Eco-projectos da Quinta Arco-íris - Alentejo.

November 9, 2006

:: Participe: Eco-projectos da Quinta Arco-íris - Alentejo ::http://www.rainbowcommunities.org

Mais Eco-projectos:

http://www.eco-gaia.net/forum-pt/index.php/board,179.0.html

Rede Portuguesa de Eco-aldeias e Comunidades Sustentáveis:

http://portugal.ecovillage.org

WHAT'S NEW, FROM QUINTA ARCO-IRIS– Creating sustainable community, Alentejo, Portugal ~ Sept. ‘06

More informations: http://www.rainbowcommunities.org/News/ArcoNews0906.htm

Welcome to our latest news-update –

experiences and lessons from these last 9 months with friends, visitors, wwoofers and neighbours.

Rebuilding our Earth House * Paper-Crete – your new low-impact home? * Buying the land – sharing not owning * What have we learned? * Growing Community Food * Eucalyptus and tree planting * Hard Work and Heaven * New friends and neighbours * Right Livelihood for a sustainable economics * Needs & Offers

Rebuilding our Earth House

Now at Quinta Arco-Iris we are in the second week of our “Taipa Rebuild” workshop. It proves to be less workshop and more of a friends gathering of people seeking to learn and sharing practical skills needed to live the more sustainable life. It is also proving to be perhaps the most enjoyable intensive days of our life on this land. Along with Andre from Lisboa and Jose from Porto, Pedro and Philipa who run a self-harm rehab project in Porto, Kevin from Quebec, and others, we are sharing and interacting at many different levels whilst at the same time, a huge step for us, the roof is at long last being rebuilt on our traditional Alentejo home.

Our day may start with Tai Chi or meditation, or just a cup of tea to get us going, but getting together over breakfast to create the day and orient ourselves. It usually ends with music making, an insightful video on practical building techniques or new consciousness after cooking up some excellent food. Notably quite a bit of our food has come from our land. What a difference! Tomatoes, marrows, cabbages, garlic, even melons and peaches have been abundant. The bread we baked in the earth oven along with Pizza of course.

Building a new roof on a Taipa “rammed earth” house introduces many different skills and materials. We have installed new lintels cut from the eucalyptus forest, formed adobe wall sections, set rafters and cut heaps of cane – a group task that felt very familiar as the families used to do this in the past here in Alentejo.

In these two weeks we have been joined by old friends and new, from Portugal all the way to Quebec. Though we set up the Taipa Rebuild workshop on a cost basis, the way it has worked out has been more as a volunteer group, with everyone contributing to food and tasks. It has made no money but also cost none (except minimal food costs) which was an original aim anyway.

Paper-Crete – your new low-impact home?

To be in such a group combines a living with an intensive community work experience We learn so much from each other. We have a good group of friends to go forward for the future, with the proposal to arrange a geo-dome making workshop with wood cut from the forest, and at least one of the structures to be covered in the new “paper-crete” technique over chicken wire mesh. Imagine a few yurt sized paper-crete hobbit houses for people who can visit and live here; ideal low-impact year-round structures for people without capital. Could be a good way to help young people regain access to land and to help co-create the new fledgling communities in Portugal.

Next for us is to pay one of our neighbours a visit to cut a load more cane and get the roof on before the rain comes!

Buying the land – sharing not owning

Time moves in spirals and “soon we will have bought this land” has been an echo with no sign of fixing the date for over a year. But when Alistair and Jo arrive in a few days we can be assured all the legal parties can meet and complete this very significant step.

It’s a significant step because there is no obvious means for people to share, co-own and protect land for future generations in Portugal – our Association does this and so can be offered as a model for any other group seeking to do the same as us.

However to take this step we have a loan of £30,000 for which we are paying 6% per annum pro rata from the beginning of June this year. So we must offer new people the chance to join our community.

Opportunities for people who want to live at Quinta Arco-Iris eco-neighbourhood are offered. To know more please see Needs & Offers section.

What have we learned?

This has been a long time coming for us, for which a whole book could be written from our amazing adventures. To sum it up, what have we learnt in this time?

~ that people of like mind are as important as “good land”,

~ a common good intention (of living sustainably) with awareness of interdependence is the key to getting to the future together because it can bring us together creatively more than what may tend to keep us apart,

~ If its meant to be things happen to support you, money, people and things – it’s really what you have in mind!

~ the people and the land of Alentejo have a natural tradition and culture that tends to support our crazy ideas,

~ Alentejo is a hard teacher, a tough place, but an ideal environment for learning to live in sustainable ways,

~ We’ve learnt to listen to the nature, to what the land will accept, rather than impose our ideas impetuously. It takes time for bodies to adapt to culture and climate, and maybe more so for the mind.

So many people want to change, to move on toward a more earth-connected reality but few have any idea of the implications. There are real learning curves on all sides for both the willing Portuguese and the "estrangeiros". To come from self-reliance and self-responsiveness with a sense of cultural and cooperative open-mindedness is so important. Even so we are “only human” and so are needing to learn and to practice true tolerance, and true speaking, within the new group experiences, for which society has given us a tough experience of how not to do it!

Setting and respecting boundaries, for each other’s privacy, use of tools and stuff, for really sharing our land is a big challenge all round. Think of it; we’re moving out of “ownership” and “price-tagging” and into “resource and land sharing” and “inner values”. What models do we have? What old stuff do I have to let go of? How do we shed the old skin of land-owner defending and fencing off his bit and become stewards of the nature and guardians of the future? If this is where we are heading then let the heart do the talking because the head has had its day.

Growing Community Food

All around us the ground is smothered in juicy fig purple, a serious excess hardly touched. We give away loads and are drying a few in the Solar Cooker. It's a surplus we could be marketing.

Jennie’s “Creating a Community Veg. Garden” workshop back in February really got us started. In those two weeks we planted out the first patches and built a small green house, ably assisted by Donna from Aus and Emma from Ireland, Ellie from Wales and Genvieve from Canada. From my first faulting attempts to plant out a veg. patch in completely the wrong place – blown away by fierce northerlies, burnt dry by mid-day summer’s sun, hard to irrigate and tough old earth – and now knowing enough to say what will grow where. It’s really thanks to Joao and Eugenie our neighbours with their natural instinct and inspiring examples, to Tim who visited us via SunSeeds in Spain, to Andrew who bought in, gardened and then moved back to his beloved Westerly Islands, to Lee leading a student group from Colorado on the Terraces, that has got the land back to potential.

Recovering the water supply, digging out wells and reservoirs, breaking through wall high bramble banks is a retracing of the land’s memories and heritage. You can feel it, it loves to be able to flow with water, to be worked with humans again. And we are lucky that the old people who are also our neighbours, are around to tell us of its secrets, from seed, to medicine and dinner plate.

Now this Autumn, we need to plant with scale in mind. But the only way to make the most of it is when a gardener is here, someone who can organise this work. In the meantime Jennie will be starting with seeding. For there is the promise now of surplus, the possibility to supply at least the nearby local holiday community, and make a modest income from this, because we have also recovered more land along the original water way.

Eucalyptus and tree planting

For three weeks heavy machinery rolled around the Quinta as the eucalyptus in the South West valley was logged. Earlier in the year I cut over 150 rafters and a set of ridge beams for two houses. Still standing are the few such trees still good for this purpose. Cork and pine now look out from a very different view of the valley and beyond, able to breath again in a less crowded environment.

Our plan is to have a machine dig out at least half the old euc’ roots once the rain softens the earth. It could be that this cost may take most of the income from the logging, which is otherwise intended for our shared land purchase costs.

Small trees were planted this year. Less of a success more of a learning process. Very few trees grow here by chance, or without experience, and none without reliable water or appropriate soil conditions. I see more with practical eyes than with sentiment now. If it lives in Alentejo by itself it got there by tenacity and will probably get eaten or used. With a little human care it may also get to regenerate.

Hard Work and Heaven

Thanks to Permaculture Magazine we built ourselves a Rocket Hot Tub. Solar showers may be good but after two years without a hot bath this has to be heaven under the stars!

When Sunny, my nine year old, and Gabe, Jo and Martin’s four year old, came for August we all set to and turned the spring fed reservoir into a slate lined swimming pool. Imagine pure limpid cool flowing water good enough to drink, with the odd frog for company, surrounded by nature’s green and yellows under a beautiful blue sky and when the day may be baking hot.

New friends and neighbours

It’s amazing to think that despite living as peasants on the land not owned by us several hundred people have visited here in the past two years. It’s been a real training in non-attachment, to truly love where you are without possession, to accept being with people for who we are, basically as caretakers, seeking a live so much more believable.

This Summer Martin, Jo and Gabe spent their first few weeks here to make plans for moving over the coming months. Their idea is to run an environmentally minded canoeing business on the Mira River whilst rebuilding their taipa farm house. In a few days, Alistair and Jo will be setting up in their cottage along with a metal forge! Later this year Silvestre joins us on the Quinta with Patricia and their little son staying in a nearby town house. Silvestre and Patricia have been practising Permaculture on the Irish Islands and Silvestre will have done the Findhorn Eco-Village Foundation workshop. This knowledge can contribute to the eco-village movement in Portugal and help many to follow their path as we find ways to live on the land again here. Silvestre will put the Arco-Iris land project to the test by making house in a low-impact structure of his choice and by seeing if this is where they want to live.

We expect to see more of our friends from the Taipa Rebuild workshop too. We have a small network of people who want to come to events and help the land and the community to grow stronger.

This October we will run a two-week “Complete Living with Solar“ work-camp to install solar water heating, and an electricity supply for a communal washing machine, from a small wind-generator plus solar combination.

Next Spring Jennie and Jonathan plan to run a “Know Yourself – Know Your Resources” workshop that offers an alternative to formal Permaculture via a Shamanic survey of the living environment.

But watch the Web site as there will be many more events and workshops now arranged between us.

Right Livelihood for a sustainable economics

Money makes the world go around they say, and there’s no doubt that this is the test of sustaining one’s life. When relocating to, or even visiting an eco-village or community there may be a tendency to think one’s needs are going to get met somehow in the way of co-dependency. What I’ve learnt is that I have to get myself out there, to let people know I can do things, and in Alentejo this takes some time.

Even so, I believe that we can aspire to a new way of experiencing our economic livelihoods as we find ways to help one another, by discussing and supporting ideas and initiatives that alone wouldn’t be practical.

Needs & Offers . . .

Gardener needed for developing ideal land for supplying food to families and neighbours.

Opportunity for Bee-keeping and Honey making at Arco-Iris.

Box trailer wanted for conversion into a mobile Community Market Shop.

Arco-Iris offers community land-shares. Do you want to live a more sustainable life with like-minded people? We have two building plots that are for permanent registered dwellings, for (half-share) investments of €25k each. Neighbouring land is also for sale now offering at least two earth built family houses at full share investments of €50k each. For friends of Arco-Iris, about three low-impact dwellings can be constructed for year-round use. For further details contact Jennie Evelight, (ecolifeAToninet.pt), or Tlm: 961 252 349.

Herbal Medicine including herbal antibiotic, massage oils, treatment and counselling for self-healing and energetic therapy. Contact Jonathan Evelight, 967 337 994.

Solar Systems, products and environmental services, including Bio-composting Toilets supplied and installed. Contact Jonathan Evelight, 967 337 994.

Internet Hosting from a green environmental service provider, Greenisp.net or Email service

Pure woollen hand spun garments made to order: Contact Jennie 961 252 349

Snr João shows how to select and fix the first cane

Cleaning roof cane

Group hosting seminar, Intro.to Permaculture

Home Stay with Snrs Augustafor Colorado students

Euc. logging truck

Land art rock labarynth

Twin-Solar Cooker gets up to 130º C!

Hot Tub set on earth bags

Sunny gets cooked in our rocket fired hot tub!