katy Taggart and Leander Wolstenholme of plot 2) have been agreed and should residents adhere to the timescales (aiming for resolution of all outstanding issues by May 2012) then the Council has indicated that charges against these two families will also be dropped.

It was recognised in Court by the Council that the Lammas project is pioneering new ground and that special consideration was required in how Building Regulations were applied to low-impact development given the use of raw natural materials and innovative solutions being adopted by such projects.

Great! common sense at last...

A Gentle Revolution

"Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong." (Lao Tzu)

Amidst all the trouble and turmoil in the world, there's a gentle revolution that’s been growing for a long time.  I guess it’s a personal individual revolution for all involved, for me it’s about:

Respect for all life and all things.

Developing our intuition, thinking for ourselves and making our individual choices inspired by a global understanding – no more “us and them”, just “us”.

Going against the flow, peacefully: giving as little energy as possible to all the top-down power structures we have allowed:  the corporatocracy, the religions and all those authorities who tell us what to do, to think, to buy... The only sensible progress is going to be made from the roots up. 

Earth profit, does the Earth profit in anyway from having us humans around?

Frugality – there’s an extraordinary period ahead as we move into a world of less and less abundant and more expensive energy and materials. The more frugal we are the more resilient we will be and the easier it will be to recreate local abundance and share our Earth’s resources fairly.

Access to land – you don’t have to own it! Farmers and growers, particularly those operating on a small scale, really need your help and you can share in the harvest. Or do some guerrilla gardening on your local waste land.

Quality – and another thing... here comes a rant... I’m so fed up of the general poor quality of the stuff people are conned into buying, eg furniture that is made so shoddily out of such poor materials that it can barely hold together long enough to be taken to the skip. I fixed up a chest of drawers yesterday that was probably made fifty years ago and is now good for another fifty – how much of that chipboard and MDF rubbish will last that long? It just isn’t repairable or fit for its purpose, in fact its just crap.

Open mindedness – looking for the potentially positive in unexpected places – I’m surprised at how dismissive some people are of some of the phenomena I’ve experienced myself, energy work such as homeopathy, distant healing, working with the body’s energy, chi kung and so on. Our understanding of the world is continually developing, nothing is fixed, yesterday’s magic is tomorrow’s technology.

Working together effectively involves a deep inner journey towards a deeper understanding of ourselves and how we relate with others, understanding the influences that shape our lives, family life, astrological influences. If you have the opportunity to do any inner work, like CranioSacral Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Shamanic work - grab it and grow.I've seen enough projects flounder because of clashing personalities.

And don't forget to have fun!

INTUITION

I’ve realised recently what good advice my intuition has been giving me all my life, a shame I haven’t listened to it very often. It’s as if there’s been two forces acting on me, the pressure to conform to expectations and the status quo’s definitions of success, worthwhile ways to spend your time, the world of competition, materialism and consumerism – the other force is that inner voice gently insisting that all that stuff is bollocks. Now I’m wondering if intuition and the development of a global awareness go hand in hand. I have a vision of a world where we have an intuitive insight into what’s going on for everyone in the world and for all forms of life and make our own decisions about what to do with our time based on that global understanding.
If you feel something similar why not join in with the Thursday Group this evening.

The Way of the WWOOF

If you want to explore the eco world, volunteering is an excellent starting point. I don't know of a better way of getting to know people than working with them. It's easy to get going, the best known eco volunteering organisation probably being the excellent WWOOFing network, (used to be Willing Workers On Organic Farms now Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms), with over 500 active hosts in the UK and a worldwide network beyond that. It's a long established organisation and works well. The deal is that you help the hosts, typically on a small farm doing organic and other interesting stuff in return for your board and lodging. You meet some very interesting people and can experience varying degrees of low-impact living. It's good to have a useful skill or two to offer, obviously experience with plants is useful but your hosts may be glad of other skills as well. I always end up doing woodwork on projects and often give therapy treatments for sore backs etc.

Student volunteers working on Nigel and Cassie's roundhouse at Lammas, 2009

Lammas again, fresh air washing up - the plate rack was blown away later...

Nigel and Cassie's roundhouse looking good two years later

I'm very interested in how people can learn to cooperate and in alternatives to the harsh unreality of growth at all costs economics, so have been very interested to visit and work at various communities and cooperative ventures. If that interests you too, the Diggers and Dreamers site is a good way in to this world, it's how I found Chickenshack and went on to work with Steve Jones of Sector39 fame. Having also visited the Crab Apple Community at Berrington Hall and the community at Canon Frome Court I have to say I admire what all those people are doing but it's not for me! mainly because of the lengthy meetings of the decision making process. I struggle to stay focused on what people are saying for any length of time being much more of a practical person. (The decision making process is different here at Treflach - more about that in another post soon).
One of the most interesting places I've worked at is the Lammas Eco Community - it was also the most challenging! I arrived there, over two years ago now, just at the beginning of three weeks of very wet and windy weather. Back then it was really hard core, a sort of cross between a building site, a refugee camp and a failed squat, all flapping tarpaulins, mud and cold. I almost turned tail and headed off that first night, I'm really glad I stayed though, it was great experience for low-impact building of roundhouses etc. and I have some great memories, like reading stories to Nigel and Cassie's kids by the light of a wind up torch and a candle inside a yurt swaying from side to side in a storm. Volunteers have put in a huge amount of energy into this wonderful project and made an important contribution for which the Lammas residents are always very grateful, as are all the other hosts I've worked with.
So if you have the time and are interested why not treat yourself to a volunteering adventure this year!

A chance to visit beautiful places too, Ben Lawers from Tombreck on Loch Tay, Perthshire

!! HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012 !!

Best wishes and good luck to all of us who are exploring a lighter way to live together on the planet - may the winds of change blow us towards deeper friendships and deeper understanding.

2012 - Year of Transformation?
The pace of change seems to be speeding up alright - and ideas spread around the world in an instant. Maybe this is the year we realise we must look after the Earth for her to continue to nourish and support us - and we learn how to do that as one.

photos from joanocean.com

Do check out the Joan Ocean site, this lady has been swimming with dolphins for many years and believes they have an awareness of dimensions beyond our familiar world - they don't fight a lot either do they?

...and they're more evolved than us - they're mammals who've returned to the sea...

They know how to access multiple dimensions. This means they are simultaneously experiencing life in the ocean and life in an ontological world of multi-level subtle realities. As they swim with me, I am often fascinated by their ability to be wonderful three-dimensional physical friends, while they also interact with vibrational holograms that take them to fourth and fifth-dimensional worlds. They serve as inspirational examples to us of the possibilities existing beyond our present belief systems.

They know how to access multiple dimensions. This means they are simultaneously experiencing life in the ocean and life in an ontological world of multi-level subtle realities. As they swim with me, I am often fascinated by their ability to be wonderful three-dimensional physical friends, while they also interact with vibrational holograms that take them to fourth and fifth-dimensional worlds. They serve as inspirational examples to us of the possibilities existing beyond our present belief systems.

They know how to access multiple dimensions. This means they are simultaneously experiencing life in the ocean and life in an ontological world of multi-level subtle realities. As they swim with me, I am often fascinated by their ability to be wonderful three-dimensional physical friends, while they also interact with vibrational holograms that take them to fourth and fifth-dimensional worlds. They serve as inspirational examples to us of the possibilities existing beyond our present belief systems.

Treflach Farm, November 2011

Misty sunrise

I've had a busy few weeks since starting to work at Treflach Farm, doing a lot of woodwork amongst other farming stuff. There's always loads to do, frames and doors to fit, ceilings to be insulated and panelled, a kitchen to fit... It's good to be doing plenty of practical stuff and very interesting to be doing it at Treflach where we are actively working on transition solutions. We have an engineering workshop on the farm and will be making space for a woodwork area too. Farmer Ian is interested in making things as well and has an engineering background - I'm sure we'll come up with some great ideas. I'm really enjoying working with everyone on the farm - what a great team!

The same morning a bit earlier

 The piece of land where Ruth and I were planning to build our yurt-in-a-polytunnel-rocket-powered home is a sea of mud at the moment since being dug up for some recent cable laying so we haven't even made a start with that. Friends of mine in Scotland, Alex and Mick, who kindly put me up for a few great days on my way down from Perth - see Bronze Age in the Borders - lost their polytunnel during Hurricane Bawbag a couple of weeks ago which made me think that the whole idea needs a rethink anyway. Ah well, I'm learning not to keep my ideas too fixed - as John Lennon said, "Life's what happens when you're making other plans."

Busy green woodworking session at Treflach on the October Permaculture design course - what a great experience that was!

Walking the low-impact talk - Access to land

ANOTHER NEW CHAPTER!
From November Ruth and I will be exploring low-impact life for real, living in a yurt and caravan combination based at Treflach Farm. Ian Steele, farmer at Treflach, has been very friendly and helpful while we have been running Permacuture courses at the farm over the last year so I'm looking forward to working with Ian and all the others there. It's an amazing three years plus since I started making my yurt in the garden at Debi's house near Brighton (making the thing turned into an epic Icelandic Saga all of its own, check out some of the many posts about it here, here, here, here and here), so it will be truly wonderful to be using it at last. There's lots of stuff we want to explore, like putting the yurt inside a polytunnel so we can get some solar gain and put lots of insulation on the outside of the yurt without it getting soaked. I want to try out Lucia stoves and a rocket stove/thermal mass combination rather than the usual log-burning variety and we'll be growing some food of course. I'd like to try using a fan to take warm air from the top of the polytunnel down into a thermal mass store under the yurt .... and lots more .... will be getting in touch with some of the great eco-boffin types I've met for advice on developing all that stuff.
ACCESS TO LAND
We have the sort of arrangement which I hope will help many other people gain access to some land in this transitional phase, swapping some work on the farm in return for living space - so I feel it's all an important as well as fascinating process. Farms will inevitably have to use more human labour as we are all forced sooner or later to make the transition away from oil dependency. I feel Treflach will be an excellent place to be as the farm is already confronting transition issues and adopting Permaculture principles. I think access to land is the key for peoples' future security, in cities as well as out in the countryside, and learning to live a simple land based life as much as possible, regenerating local Earth capital and abundance instead of being a consumer-unit cog in a global Earth-destructive corporatocracy. I hope some of the solutions we develop in the farm will help people everywhere.

Permaculture Design at Treflach Oct 2011

This was Sector39's third Permacuture Design Course at Treflach and what a wonderful event it turned out to be. I felt I already knew everyone on the course when I met them - extraordinary feeling! Our team has been working together for a while now and the day's programme rolls along like well oiled machinery; Richie, Kev and Ruth and on the cooking, Steve, endlessly passionate teacher and knowledgeable on all aspects of sustainable living (difficult to get him to stop for meals sometime in fact...)
Steve also organises visits to interesting projects and people, while my role is to get the day started with  a Tai Chi/Chi Kung/Energy Work session in the mornings and to help out generally with anything that crops up from getting the compost loo "going" to treating a headache here and there. I also gave some lectures on the course on patterns in nature, people patterns and on design - this last one with reference to guitars, eg the Fender Telecaster, a fascinating tale and lovely to be able to share it. The course is after all a design course and studying how guitars have evolved shows brilliantly how the process works.
As well as all that, we had an ongoing Green Woodworking practical run by Richie and Kev and a teepee and two yurts on site, with music sessions late on into the night round a fire in the teepee. It's a packed programme alright.
Treflach is a family farm managed by Ian Steele and his parents, they are always tremendously welcoming and appreciative of any help we give. At the end of the day the course is all about our transition away from fossil fuels towards a life which respects and regenerates the Earth; it feels good to be part of that process and to see previous PDC students' ideas already being put into practice on the farm. I haven't processed any of my photos for ages but Ashley from the course has put a wonderful album together which you can see here: Ashley's photos - really worth a look, he takes photos from the heart and the album really captures the people and feel of the course.

A Permaculture year with Sector39

From November I'm moving on from Steve's flat in Llanrhaedr-Ym-Mochnant to live and work from Treflach Farm. I've had a fascinating time since August 2010 working with Steve helping to develop Permaculture courses and projects and learning all the time about Permaculture and sustainable living. Steve is exceptionally well informed and thoughtful, passionate about his work and has been a wonderful inspiration for me and the many students we have had on the courses and people we have worked with on projects such as the Cwm Harry community garden. I'm very keen to keep working with Steve, Sector39 is an excellent team now, the last course ran like clockwork and was a wonderful experience for me just as much as the students - one of them was kind enough to say that it was the best and most informative educational experience of his life. But it's becoming more and more important to me personally to adopt sustainable, low-impact living principles in my everyday life so I am moving to live and work from Treflach Farm, more about all that here.  Interesting that the world situation is heating up so much just as I make the move... will we tackle the real issues before they tackle us?

Raised Bed Season

It seems to have been Raised Bed Season recently - last time I was up in Scotland I helped a couple of my friends make beds for their gardens only to find that Steve had got an order for 800 beds when I got back down South. It's all been very interesting...
Steve Jones, Sector39 colleague Richie and I worked out a prototype for our customer, who was an enthusiastic student on a Sector39 Permaculture Design Course recently, "Steve! You're blowing my mind!" he is reported to have said. Using some guitar making knowhow, I made a jig to assemble the beds and then a team of us got together to complete the order. I found making the prototype and the jig really interesting but have to say the mass production side of the project just confirmed for me my intuition from way back in the 1970's that I want as little as possible to do with mass production... To me it has a de-humanising effect on people, tasks are broken down so that they take as little skill as possible, there's pressure to work as quickly as possible leading to pressure on quality and I have misgivings about all the transport we've got involved with. All the same they are really good, robust beds made from naturally weather-resistant larch and make the garden centre offerings look like so much junk. They're being sold as Radnor Raised Beds (site under construction) and will be well worth checking out if you're developing your food growing potential at home.
It is interesting that all of a sudden these different people have felt the need to start growing some food, I think they are at least partly responding to world change at a sub-conscious level, which is a nice lead to another post I'll be writing soon on the subject of Intuition.

Stop Believing, Start Perceiving

We're awash with opinion, articles, news and it's very easy only to read the stuff that confirms your current beliefs. I've been trying out the idea of not believing anything and I'm finding that it really helps. I think of my current understanding of the world, life etc as just that - an understanding which needs constant input and tweaking. There seems to be a lot of really shallow stuff out there, for example here's three articles on the same subject, Shale Gas, one from the Financial Times: which is all for Shale Gas exploitation. If you read it and believe it you'll probably think all our problems are solved. But then if you go on to read the Oil Drum or George Monbiot on the same subject you might wonder why such a worthy organ as the FT has printed such an un-informed and under-researched load of rubbish... Let's draw our information from wide and far and keep our minds open to fresh understanding. Is there an Ultimate Ttruth anyway?

kilowatt hour possible base for currency?

Just an idea I had the other day, but why not use an energy unit, eg the kilowatt hour, as a base for currency? It could work locally or nationally, would be just the same all over the world and wouldn't need big piles of gold stashed away anywhere. And what exactly are the dollar, pound, euro etc based on at the moment? The kilowatt hour has got to be better than ever-thinning fresh air....

its a while since the pound in your pocket was based on on a fixed weight of gold...

Urban Permaculture Inspiration at RISC

Please pass this on to anyone you know in the Reading area who might be interested. It's going to be an inspirational day at a fascinating venue, the forest food garden planted on a city roof at RISC. More at the Sector39 website here.

oh dear...

FTSE graph from the Financial Times

Maybe we'd get on better if we focused on re-building Earth capital and people capital.

Craig's mountain send off

 The death of one of my oldest and best friends, Craig, has been a real shock. I was able to go to Craig's service and for a walk up one of the Perthshire hills with his friends and family in his memory which really helped me to deal with the loss. I've been up the hill, Ben y Vrackie, "The Speckled Hill", many times with Craig and friends before as its so near Perth and also because its such a great walk, with lots of variety on the walk in. The climb itself isn't too much of a slog and the hill itself is a beautiful shape, a real little mountain at just under 3000ft. We were treated to perfect weather and fantastic views, a wonderful send off for the man. My friend Stone and I walked over to the hill's second peak - looking back at the tiny specs of our friends gathered below the summit lots of thoughts went through my mind, how short our lives are on the mountain timescale and how friendship can transcend the human life span.

Thinking long...

Sustainability? Does that mean patching everything up and squeezing our planet dry of its resources so we can carry on living our industrial society way of life for another few years? Or does it mean making a transition to a way of life that can be supported by the planet's resources indefinitely? Surely we should be thinking not just a few years ahead but thousands of years - isn't it just common sense?

Around Beauly

Just a few photos from around Beauly for fun, I'm up here for a few days with Laura and her boyfriend Chris.

a fine Beauly skyline

looking East towards Inverness from above Beauly

I'm not exactly sure why, but to me this is just typical of a Scottish Highlands village, the stone building, the traditional sash & case windows, heavy-duty door, the simple garden ...

and everywhere around Beauly there's lots and lots of wonderful trees

I can't help wondering how Scotland will fare as we inevitably make the transition towards sane living - people up there have several things in their favour, water, space and a long history of inventiveness. I reckon Wales and Scotland will be two of the best places to be in the near future... well they already are!

Anyone who wants power shouldn't have it

All the uproar in the media and the government at the moment just reminds me of a pack of ghastly spoiled children, all screaming, bullying and cheating each other behind their backs, and all the time our environmental systems, social systems, food production, world finances are creaking at the seams ready to burst. What chance is there that these people, in the pocket of big business, will ever do anything constructive about the dire state of our world? Exactly, fuck all.
Is it a case of wicked them and good little us though? I don't think so, there's only us, and we're all to blame for having these arseholes in control and for the mess we're in. So what to do? Here's some ideas:
GO LOCAL get involved with local people and projects, they're the people you're going to be working with in the future. Help to build up local skills, resources and resilience. Help to grow food locally - check out what we're doing at Cwm Harry. And come on a Sector39 Permaculture course! Our courses are all about local solutions for world problems.
GO FRUGAL cut down on your energy usage and other inputs - the less you need the more resilient you are. Learn how to use hand tools, buy as little as possible, get good quality stuff that lasts and can be repaired. I get so annoyed with the crap furniture for sale these days, chests of drawers that are barely able to hang together long enough to be taken to the skip - what a waste of energy, time and materials.
GO GLOBAL we're all connected, the choices we make and the stuff we're complicit with to keep us in oil and winter strawberries has an effect on people all over the world - read, think, talk about it.
...and above all, don't bother waiting for the bunch or arseholes we have in power to sort things out for you, they haven't a clue how to and they don't really have any control.

Urban Permaculture in Reading

How many edible roofs do you know of?
The inspiring RISC roof garden is now mature and giving lots of produce. This one day event with Sector39 will show you the permaculture principles behind it and help you to see similar opportunities that you can take in your own locality - opportunities for growing food and in many other areas of daily life.
More about Sector39 and Forest Gardening
More about RISC - Reading International Solidarity Centre

The Storm Clouds Gather...

A couple of clips from The Oil Drum - a good source of in-depth, reasoned comment, well worth checking out if you don't already know about it:
A new paper by NASA’s James Hansen suggests that immediate and drastic declines (ca. 6% annual) in industrial CO2 emissions are required to avoid catastrophic climatic destabilization. As no realistic political solution exists for such immediate CO2 reduction, prospects for a livable future have now become dependent on a single back-breaking option: rapid global economic collapse. And in ‘Deus ex machina’ style, we may get it just in time.

...and this from Richard Heinberg, also in The Oil Drum:
At the core, though, all of these uprisings are about the simultaneous failure of modern economics and modern politics—even though systems differ somewhat from country to country. People in all of the nations mentioned have one thing in common: crushed expectations. Economists and politicians have promised jobs and growth, but instead citizens are seeing spreading unemployment, rising food and energy prices, and increasing economic inequality. Nowhere are there realistic prospects for a political remedy to worsening economic conditions. Thus, while unrest seems destined to spread and intensify in the months and years ahead, it has no clear long-term strategy or goal.