Experience from Cristine Jones

In addition to enhancing nutrient availability, carbon performs many other functions in soil, including the maintenance of soil porosity, aeration and water-holding capacity.

Glenn Morris (Morris 2004) extensively researched the water holding capacity of humus (an extremely stable form of soil carbon) and concluded that within the soil matrix, one part of soil humus could, on average, retain a minimum of four parts of soil water.

From this relationship it can be calculated that an increase of 16.8 litres (almost two buckets) of extra plant available water could be stored per square metre in the top 30 cm (12”) of soil with a bulk density of 1.4 g/cm3, for every 1% increase (in absolute terms) in the level of soil organic carbon.

Building Local Resilience

The house of Miguel was almost finished this weekend, with a final layer of fine plaster going up. The windows are in, the doors are on their hinges, and Miguel almost the proud owner of a handmade house. Replete with frescoes on the wall, this little piece of art may be here in another century as a relic of our story, testament to the ethic of collaboration, of a local, national and international community coming together to help one man achieve his aspirations.

You can read another perspective about the workshop here 'good idea, good people, good place, good cause' in Arquitectura y Territoro by participant Elena Mayorga Marnich.

Local and Healthy Shelter by the Community for the Community

These fotos were produced by Craig Mackintosh of the Permaculture Research Institute. You can see his work here.

The work is now underway in el manzano, with the foundations being put in in the last few days using available and affordable local materials and innovative simple construction techniques.

Design for Resilient Human Settlements

This is the second story from the learning process in Millenrama. You can read the first here.

The week 5-9th of May 2010 team El Manzano was hosted in Millenrama, Mantagua, 5th region to run an Applied Permaculture Design course.
As El Manzano tests ideas for assisting people and communities to engage in transition and design for resilient human settlements, the team develops competency in the delivery of catalytic learning events, in facilitation and leadership by design. As the experience is reviewed once again it is confirmed that there is no power equal to a community deciding what it will become.

Viene Pronto!

We have bueen busy in Chile working on many and various projects as we learn about the application of regenerative design science. We are documenting our process in order to make our experiences useful for others, and as a way to demonstrate our ability to make things happen. Here you can see some of our work. We intend this section to provide a searchable information resource.

A PATTERN LANGUAGE

Summary of a book by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Published by Oxford University Press.

The original book contains much essential detail behind each of the following patterns and is recommended reading.

We begin with that part of the language which defines a town or community. These patterns can never be "designed" or "built" in one fell swoop- but patient piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns, will, slowly and surely, over the years, make a community that has these global patterns in it.

It has been said that we are the most useless generation that ever walked the earth (Hopkins, 2008). Our cosy western lifestyles have led us to reliance on the supermarket, and food transported thousands of kilometres around the planet. As we have chased economic growth at all costs, we have rejected a lifestyle where we had to take care of our own needs, and many of the basic skills that go along with resilient simple living. We forgot once common knowledge, common sense, like how to cook and preserve, to grow our own food, build our own homes, how to fix things when they break, how to live in community.