The first leg of The Plan is the institution of a Permaculture system. Here are two definitions of permaculture:
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The design, installation and maintenance of indefinitely sustainable human communities set in balanced ecologies, both urban and rural.
- Any system of sustainable agriculture that renews natural resources and enriches local ecosystems.
An indefinitely sustainable human community, for us, breaks down into:
- shelter
- power
- water
- food
The second definition listed above is interesting to us because of the phrase renews natural resources. We want to cover all of the above bases, while actually improving the ecosphere we’re coming into.
Earthships:
- Provide shelter
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Provide their own power:
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They are solar passive and operate on thermal mass principles, meaning that even in quite extreme climate conditions the internal temperature is constantly between 16.5 and 19 degrees. This almost or entirely eliminates the need for fuel expenditure for warmth or cooling.
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They are designed to incorporate solar panels to power electrical devices.
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Provide their own water through rainfall catchment from the roof; this water is then used once for drinking, showering, washing, cooking, once for watering plants in the greenhouse and outside (grey water), before being used a third time for flushing waste (black water);
- Have a greenhouse running the length of the construction to provide growing space for food.
In addition, Earthships reuse tyres and cans, waste products, and thereby clean up the environment around them.
Other things which are Earthships have going for them:
- They make use of rammed earth, a locally available resource
- In principle, they can be built by an owner-builder with a minimum of technical expertise
There is no doubt that an Earthship-type design is an incredibly elegant solution for what we want to do, and we are in total awe of what the Earthship people have achieved and are achieving. However, we do have a couple of reservations. These are:
- Earthships still require a lot of cement, plastic (for waterproofing), and petrochemical-based rigid insulation. We are not “romantic environmentalists”, who will refuse to build a dwelling if it’s not 100% sustainable. However, because we believe that the days of easily available plastic and cement are ending, and because item 3 of our mission statement is about educating others (hopefully into the plastic, cement-free future), we would prefer (insofar as it is feasible) to start off as we mean to continue: that is to say, we’d prefer to build with things we know will be around indefinitely: locally made, energy-efficient, renewable materials. We don’t yet know if it’s possible to build a well-insulated (wool? strawbale?), structurally sound (adobe? cob?), waterproof (???) Earthship without these things, but we really hope it is; and (without wanting to be arrogant) if it can be done but hasn’t yet, we’d like to get the doing of it onto the Earthship agenda.
- On a more personal level, we know already that most if not all of the funds we hope to have at our disposal will go into buying land. In the second Earthship book, Michael Reynolds suggests that the way to go about building Earthships is “out-of-pocket”, gradually building over time as funds are available, and we agree. Because we lack funds for labourers and materials, we’re looking at self-building, and freecycling a lot of our building materials. All this takes time, effort, and community-building. We’re very happy to invest those things in the process, but in the meantime, we’ll be living in temporary accommodation for (potentially) many years. If we organise that temporary accommodation badly, we might end up using a generator for heat and to power machinery, buying in our food (and, worst case, water) externally because all our available time and energy is taken up either by building or by working to finance building, and doing most of the heavy lifting ourselves – we’ve read about many a relationship foundering on the kind of long days and physical labour we’re talking about, particularly if there’s nothing but a tent to go home to at the end of a gruelling day.
The more we think about it, the more we believe that a small, comfortable, quickly, cheaply and easily built, relatively sustainable, well-insulated structure which can serve as a temporary dwelling is an absolutely necessary part of what we want to do.
In providing a near-immediate shelter solution, this structure will give us the freedom to get other, equally essential bases covered, so that the Earthship process can unfold with those systems already in place.
We expect the land we’re going to be able to afford to be remote, and entirely unserviced. That being the case, three things in particular which strike us as vital to do early are:
- establish a permaculture food forest
- start a biogas / heat-producing compost heap a la Jean Pain
- sort out rainfall catchment, even on a temporary basis
Just to be clear, the aim in the medium term is absolutely to build an Earthship. But at this stage, we think that the first structure we’ll build on our land will be a Superadobe structure.
Superadobe buildings are the brainchild of Nader Khalili, the founder of Cal-Earth. His work has its foundations in fast-to-build, economical, non-expert-buildable, earthquake-proof emergency housing. The basic premise is that you fill a long (plastic) bag with tamped earth or sand garnered locally, and build it up in courses with barbed wire between the courses to reinforce the structure. You end up with something like a giant upside down coil pot, constructed on a catenary curve, which forms a dome. From this starting point you can construct subdomes as you need or want them.
Left unplastered, the superadobe bags will get damaged by UV from sunlight, which will affect the structural integrity of the building after a couple of years. If they are plastered with adobe, however, superadobe structures are incredibly durable.
The food forest
The other major element of our proposed permaculture system is the growing element. We’ve done a lot of research into Permaculture food forests, water management techniques (swales etc), animal partnerships, aquaponics, no-dig gardening, topsoil creation, the list goes on. The idea is to end up with a garden (and, to some extent, animals) that would still be alive, self-supporting, and providing abundant food if you walked away and left the property for months or years. We plan to have our food forest well established within a year of taking possession of land.
We’ve already started here in Holland with a no-dig garden – some might claim we have developed an unhealthy obsession with horse poo. To those, we say “neigh!”.
