 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Dirt is the newsletter of Emerald Earth. If you want to receive a paper copy, send us your mailing address. The Dirt is also available on our website. Check the website for photos and other updates. If you want to take yourself off the paper mailing list, send us an email or postcard. If we have your email address, we will send you an announcement that The Dirt is available online.
|
The Dirt 2008
Emerald
Earth Update
As the wildflowers and daffodils erupt from our wet soil, we are preparing for another exciting and busy year here at Emerald Earth! We plan to break ground on our new Sunnyside Common House soon, as we work hard to finish the design and budgeting. We’re excited by the beautiful and functional design that has emerged from our design team, a real testament to the power of effective group process! In 2007, we began our first fundraising campaign, and exceeded our year’s goal of $10,000 by raising a grand total of almost $25,000! This puts us well on our way to our goal of $100,000 for our new Common House. Many thanks to all who have supported us! We have tremendous gratitude towards our friend Ann who propelled us forward with a $10,000 gift. She has never before donated so much to anything, but is thrilled and inspired by our project! With the help of Ann, you, and all of our larger community, we hope to fund a large portion of the cost of the new Common House over the next 3 years. Great change is happening in our membership these days. 2007 saw the arrival of seven adults, one child, and two dogs. You read about Lisa, Sue, and Gracie the dog in last spring’s Dirt. The universe continued to answer our call with the arrival of Tom, Abeja, Garnet, Mika, Prana, Joey and Vox the dog! If you haven’t gotten to meet them yet (or even if you have!), you can read about them in this issue of The Dirt! This influx has brought our membership from a low of 5 adults to its current 11 adults (Sue has moved to Boonville). Other
big membership news is that Sara, Darryl, and Aria are leaving Emerald
Earth this coming summer. For the last nine years, Sara and Darryl
have been core visionaries and builders of this community, and the
space they leave behind will not be easily filled. We are deeply
grateful for all they’ve done and wish them joy, inspiration,
and success in their new lives. Liz,
Brent, and baby Esther Joy moved into their home, “Strawberry
House,” in late October. They are thankful to have spent the
winter on the Sunnyside in their hand-built home. Many thanks to
all the loving hands that have helped along the way. This year has been an exceptional year for tasty local food here at Emerald Earth. Michael has led us in eating more local staple foods by harvesting and processing acorns as well as growing a beautiful crop of multi-colored corn for tortillas and tamales. Liz grew our third crop of wheat, in addition to lots of fruits and veggies in the sunny garden. Sara mothered the black bean crop and the shady garden, while Tom brought seaweed, sea salt, and abalone from the coast. We’ve collectively “harvested” many of our own roosters, older chickens, and ducks, as well as trapping some of the many wild turkeys that get into our gardens! Abeja led a gleaning project that brought the wealth of apples, pears, figs, mulberries, jujubes and other fruits from the Valley home and distributed them through the farmers’ market and as gifts and barter. We all reveled in the bounty of wild mushrooms this year, including a bumper crop of white and orange chantrelles, king and queen boletes, matsutakes, shrimp rusulas, pine spikes, and black trumpets. And we are still blessed with local, organic raw milk.
Getting ‘The Dirt’ Out The Dirt is the annual newsletter of Emerald Earth. If you want to receive a paper copy, send us your mailing address. The Dirt is also available on our web site, www.emeraldearth.org/newsletter. Check the web site for photos, events, and other updates. If you want to take yourself off the paper mailing list, send an email or a post card to community@emeraldearth.org,or P.O. Box 764 Boonville CA 95415. If we have your email address, we’ll let you know when The Dirt is available online. Hearing from you feeds the fires that keep our project going. Please drop us an email or post card to let us know that you enjoy The Dirt and our community. You can also phone us at (707) 972-3096. Last fall, we received a dream letter with a donation from Anasuya Batliner. “Though I have only visited Emerald Earth once in 2002… I read every word of your newsletter. Thank you for what you do and what you stand for. It means a lot to me to know you are there.” Thank you, too, for being part of our community and for staying in touch! Deep
Democracy in Action Imagine all the decisions required to design and build a 2,500 square foot community house (with kitchen, dining room, lounge, meeting room, office, kids’ space, and guest room). Now imagine making these decisions with ten other people using consensus process. What would that look like? For us it did not mean that anyone always got her or his way. It just meant that everyone was ok with the choices made by the whole group. It also meant that a subgroup of our community, the design team, had to hear the feedback from our larger community and integrate their suggestions into revised plans. Thus far the design team has reworked the floor plan over 30 times, continually refining details. Some say consensus process is slow and frustrating. For most of us, at times, it has been. Practicing deep democracy has required many all day meetings full of discussion and debate. Consensus process has also rewarded us with an exceptionally well-thought-out design that meets our diversity of needs and values and reflects the beauty of our creative potential. We now have an elegant design that we are all inspired to start building this summer. This is what democracy looks like. Come see for yourself or help us build our most extensive structure to date.
As always, 2008 will be a busy year for us here at Emerald Earth, and we hope to see you at one or more of our public events. Scanning the schedule above, you will notice some familiar events that we’ve held many times in the past, and some new ones that we will be trying out for the first time.
This year we are adding a Friday evening concert series before our work parties in May, July and September. We will be inviting local artists to perform in the meadow near the common house to raise the energy for the work weekend and hopefully some funds for our new community house. We’re still looking for musicians to play; let us know if you have ideas. We’ll post the artists on our web site as we get them booked. Another new addition to our schedule are Eco-tours on the first Sunday of most months. These events will begin at noon with a home-cooked organic lunch, followed by an afternoon tour of Emerald Earth. This is a good time to learn and ask questions about our gardens, orchards, natural buildings, composting toilets, graywater treatment and off-grid power systems. Please register in advance and bring a cash donation.
We’re also adding a Local Foods Fundraising Dinner in November, a time of year when our gardens, orchard and pantry are overflowing with yummy abundance. Come treat your taste buds to a novel array of sustainably grown or wildcrafted delicacies, while supporting Emerald Earth’s fundraising drive for our new community house. Our lineup of hands-on workshops this year includes some popular stand-bys like our “Natural Building Intensive” (now in its 8th year) and a number of exciting new offerings in Pemaculture, building, and local foods. Please see our web site for more details (www.emeraldearth.org), tell your friends and family. Please help us get the word out by posting the enclosed flyer at your local natural food store or community bulletin board. Thanks! After four years of successful Natural Building in Community Apprenticeship programs, we have decided to take a break in 2008 while we gear up for our Community House construction. Keep your eye on our web site for details of expanded apprenticeship opportunities in 2009.
Moving
On
We sometimes question if this is the best decision. We believe so strongly in everything EE stands for and know well what we will lose in leaving. But for now it feels like time to try something new in the greater world, to take our skills and interests to new projects and to explore other possibilities. We do not yet know where we are moving to. We’re still deciding between Sebastopol and Boonville. We hope our incredible network of friends will help us look for a new home and work. We will stay involved with Emerald Earth as off-site Land Council members and maybe even move back someday. We want to thank everyone in the larger EE community for making the last nine years such a magical and incredible journey.
Adoption Connection
~Kristen
Gardner, Land Council Member |
||||||||||||||||||
The Dirt 2007
Community Update By Liz Since our last newsletter went out, we have enjoyed another busy year here at Emerald Earth. Although our permanent member population had slimmed down to just five adults plus one “tween,” our population more than doubled for most of the summer. We hosted our largest work trade crew ever with up to seven work-traders at a time, starting in March and running all the way through mid-November. Thanks to MJ, Saiorse, Bill, Diana, Jade, Anastasia, Jim, Justin, Lyn, Heather and Mojo for all your hard work and positive energy. Jade created a very detailed web site, with descriptions and photos of everything she was involved with during her 6-month stay. You can check it out at www.dirtandquiet.blogspot.com. Michael and Darryl taught their third natural building apprenticeship program which was full with six eager participants, and we put on the usual work parties. So, just what did we do to keep all these folks busy? The biggest project we undertook began in March when Liz and Brent decided to level out their sloped house site by hand so that they could build their new home during the summer. Called “Strawberry House,” it is the second house in the sunny-side cluster that began with Madrone house. An enormous amount of dirt was dug, and moved by wheelbarrow into huge piles; much of it has gone back into the house as a component of the earthen floor, earthen plasters, straw-clay, cob, and clay wattle walls. The house was the main focus of the apprenticeship program and the work traders all put many hours of work in as well. We were able to get the walls up and the roof on before the rains. Yippee! Now the windows and doors are going in, and we’re getting ready for ceilings, interior carpentry, finish plasters and floors during the spring and summer. Other projects included work to improve the aesthetics as well as the functionality of the common house. We now have a lovely earth plastered wall behind the wood stove where once there was plywood. The apprentices made that happen with guidance from our guest instructor Janine. Thanks to our very motivated and skilled spring work trader MJ, we also have a beautiful and functional new entry to the common house complete with real stairs (instead of a ladder) to the kid’s loft, and enough cubbies for all the summer residents. Three apprentices took on building a pump house to protect the pump and PVC pipe from sun and weather. Jim, one of our work traders, brought his herd of ten goats for most of the summer. We learned just how much ten goats can alter the landscape (they cleared out a lot of brush around the common house, giving us a better view of the pond), and just how much goat cheese we can eat. Hosting the goats was a real treat and we hope to get some permanent EE goats in the not-too-distant future. Of course, the gardens were abundant as every one pitched in to grow food for the season. While the summer population here bloomed, it shrank even further when fall came. As the work traders peeled off in ones and twos, Deleh also decided to move down the hill to Boonville. We still see her around town but we miss her energy and her input. She is working towards her teaching credential while continuing to teach at the adult school and to run the Boonville Teen Center; she will also soon be teaching gardening at the elementary school. She has officially transitioned to an off-site Land Council member, as has Mitch, who is living with his sweetie Uma in Eureka, but stops by Emerald Earth about once a month to get his requisite chainsaw time. Thankfully, our permanent population seems to be on the rise again. In November our youngest member arrived as Liz and Brent had a baby girl! Esther Joy is her name and she has brought a lot of joy to us all. It’s great to have another little one in the community, and we hope there will soon be more. More recently, Lisa and Sue left Easthampton, Massachusetts to join us out here in California and see if Emerald Earth would work for them. We are all thrilled at their arrival. Several other couples and families have expressed interest in becoming members. Some we know well and others we have yet to meet, but we are hopeful that soon all our empty houses will be filled. As usual, the winter has been quiet here, but spring is almost upon us (in mid-March, its already 80 degrees!) and we’re gearing up for another season of building and growing. We’re looking for work traders for all of the dry months, including one to start immediately and focus on finishing Strawberry House. We also still have openings for the 8-week Natural Building Apprenticeship in June and July, which this year will be taught by Darryl and Massey Burke, a graduate of our first Apprenticeship four years ago. In addition to finishing Strawberry House and Madrone House, the biggest building project of the year will be a new power house at the top of the sunny-side meadow, which will begin the development of our new common area, hopefully to be followed by the new common house starting in 2008. Other
projects for the coming season include lots of gardening and food
preservation, a new fence for the sunny garden cluster, and possibly
a ferrocement water storage tank. Another new development is the
first annual Cob-a-Thon (see enclosed flyer), to help us generate
money and enthusiasm for the new common house. We hope to see you
here for that, or for a work party or workshop! Wondering – by Sara Sometimes in the dark of winter, I begin to wonder if anything we are doing here at Emerald Earth has any meaning to the world. Surrounded by beauty and living the good life can feel selfish and indulgent. When I encounter poverty, pain, oppression, or ugliness in the world I have to question why I have been privileged to live such a lovely life. And if living such a good life is a positive addition to the world or just an escape from reality. On the brighter days, it seems clear that our simple, good lives are a benefit to this world. Using fewer resources, experimenting with alternatives, valuing process (vs. product), caring for one another, honoring the earth and stepping more lightly and with more awareness seem like they must be a positive addition to a world seemingly going the opposite way. Sharing what we have learned (or are learning) spreads it even farther. Maybe our way of life is able to put some weight on the side of the scale balancing out the destructive forces of the human race. Maybe we are creating the alternative, maybe we are the revolution. But most days, I just hope we are doing more good than harm. Most days I am just grateful for this life.
Wish List
Emerald
Earth If
you are receiving the Dirt, it means you are part of the Emerald
Earth community. You have visited us, worked with us, are part of
our family, and care about what we are doing. We are kicking off
our first-ever fundraising campaign this spring to raise money for
our leap to the sunny side. To build our new common house we need
your help. We believe that the work we do here is not just for us, but is creating a model for a very different way of living in the world. We teach what we have learned and share our home with hundreds of visitors each year. Natural building, permaculture, consensus, healthy relationships are all things we believe in, we live, and we share with the world. We hope that our work has inspired you and that you will help us continue to inspire others by contributing to this project. Ways you can help
***Emerald Earth is a 501(c)3 non-profit, so all types of donations are tax-deductible. Getting The Dirt Out The Dirt is the newsletter of Emerald Earth. If you want to receive a paper copy, send us your mailing address. The Dirt is also available on our website, www.emeraldearth.org/newsletter. Check the website for photos and other updates. If you want to take yourself off the paper mailing list, send us an email or a post card. If we have your email address, we will send you an announcement that the The Dirt is available online.
Emerald
Earth Land Council Jess,
Darryl, Kristen, Deleh, Jim (part of his head), Sara, Aria, Connie,
Brent, Mitch, |
||||||||||||||||||
Work
parties have been one of our most dependable ways of making new
friends, getting work done, and sharing what we’ve learned
with the greater community. They run Saturday morning through Sunday
afternoon with work projects including natural building, gardening,
and land management. There’s a tour of our buildings, gardens
and grounds, as well as a talk about our community structure and
membership process. There’s also time for a sauna, a swim
in the pond, a game, or a walk in the woods. Bring your family,
friends and neighbors and show them a different way to live. Children
are welcome. Please register 1-4 weeks in advance; we ask $10 per
person per day to cover food costs.
Last
year’s Cob-a-Thon Fundraiser was a huge success.
We got some cobbing done on our new power house, many bodies were
massaged into bliss, we feasted on Sara’s wonderful food,
danced and hula-hooped the night away, and we generated several
thousand dollars to help kick off our community house construction.
We’ll be repeating that event this year - hopefully bigger
and even better. See our web site for details.
We--Sara,
Darryl and Aria--have decided to leave Emerald Earth. This summer
will be our ninth one here and, in so many ways, Emerald Earth is
our dream come true. But that dream is ten years old. We have changed
and it no longer fits us. A rural, land-based, intimate community
is not meeting our needs anymore. The reasons are both complex and
simple. Some have been emerging over the years and some have always
been there. The simplest and easiest to describe are: Aria is going
into Junior High and more than ever does not wanting to be up a
long dirt road far from other kids her age. Darryl is ready to live
in a less intimate community and Sara has burned out on the constant
comings and goings of new people. 
Hi!
I am looking to adopt a child of any ethnicity. I have always wanted
to be a parent and am actively trying to connect with an expectant
(or recent) mother looking for a home for her child. Many times
these connections are made through somebody like yourself learning
about a child that needs a home and helping put them in touch with
somebody like myself. (I know many people are unfamiliar with this
process, but about 20,000 adoptions within the US take place in
this way each year. This is a voluntary process on the part of the
parents, not a forced removal from the home.) Please find out more
by going to my web site: 
We’re
Sue and Lisa. We arrived here from Western Massachusetts after a
month-long journey across the country. Gracie (our dog) came with
us and is happy to be out of the van. We made a decision to move
out of the northeast because the long winters made it difficult
to significantly decrease our energy dependence. We had been looking
for a community that practiced sustainable living techniques and
would be receptive to our hopes to garden organically, use renewable
energy sources and build with renewable resources like straw bales.
We feel incredibly lucky to have found EE, a community that is doing
all of these things. Lisa will continue her work as a hand bookbinder
and Sue is getting involved with organizing the Boonville farmer’s
market. It’s great to be here.
Home | About Us
| Membership | Apprenticeship
| Workshops
| Visiting |Work
Parties
Photos
| Work Trade | Consulting
| Newsletter | Wish
List | Contact
Web Site Design by BerensDesigns