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We can receive donations directly using any major credit card or your bank account via PayPal (donate to ecovillage at thefarm dot org and specify your greatest interests, or use this handy link:
Your contributions welcome! |
Eco-Iwo by Albert Bates (c) Copyright 1990 by The Book Publishing Company, All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
Where we are planting trees right now:
providing water, food, fuel, peace and hope to the peoples of the Middle East from the peoples of the Middle East $20 from you plants 10 trees! One tree removes 55 pounds of carbon each year, equal to 1100 miles of car travel or 5500 miles in a commercial airliner (assuming 2 passengers out of 200 on the flight). Join Starhawk (USA), Klaudia van Gool (UK) and Murad Alkhufash (PA) 16-30 May 2013 in Marda Village, Salfit, Palestine, for the full Permaculture Design Certification Course
Read about The Palestinian Farmer Who Grows His Own Resistance
and visit out Facebook Site: Marda Permaculture |
Climate FarmingWe are now working with keyline injection of biochar in a compost tea slurry to regenerate degraded soils. Transition InitiativesWe are part of the Transition Towns movement. Our county seat at Hohenwald, Tennessee is the 25th Transition Town in the USA.
We are working with county government, the business community, local charities, and the public to create a resilient and ecologically responsive economic fabric that will endure the turmoil and chaos of The Great Change now underway.
and Climate Change by Albert K. Bates available from and available in Kindle from |
Now Sponsoring
Culture Change,
the Sail Transport Network and an international plastics ban protecting the Pacific Gyre while trying to outlaw BPA. 2014 STN-Pedal Power Produce wish list Equipment and materials: |
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Climate Farming and Financial Permaculture
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We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered. M. King Hubbert, 1983 |
 The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times
by Albert K. Bates now available in Kindle from |
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Institute program areas over the past decades have included research into food and energy applied sciences towards the end of improving food security and reducing climate-altering dependence upon fossil fuels; using improved communications methodologies for demonstrations of alternative economic and social experiments; and multidisciplinary research into mechanisms for narrowing the gap between the developed and developing world without undue negative cultural and environmental impacts. |
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Our focus is on a convergence of renewable energy, environmental building, sustainable agriculture, biological wastewater systems, community conflict resolution methodologies, holistic community planning, permaculture design, experiential education, natural capital economics, ready access to global information, and a host of emerging modalities for systemic social improvements. We have received numerous awards and frequent recognition for this work, which has always been at the leading edge of systemic social change, but we continue to rely principally on grassroots support in the form of donations to pursue these efforts.Working in Fundraising? Take a look at our project proposal and reports for Womens Training in Sustainable Community Development in Ecuador |
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The Institute's principal work in the late 1970s related to the transportation sector. Working under a series of contracts with the U.S. Department of Energy, The Institute performed groundbreaking work on concentrating photovoltaic arrays, low cost, long-distance electric and hybrid vehicles, and multi-fuel heat engines. This work led to the inception of the Solar Car Corporation of Melbourne, Florida and Groton Connecticut. SCC went out of business in the late 1990s, a victim, like the Tucker, of being too far ahead of its time. With a capitalization of less than $10 million, SCC lacked the financial ability to combat the conjoined forces of industry and government which quickly arrayed against it, despite a vastly superior product that correctly foresaw fundamental shifts in transportation demands. |
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Other applications coming our of the solar car research included 1 kw solar (dish) Stirling and rotary turbines; direct current-powered compact air conditioning; solar powered electric watercraft; and trough concentrator arrays for solar water heating. |
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What is new today is a merging of all these disparate threads into a holistic vision for the future.
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How fast do bacteria replicate in presence of food? Every 20 minutes. One bacterium in 72 hours with infinite food supply would weigh more than the planet Earth. What stops that from happening? The absense of food. What will stop the human population from overrunning the planet? The absense of food. We are poised at the cusp of a Malthusian correction. Our goal is to develop and disseminate a method of agriculture that supplies our food in an ethical way, which also means being a positive force in the climate equation, building healthy future soils and promoting biodiversity. We want to heal the planet from the abuses of our careless predecessors. When some part of a growing plant dies, it drops material high in protein, which is food for the soil decomposers. That food becomes bacterial and fungal biomass. The N is tied up. The C is tied up. Bacterial and fungal bodies are eaten by nematodes and microarthropods which release the nitrates (soluable) and ammonium (gas) fertilizers in their wastes. If you can fix those nutrient flows you can eliminate the need for fertilizer. Healthy organic soil systems do this, and can more than double yields in the first growing season they are applied. Mother Nature takes soluable nutrients and changes them into biomass. Biological processes decompose the biomass and use metabolic wastes to make soluable nutrients to fuel the next round of the cycle. Humans are Gaia's tool for taking plant waste — free oxygen — and turning it into plant food — CO2. In a healthy system, it all goes around, is not shuffled off to form toxic burdens on the atmosphere or ocean, but merely replenishes its own needs. This is not rocket science.
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With the Peoples Republic of China we have been exploring a legal system of standards for ecovillage design. It is an inconvenient truth that all proposals or efforts to slow global warming or to move toward sustainability are serious intellectual frauds if they do not advocate reducing populations to sustainable levels at the local, national and global scales. Albert Allen Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado
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 The USA and China are like two drinking buddies staying at the bar until closing time. They will drain every last drop of petroleum (and other natural resources) that they can get their hands on. What happens next is not even remotely on their minds. Everything they are doing is for the sake of keeping the binge going.
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Did you know that the urban habitat crisis could be solved by allowing people to grow their own houses?In the 1970s the Institute began research into fast growing plant species that could serve multiple purposes even while providing residential building materials for an expanding world population. Our experimental hybrid poplar and chestnut plantations are now more than 20 years old. Our tree varieties, including Tennessee's own state tree, the Tulip Poplar are able to process wastewater and reclaim severely eroded landscapes. Today we have more than 20 varieties of temperate bamboo growing at our Ecovillage Training Center, and more than 200 varieties under study at the nearby Earth Advocates Research Center for size, growth rates, temperature tolerance and other characteristics. We like bamboo as a cultivatible architecture. Only 500 square meters are needed to grow one house in one year, about the size of a typical U.S. living room. |
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In 1983 The Institute financed the creation of a food sciences laboratory which, in cooperation with the USDA, experimented with a number of soyfoods and other ecologically secure ways of feeding the world. In 1985, the food science laboratory was transferred to a community business, the Tempeh Lab, which today is one of the world's largest suppliers of soy fermentation inoculants.
In the mid-1980s The Institute also created a forest research program to identify ways to give standing forests greater commercial value than saw timber and residential subdevelopments. That effort created another commercial enterprise for the local community, Mushroompeople, which is one of the nation's largest mail order suppliers of specialty mushroom spawn and growing supplies.
Throughout its history, it has been a goal of the Institute to serve as a living laboratory for developing, incubating, and showcasing new technologies. The Institute provides the scientific and technical expertise that advances new ideas from paper to practice, and builds and tests prototypes in the real world, in combination with other technologies which affect overall performance. Once an idea is proven to work, the Institute takes it to the stage of commercial viability. |
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Plenty's Kids to the Country Program at the Ecovillage Training Center is now in its 16th year in bringing underprivileged children from low income housing and homeless shelters to a summer vacation of horses, hikes and swimming holes. |
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Consulting with schools such as Witts University (Johannesburg), Cal Poly Pomona and Berea College (Kentucky), we are designing new "green campus" population centers to steer universities into the transition to sustainability. |
The Institute sponsors the Western Hemisphere hub office of the Global Ecovillage Network, guided the formation of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, and is engaging in many other efforts to foster the expansion of the sustainable community movement worldwide. The Institute's program partners include the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, Seoul National University's Sustainable Urban Development program in Korea, Sortavala in Russia, the Green Kibbutz Movement in Israel, Los Angeles EcoVillage, The Tholego Development Project in South Africa, Luna Nueva in Mexico, the Institute for Latin American Permaculture in Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela and Peru, Reserva Sasardi, the Institute for New Frontiers in Cooperation, Builders without Borders, the United Nations Best Practices program (ECOSOC), Context Institute, Plenty International, Permaculture Institute of Peru, Grupo de Apoyo al Sector Rural, Aztlan Centro De Rescate Ecologico, Ecoaldea en Huehuecoyotl, Asociacion Gaia, Ecovillage Network of Canada, Comunidade Tribal Vale Encantado and ABRASCA (Brazil), the emerging ecovillage communities in Unguia and the Sasardi Reserve in Colombia, the Permaculture Institute of Brazil, Fundacion Darien, 7 Generaciones (Uruguay), La Caravana Arcoiris para la Paz, and many more. Global Village Video is a subsidiary production company which produces instructional tapes and dvds on a variety of subjects. |
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Consider a Bequest
Many of us choose to give to charity on a regular basis or to leave a bequest of money or property as a final gift. These kindnesses merge to create power for good in the world. If you would like to consider such a gifting, please examine a paragraph suitable to insert into your testimentary bequests. US residents can now make unlimited charitable contributions from their IRAs and 401(k) plans. The possibility that there will a $1 million estate-tax exemption, plus a higher tax rate, in two years makes a compelling case for spreading wealth around now.
The governing body of the Institute is a five-person board, consisting of:
It shall be the policy of this organization that no discrimination shall exist toward any person, employee, member, or guest in any program, privilege, activity or facility of this organization on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, physical handicap, or national or ethnic origin.
— Article Six of our charter, November, 1974.
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From our crafting of a trike for an orphan of the 1974 earthquake in San Andrés Itzapa Guatemala has now come 
To provide owner-built homes for the 100,000,000 people now without adequate housing, the area needed to grow bamboo for one year is less than the area annually being clearcut in the Caribbean rainforests of Belize, Honduras and Colombia each year!
Today, the Institute's principal work relates to the creation of a prototype 
