It’s the shortest day of the year in Chile and the rain is coming down. It is cold and wet. As we celebrate the new year and the return of the sun, thousands of people in the surrounding region are living in government supplied shacks… affectionately termed "Mediagua" or half water. Most of them are leaking with the rain, and the wind is coming in. You can find photos here.

The government has not yet started the reconstruction effort. We imagine they are trying to get through the winter with temporary emergency housing, and to begin construction in the spring, when the dust settles a little. Here in El Manzano we are doing our best to inject common sense into the debate. Many are listening. Small strategic actions can have wide repercussions, and though we cannot take the credit for the actions of others, we can be sure that our voice has resounded widely in Chile and many are following the lead.

What would you choose? A cement and treated pine box, designed and built by someone you have never met, squeezed as tight as possible with the neighbours, with very little outdoor private space? Or would you choose a beautiful home with natural materials, designed and constructed by you and your family, with plenty of space, and your own food to boot? One might assume that common sense would prevail. What’s missing? Choice? 

So then it becomes a matter of pragmatism, as the so called planner, shapes attention, and counters misinformation as best they can.  

Design with Principles

El Manzano has embarked on a mission to provide alternatives for Chileno people; to show people how they can create their own permanent, earthquake-proof housing made with local materials, local labour, at an affordable price. 

The original project was in usual permaculture style, a strategic and multifunctional intention to affect as many people as possible, to be a catalytic learning event. With the support of the Artists Project Earth (relief, recovery and resilience… we speak the same language) and the Permaculture Research Institute (now in Chile) a project was developed to assist people to meet their own immediate housing needs, to design their own resilient housing and settlements, to quickly recover from the devastating Earthquake of February 2010, and to build long-term resilience to future disaster and disruption. Having raised only a small portion of the required funding, we set out to maximise available resources, to catch and store the energy required and deliver the most bang for buck. 

When we design with principles, people and ecology in mind, our solutions are often distinct to those discovered by the logic of the mainstream system. When we design for haste and minimum cost we compromise on things like quality and materials efficiency, well being and long term security. We tend to forget about talking to local people and fitting in with the place. Permaculture design on the other hand, enables us to create low cost solutions that are much more resilient, because we see the problem and we have a long term perception. A permaculture designer sees opportunities and local resources, knowledge and skills. Coming from a systems perspective they link elements together, investing in the health of the system. Combined, work can be more efficient, we can reduce materials costs by seeing available free materials. If we put our heads together we can save time and money. Sometimes a small change will have big effects.   

Design & Construction  

The design was made as participatory as possible, with the community an integral part of the design and decision making team. A participatory approach takes time, and will often lead us in unexpected directions, but in the end a better solution can be found. You can read about the design stages here. And here about the El Manzano in Transition process here. 

Construction started in the first week of May. You can read about the first stage here by Craig Mackintosh. Using local materials, unmilled timber cut directly from surrounding forests with a chainsaw, straw harvested nearby, recycled adobe from the earthquake collapses, and the soil beneath our feet we trained a local team in the use of roundpole and earth construction techniques. The community has awakened to a new possibility for their own homes in the future, and is learning together, that many hands make light work.

The superadobe technique has been modified a little, using sand from the site (a resource we have in abundance) to fill sacks, mixed with 10% cement and laid as a foundation wall. This same technique was used to make the floor, with a thin layer of cement and very little steel on top. We have tried to minimise the use of cement and steel at every step, but have been hindered by the locals who won’t imagine standing on anything made of clay in the next earthquake, and the need to get the house habitable as soon as possible.

The roof went up quickly with a 22 cm layer of light clay straw compacted into the cavity between roof joists. We have heard of this technique being used locally without clay with 60+ years of life. If it stays dry we are hopeful it will provide insulation for a long time to come… another research project. 

The walls are up, two non-load bearing layers of 2×2 pine (we could have used small diameter pseudo acacia and eucalyptus cut from the forest to reduce costs) with a 25 cm sandwich of light clay straw in between. With all the rain our primary concern is the drying time of the straw. Based on the experience of friends with the same technique in Chile, we are concerned about fungus growing in the straw and affecting the timber. Oh for a dry season. Chile is well known for its dry sunny winter periods… we have our fingers crossed and are exploring other options for drying the walls efficiently.

Budget

The final budget for materials and labour is 2 million pesos or $US3700, around US$125 per square metre. This is an affordable house. The main cost has been the roofing, the cement for the floor and labour. We haven’t managed to stretch the budget to pay the professional services of the design team, but intend that the house is a model that can be improved and replicated, a product we can offer in coming months.

The gains have outweighed the cost, and we don’t need a cost:benefit analysis to tell us. A community team has developed itself as a competent unit able to deliver on time and under budget. The house is beautiful. It will last a few good 8 point earthquakes yet. Wanna bet?

Learning

Many small mistakes have been made, reviewed and redesigned for the next house. This has been a continuous learning event for the community and the team. In coming weeks the team moves its focus to begin construction of a second house. We feel more prepared and more experienced for a spring and summer construction process ahead, with tested materials and techniques in the construction of a living university campus. You can be involved in this catalytic learning event. Stay tuned. Happy new year.

All photographs copyright © Craig Mackintosh

My time in Chile was encouraging. It gives me some hope in mankind to see a community rallying together to meet present historical realities. Not all is perfect of course. Not all are fully lucid and fully engaged, and whipping up enthusiasm, ethically, in a way that respects individual choice, is a challenge in leadership and patience (sometimes the shock of an earthquake or other disaster can help a little here…), but the good news is that the needed work at El Manzano has more than begun, and it should beget hope for the rest of us – that it is possible to awaken the people around us to unite around intelligent, historically appropriate plans for transition.

The current indoor classroom, at right

On my way out of the country I stayed in a hotel, on the fifth floor. While lying on the bed I felt yet another tremor. I think it was the seventh since landing a month prior. This one made me feel more uncomfortable than most, despite being one of the smallest. I coudn’t help but feel more vulnerable in a large structure, and surrounded by a city dependent on centralised supply lines. I felt that if I’m to face disaster, I’d far prefer to experience it within a community that’s progressed to some degree in taking back control of its needs, like at El Manzano.

Although the team at El Manzano promise to send us updates, my personal series will end with this post. I hope you enjoyed the series, and have come away with a better grasp of the scope of the work happening with PRI Chile (Eco Escuela El Manzano). I also hope that those considering venues for their permaculture training will put this developing permaculture university onto their short list. You will learn a great deal, in very pleasant environs, and your tuition fees will support the development of what is fast becoming an excellent template for sustainable development. We would like support such endeavours on every continent, so that they can in turn help establish and support regional satellite projects. In this way we can raise the profile of permaculture – taking it out of a purely academic or idealistic ‘concept phase’, and pushing it into mainstream consciousness as a practical, viable alternative to our present political, economic and consumer madness.

I thought I’d close more pictorially – showing images of the area to further motivate prospective students to consider Eco Escuela El Manzano as an excellent place to learn. Although the base of a healthy society – indeed, the central platform upon which it must be built – is sustainable agriculture, the great news is that at places like El Manzano it’s possible to learn, and contribute to, even more than that. On the foundation of sustainable agriculture, El Manzano is attempting to erect a structure of mutually beneficial community interactions that include other key components of a truly permanent culture – including participatory democracy and sustainable economics – elements students would do well to observe along with their on-the-ground training, so they can take these concepts home with them too.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a few photos from areas near El Manzano:

Thanks to all the El Manzano team for spending some time with me and giving me opportunity to share your work with the world. Please keep doing what you’re doing!

My time in Chile is almost at an end. But, before I go, I want to share with you the present and future plans for transitioning the community here in El Manzano. They are not insignificant.

The second community meeting I attended during my stay was to discuss these plans and solicit community input and participation. It is the end of the agricultural season here, so people are in high spirits and also have a little extra time for contemplative discussion.

But before I jump straight into the meeting it’d be good to get a grip on practicalities of advancement here.

Financials

Funding for transitioning at El Manzano comes primarily from the following three revenue streams:

1) The farm, consisting of 120 hectares of land: 80 ha of Zone 5 (70 ha of primarily pine and some eucalyptus trees and 10 ha of regenerating forest – i.e. re-establishing natives along stream beds and borders to protect the watershed and improve eco-system services, aiming to eventually become 30% of the property), 5 ha of organic blueberries, 30 ha of broadscale horticulture (horses used for cultivation as much as possible), 2 ha of orchards, and 3 in Zone 1 intensive gardening. The farm is entirely chemical-free, implements permaculture principles throughout and is steadily transitioning to increase diversity and reduce dependence. It currently employs seven of the villagers, and others work, as expressed in the last post, on a very appreciative voluntary basis so they can share in the farm’s harvest – essentially bartering labour for food.

2) Eco Escuela: Eco Escuela El Manzano translates to ‘Apple Tree Eco School’. It is the educational business set up by Grifen and Javiera, and includes other family members as business partners and teachers-in-training. The school has trained 145 students, now Permaculture Design Certificate holders, since the school was launched two years ago, and is poised to teach many more (more on that below). In addition two students have completed their two-year Permaculture Diploma here (Eco Escuela is also Gaia University Chile, the only Gaia University node in Latin America), and 33 more are current diploma works-in-progress. Funding through permaculture education is, as regular readers will know, part of our Permaculture Master Plan concept, where sites become financially self-sufficient, and self-replicating, through education – a proven and efficient way to move permaculture forward sustainably.

El Manzano’s outdoor class, when weather conditions invite

3) Grants: Funding is sought from outside individuals or organisations for various endeavours where possible. An example: two years ago the family met with the local community and discussed the need to transition the village to meet future resource constraints caused by energy descent (peak oil) and climate change. They determined to petition the Chilean Ministry of the Environment for funding to help implement initiatives that would reduce the village’s impact on its surrounding whilst increasing their resilience. Jorge and Carolina were subsequently delegated the task of creating the application, and their request was rewarded with support by way of U.S.$16,500. Another example is funding for the house project, a demonstration of sustainable post-quake redevelopment, where U.S.$5,000 was secured via Artists Project Earth, and of course the assistance of the Permaculture Research Institute, and the likes of you!

All of these aspects take time, dedication, persistence and vision. The good news is these traits don’t seem to be in short supply here.

The community discusses a possible budget

Back to the meeting

The main point of the meeting was to look at the financials – how much funding they had, and options for expenditure. Central in this discussion were plans the family and the community had long been brainstorming, which would utilise some of the family’s 120 ha mentioned above to develop new building and land features to benefit both Eco Escuela (the eco school) and the community. It was decided at this meeting that the plans had ripened sufficiently in maturity of evolution and consensus in thought, so that Angel Carrillo, the architect profiled in a previous post, could begin formal designs based on community feedback for this development.

The meeting broke into groups to brainstorm the design concepts

And then the three groups shared their ideas before the entire meeting

Until everyone came to happy agreement, and even applause!

There’s more than can be described within the constraints of this post, but in a nutshell, the new development would fulfil multiple functions:

1. increase the capacity of the villagers to work together in mutually beneficial ways to improve their lives along highly sustainable lines – one example is in converting the Adobe House into a food storage and preserving facility, village bakery, and potentially even an outdoor cafe supplied with farm produce, all providing employment for villagers and healthy food options for the increasing student numbers.
2. utilise some of the land to build an additional classroom that can be utilised by both the existing children’s school and Eco Escuela, and to create additional facilities (kitchen, accommodations, etc.) that can also be utilised by the growing training centre and the villagers.
3. create public spaces and environmental elements – a walkable landscape – that will benefit all of the above.

The goal, and one that seems entirely within reach, is for the community to become a beacon of realism, inspiration and reskilling – making not just the school a source of education, but also making the entire settlement a lesson in appropriate development, and cooperative endeavour. The designs being worked on today, once turned into reality, will essentially see a permaculture university in the midst of the village – with maximum participation and benefits for the villagers themselves.

Reversing the trend

These initiatives for El Manzano have great potential to not only stem the flow of rural migrants into cities, where they become wholly dependent on a collapsing money economy, but to actually reverse it. As the quality of life here improves, and resiliency builds – and the social order elsewhere continues to unravel – sons, daughters, brothers will notice the change during their visits and will inevitably decide to move back home and get involved. This is another motivating factor for the villagers who have up until recently seen their community steadily disintegrate as people head to regional capitals in search of work.

People want to see their families come to life again, and this work is making it happen.

Culture of plants, not careless propagation

One thing that needs to be clear, El Manzano is wholly unlike many ‘alternative communities’ we hear about, or have been involved in, where several well meaning but oft-naive folk decide to converge on a newly purchased property due to their shared, idealistic vision of the lifestyle they want to possess. That eco-village scenario is said to have a ninety percent failure rate. Comparable to plants being mismatched with soil and climate types, throwing westernised individuals together in situations out of their element can be rife with tension, misunderstandings, maladjustments and heartbreak.

Instead, El Manzano is about inspiring an existing community, in situ, to consider their future, and to begin to work together to achieve common goals – goals based on an increasing understanding of current events and a determination to meet them head on. The work here is taking a village and transforming it from within. This is the transition approach – one that arguably has a far higher likelihood of success.

Better to give

One thing I noted during my stay was the feeling of peace oozing from the Carrion family. Rather than cling to land ownership as an inherited ‘right’, or narrowly considering it as merely a means of securing short term gain, they’re gaining great satisfaction from finding ways to use it to create something of far greater value, and in doing so feel a weight is being lifted from their shoulders.

If this attitude were to become infectious, the world’s troubles could dissipate rather fast.

Continue on to read Part X: Eco Escuela El Manzano, a Nice Place to Learn

Contemplating the past, present and future – and land redistribution – in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Chile.

All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

He stares back at us from the t-shirts of millions of youths worldwide. Che Guevara’s face has become one of the most recognisable counter-cultural and political symbols ever known. The history books tell us the man was famously sympathetic to the lot of the poor, and that his overriding passion was to fight against inequality, oppression, control. Che comes to my mind as I write this article from South America, because, in his rise to power, one of his driving ambitions, and which became one of his key responsibilities under Castro, was land redistribution – where he sought to break the stranglehold that was keeping the masses impoverished and robbing them of their potential. I bring this topic up, as, when I look at what’s happening in the world, and the radical changes needed to put us onto a sustainable path, the issue keeps coming back to my mind. These two words – land redistribution – strike fear into the hearts of the rich, and feelings of ambition and even violent revolution in those of the poor, yet, if we’re to stake a claim on the future, I feel we must, both rich and poor, come to terms with them.

Those studying how to address our precipitant trends – our dire soil erosion issues, our increasingly desperate water situation, and the complete vulnerability of our having made our entire large scale food system, from seed-sowing to consumption, completely dependent on waning supplies of fossil fuels – will recognise the need to harmonise our culture with the realities of biology, of soil science, and the urgent need to diversify and relocalise our food production, and, indeed, the production of everything we need for human habitation.

Forging a permanent culture, particularly in the era of energy descent we now find ourselves in, necessitates a rapid shift of food production to small scale biodiverse systems – polycultures. A logical flow should cause us to turn to face our current predicament – where millions of farmers over the last fifty years have succumbed to the onslaught of ‘get big or get out’ agricultural policies and have done just that; gotten out. Most of the agricultural land in the ‘developed’ world today is held, and abused, by Big Agri. Indeed, only a handful of companies control the land, seed, fertilisers, pesticides and even distribution and sale of much of what we eat. Unfortunately it is not well recognised that the same can be said for much of the best land in the South as well, which is also largely serving only the needs of the wealthy – inefficiently, as industrial agriculture is – to the detriment of locals who should have the rights to that land (example) but who are exporting their water and their best soils in the produce that feeds the North.

The question of how to rapidly, but peacefully, transition society back to small scale farming systems should be on everyone’s mind, and should be pressed upon politicians at every turn. But, we should be aware that carving up land is never an easy ask. Historically, land redistribution almost never came without bloodshed. Land reforms, whether in the form of a centralised government-enforced collectivisation program or government-enforced redistribution, or whether by bloody grass-roots uprisings, are arguably the biggest cause of radicalisation, revolution and violent unrest within regional social contexts. The reason for this is simple – they are based on the most pressing of human needs: food and water.

But, worse, and this is central thought to this article: despite all the upheaval and unrest, usually these ‘reforms’, by whatever method, fail miserably.

Often, for example, the peasant class who might benefit from land redistribution look upon the situation as a way to ‘get even’ or to take back wealth from their ‘oppressors’. It becomes a class war, rather than a conscious, sober-minded and objective effort to rebuild society for the betterment of all.

Conversely, it is entirely difficult for those with large land titles to objectively appreciate the demands and needs of the landless – particularly when profits are still being made and an entire economy is based on the current paradigm. Just as medieval feudal lords fought to retain their hold on power, our contemporary corporate feudal lords will be just as unwilling to relinquish it.

And, often land reforms come to nothing because of a lack of skills, equipment or capital. People receive land, or take it by force, but then end up failing to accomplish anything with it simply due to their own inability to do so. Or, the rapid change brought about by redistribution rudely interrupts market mechanisms in place, and people fail to build a viable new system to replace it from one day to the next. This inability to plan, to strategically and objectively implement – to transition – has been the cause of some of the world’s worst famines and social implosions.

Why do I talk about these things in the context of this particular series? Well, the community development here at El Manzano is, I believe, better appreciated in the light of its historical context – and from it we may draw some lessons for the social adjustments we need to work towards and press for.

El Manzano history in a nutshell

In 1931, an ex-navy man by the name of Sydney Raby-Matthews (the great great grandfather of Grifen and Javiera’s son Anaru) bought 600 hectares of land right here in El Manzano, converting it to dairy pasture and installing electricity, fencing and roads. In the 1970s his son Lionel took over and continued with the same. El Manzano was highly self-sufficient in food, water, etc. and became a bustling little village with a much greater population than we see today.

This was the time of the Marxist politician Salvador Allende – one of whose defining acts was to expropriate lands from wealthy land holders for redistribution. The abject failure of this move set the stage for the U.S./CIA-backed military coup by Augusto Pinochet, whose regime, despite being highly repressive, happened to favour neo-liberal capitalism during the cold war years and thus endeared it to the U.S., who were, by the way, only too happy to assist him and other South American leaders in a rather muddied and murderous history.

Grifen Hope explains what happened here at El Manzano:

As the story goes, armed young men with training in Cuba came to El Manzano and rallied the villagers to take the land. They held the family at gunpoint for a few weeks in the house. They destroyed buildings and ate all the cows or herded them off. When the siege was over the leaders took everything of value – the machinery, tools and animals, etc., and left the campansinos the land. With nothing to work it they abandoned and sold it. People left and migrated to the cities of Concepcion and Santiago to find work.

Pinochet offered the land back to Lionel but he refused all but 120 hectares.

In 2004 the municipal government zoned El Manzano urban and shared the land with remaining families, giving them all a small plot. They have since constructed half of the promised homes, installed a pump, electrics and septic tank. Half the villagers remain in shacks. Around this time Maureen, the daughter of Lionel received the land and began to repair it. With her husband, Victor, CEO of a mining company, she planted 80 hectares of forest, re-employed seven of the villagers and began to live on the farm again. Her three children, Javiera (now my wife), Jorge and Jose, all with a passion for the farm and a desire to live here, trained as agricultural engineers and rallied to keep the farm in family hands and make it turn a buck.

Heavy influenced by Miguel Alteiri and Agroecology they began a process of transforming the farm to organic and started working with the village to improve quality of life.

Javiera, in a quest for knowledge that saw her visiting several countries, ultimately took a Permaculture Design Certificate course in New Zealand in 2006. One of her instructors, Grifen, quoted above, an accomplished kiwi permaculture practitioner and teacher, took an interest in both Javiera and El Manzano – resulting in Grifen leaving his country, culture and language behind to start anew in a strange land.

Investing in a future for all

Seeing great potential right here in El Manzano, Chile, the combined drive of Javiera and Grifen helped move the family’s plans ahead apace. Together they are seeing the kind of community development I’m endeavouring to share with you all. This development goes well beyond the kind of thinking that normally categorises land-holding elite. As well as seeking to transition the farm to sustainable systems and increasing diversity, some of the ‘oddities’ include:

• Encouraging and facilitating participatory decision-making for the community.
• A half/half system, where the farm supplies land, seeds, fertiliser (compost) and tools, and the villagers supply the labour. Come harvest time the villagers get half the produce. No money changes hands, no taxman, and fresh nutrient-dense food goes to families who do not possess sufficient land, and for very little input in time.
• Victor Carrion, the very supportive patriarch in this picture, is subsiding the farm with capital as it makes its transition.
• Maureen Raby, matriarch, is working with the family to bring to fruition long-studied plans to change the pattern of land ownership in the village. Legalities have yet to be finalised, but portions of land will be leased for token sums for long term use (100 years) by the community – for community facilities and common spaces (more details on this in a subsequent post). Rather than give land allotments to people outright – people who are not yet capable of making the most of it, or who are not fully aware of the crises we face and the need to maximise potential (and who may otherwise sell it or simply try to work independently of the community) – the plan will instead provide strong transition elements that incentise community development for a win-win-win scenario with promise.
• There are several transition initiatives underway (example from just my brief stay here). In fact, El Manzano is the only official transition community in Latin America.
• Assisting in times of difficulty – example.
• Five of the family members are working together as sustainability professionals to develop natural capital in the land, provide employment for villagers, and build an education centre that will increase capacity for the excellent instructional programs run here (Permaculture Design Certificate courses, full Permaculture Diplomas and even Bachelors and Masters degrees via Gaia University).

This scenario is very interesting to me. South America is well known for its massive land aggregation by the wealthy. Here many people are either Dueños (owners) or Campansinos (peasant farmers). Landlords or peasants. The family could easily just defend their ‘rights’ as land barons – and live for their own gain – but, instead, see their energies targeting the needs and development of the community around them. We see a determined effort to not only keep El Manzano alive, but to see it develop along wholly sustainable lines – to create a community that works in mutually beneficial ways, just like the symbiosis and synergism found amongst elements in a permaculture garden. And, more, the ambition is that this community will set an example to the rest of the region, country, continent and world for how people can work to create harmony and all the other elements that, in total, represent true wealth – fertile soils, clean water, sensible housing, and positive social interaction and interdependencies.

For even greater context – although the children of the community here go to school, many of the parents are illiterate. As such, it is harder for these people to progress their skills for land or any other kind of development. The family’s work to educate the community, and to educate in historically appropriate ways to build resilience (given our energy-challenged future) is thus a significant, positive intervention from people with the means to do so. In the context of peak oil and the inevitable social upheaval that will come with it, such community investment ultimately leads to self-preservation as well.

I said above that land redistribution rarely occurs without bloodshed. One exception that comes to mind – an alternative, if you will, to Che Guevara’s armed approach – is Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement. Vinoba Bhave was a disciple of Gandhi, and is often regarded as his spiritual successor. The Bhoodan movement was his effort to peacefully redistribute land – he walked from place to place asking the wealthy to voluntarily donate a portion of their land holdings to him, which he then passed on to the poor. In total some 5 million acres of land were redistributed, entirely peacefully, by these means.

But, it needs to be understood that, whether delivered voluntarily or by force of arms, distributing land to our current generation would, for the most part, end in catastrophe either way. Today, with an alarming proportion of mankind a few decades removed from life on the land, we’re now far more adept with our Xboxes and Chevrolets than we are with plants, life cycles and hand tools. With all of our technological smarts, we’re barely more capable at living off the land now as adults than we were the day our umbilicals were severed.

As much as many of us loathe the system we’re held captive in, the reality is if it were pulled down tomorrow, most of us would perish. This, again, screams of the need for transition – for investment in knowledge and commitment to training; for investment in community building.

In this sense, I wonder if there isn’t a place for feudalism, of an ethically motivated kind, where well positioned individuals and corporations – rather than defend their castle walls so they can cling to riches they can’t eat and hoarding their wealth for descendents who can’t possibly defend them from starving masses – consider the real needs of the future and start to use their means and potential to invest in natural capital and the knowledge needed to create and preserve it.

Imagine if the more privileged amongst us gave up the easter island attitude – vying to beat the other guy to take down the very last stand of trees – and instead put their means and energies into rebuilding the future, and in doing so creating sustainability and peace? Imagine land holders in every region coming to terms with reality, and beginning to work with the people around them? Imagine how fast the world could change for the better!

We share this planet with 6.8 billion people – more than half of whom are packed into urban centres. Re-educating the masses in sustainable and highly productive land management, and getting them onto plots they are incentivised to steward, has got to become a priority. I don’t know about you, but I shudder when I consider the alternatives.

Che Guevara took up the struggle by force of arms, living by the sword and dying at the hands of C.I.A.-backed Bolivian forces – summarily executed without trial. Today, I would propose, despite glaring flaws in his personal character, he has become the symbol for what is now a purely conceptual and impotent struggle against oppression and inequality. His face is meant to represent hope for the underdog, and be a warning to the leaders of unbridled capitalism – yet it has become little more than a logo, a brand name to be exploited by capitalism itself; a feel good but ineffectual abstraction to give a little identity to young capitalist drones.

But, as the world’s population rises, and resources deplete, and competition grows, the prospect of renewed and increasing calls for revolution seems likely. Desperate times lead to desperate measures. But, I like to dream of another kind of revolution – one based on foresight, on objectivity, on cooperation and on education. This kind of revolution needs to happen worldwide, but, at the very least, I think I can see these concepts coming to life here at El Manzano.

Continue on to read Part IX: Building Community Around a Permaculture University.

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

The site awaits workers in the early morning

The building stage of Miguel’s house has been underway for a few days now, so I figured it’s time to let you all have a peek. I’ll make this post mostly pictorial – but if you have questions or suggestions, feel free to comment/discuss.

The posts were all sourced from trees growing within
a few hundred metres of the site

Not that the dog could care less

Jose Carrión, brother to Javiera and Jorge, gets started
on framing for the foundation

The architect and builder discuss….

Wladimir and Santiago get mixing concrete by hand. The sand and stones are
all sourced locally (the sand from the nearby riverbed)

Minimal concrete is used – here for the nine structural supports
(as per the design plans shown at bottom of this post)

Stones are stamped down into the perimeter trench

Which is then laid with a superadobe base

The earth and sand dug out of the trench makes up most of the bags’ contents

Barbed wire goes between the bag layers, to keep them in place

Like the stones underneath, the superadobe bags are compacted by hand

Meanwhile, the posts are being prepared…

…before being bolted into place

It’s starting to come together!!

There’s nothing like unwinding around the campfire after a hard day’s work

Continue on to read Part VIII: a Little Historical Context

The El Manzano community hold their finished hand pumps

Over the course of my short visit here the power has gone out, for one reason or another, multiple times, and when it happens the taps totally refuse to surrender their precious charge. I thus find myself almost compulsively filling my stainless steel water bottle at every opportunity.

Our dependency on electricity is great enough without exacerbating the problem manyfold by having that vulnerability daisy-chain on to such a basic human need as water.

As mentioned, the massive earthquake a couple of months back helped villagers to register and acknowledge their vulnerability. The two hand pumps in the village were a critical element in their being able to avoid the chaos found in the towns and cities at the time. Ten days without power would otherwise have meant ten days without water.

A few days ago the El Manzano community rallied to increase their water security.

Jose demonstrates while the village looks on

Jose (below centre), who works for a local NGO that helps train poor farmers how to improve their situation with inexpensive, low tech solutions, came to El Manzano to get the village set up with manual water pumps. Rather than just bringing pre-assembled pumps along and handing them over, Jose brought the components only, and got the village involved, and working together, in their creation. The villagers took ownership of this element of their transition, and in the course of doing so are now intimately familiar with how the pumps work, so are now well prepared to create more if needed and to repair any that may break in the future.

The villagers get busy creating their own from scratch

There’s more to such gatherings than just reducing resiliency for individual families, of course. Such hands-on meetings create opportunity for the community to unite behind a common need and goal. Days like this are active and fun and serve to build relationships and strengthen friendships.

Even the children got involved

The resulting hand pumps are six metres in length – more than enough for the very high water table they have here, yet deep enough to help filter water that’s seeped down from above.

Is your community looking at ways to build resiliency for the energy-challenged times ahead? Why not give it some thought…. Aside from the practicalities, it can be a fun way for families – old and young – to get together to do something practical and rewarding.

Rather than fearing the future, we have opportunity to take it by the horns and steer it in a positive direction – one that gives us a localised interdependence that has a measure of hope of seeing us through difficult times.

Or, the other option is to just sit and trust the government to take care of us….

Continue on to Part VII: The House Building Gets Underway

Meet Angel Carrillo (left) and Santiago Naudon (right). Angel and Santiago are both architects – architects with a major green bent. After the meeting last week these two likeable and enthusiastic fellows have been drawing up design plans to create the two new demonstration homes for the El Manzano community.

Miguel (again, see last week’s post) will be first to see his house get built. Rather than dictate design ideas to Miguel, Angel and Santiago worked with him over a few days, showing drafts and making recommendations, until a final design plan emerged.

Santiago, Angel and Miguel discuss plans at Miguel’s house site

The resulting plans (see diagrams at bottom), are an attempt to find a happy balance between minimising environmental impact (creating a home with low ongoing energy demand and using materials sourced as locally as possible), minimising cost (both because of minimal secured funds and also to ensure the structure is feasible for most Chileans) and creating a home that is both highly comfortable and strong enough to take the worst Chile’s earthquakes can throw at them.

After the plans were completed they were shown to the builders put in charge of the construction process.

Angel explains the design to the builders

Some of the design features include:

• aspect to maximise winter sun and increase summer shade
• fire in centre
• wet back fire (heats water). The house may have a solar hot water heater, if funds allow
• Made primarily of straw and light clay – flexible materials (high straw content) and excellent insulation
• Timber frame, which makes the house flexible for earthquakes
• low roof for faster heating
• 25cm window sills made of stone, to absorb heat during the day and give it off again in the night. Eaves are designed so that only the winter sun will reach the stone sill
• front door in north, back door in south – when both opened in summer it will create a cross-flow to draw cool air through the house
• Capacity to take a green roof

The house site, with new house positioned for sun

Designed for single occupancy, but allowing for guests to access sanitation
facilities (left) without needing to go through Miguel’s bedroom (right). Visitors
can access through the rear of the house. Bedroom window gets morning sun,
living room throughout the day.

Roof designed to be able to host a green roof. Eaves the right length to
protect from hot summer sun, but to open home to winter rays.

Front view of house

Continue on to read Part VI: Increasing Water Security

The ‘Adobe House’, El Manzano’s ecological demonstration house.
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

In the middle of the little El Manzano village, on display to all in the community, is the ‘Adobe House’. This demonstration house is a project by Eco Escuela El Manzano to demonstrate to the community several low-tech but effective techniques for improving quality of life whilst reducing a home’s impact on the environment.

Houses made from adobe bricks are common in Chile, although, increasingly, like many ‘developing’ countries, people are turning towards energy disastrous concrete instead. The Adobe House was not purpose built – rather, it is actually a very old house that was retrofitted in 2008. It is thus a good example of what many villagers could do if they had a mind to.

I’ll share a few of its features.

Against one wall they built a simple conservatory. The earth brick wall absorbs heat during the day, warming the home, and radiates it back out during the night – to ensure an extended frost-free period for vegetables. Well positioned terracotta tiles or other high thermal mass elements can increase this energy buffering as well (even just barrels of water can do the trick). Though not incorporated here, another addition can be to add vents between the conservatory and the home to allow excess heat to pass into the house.

During the hotter parts of the year the ends of the conservatory are easily opened up.

Outside the house and conservatory there’s a trellis hung heavy in grape. It creates an excellent, and edible, shade area under which sits an outdoor table and benches for summer breakfasts and lunches. The foliage dies back during the winter months to let more sunshine through.

Next to this sits a fantastic earth oven. And yes, the bread was as good as it looks:

Other elements include the all-important manual pump for water – without which this community would have suffered dearly during the recent earthquake (see Part I) – and a greywater system for biologically cleaning household waste water, returning it, slowly, to the water table after several stages of natural cleaning.

Potty Training

The ‘centrepiece’ of this demonstration site, however, is this:

A composting toilet (or ‘dry toilet’ as they’re called here)

This elevated, dual-chamber throne room (similar to the one at Zaytuna Farm) serves as the home’s fertiliser collection station. When enconsed therein, or thereon, as the case may be, the room is notable for its lack of odor. Any odor.

Although composting humanure should be regarded as an urgent… um… call of nature everywhere (the world is running out of potable water, and yet we’re crapping in it, and we still haven’t come to terms with the significance of phosphorus recycling yet either), it is arguably even more important here in El Manzano.

I say this for two connected reasons: 1) most of the community here rely on ‘long drop’ toilets (simple holes dug into the ground), and 2) the water table in El Manzano is incredibly close to the surface – in many places barely a metre below ground.

In case the obvious eludes you – this means that these smelly, bacteria-filled repositories will be seeping into the water table…. Yes, this is the same water table they’re pumping water from so as to quench their thirsty lips. If it weren’t for the very low population density here I think we could be looking at some serious health issues.

The Eco Escuela El Manzano team are therefore turning the problem into the solution, by demonstrating how a potentially disastrous waste stream can instead become a resource. The Abobe House has a constant stream of students and interns residing in it – all of whom are building site fertility rather than contributing to water contamination.

Continue on to read Part V: The Design Stage

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Further Reading:

• Compost Toilet – Farallones (237kb PDF)
• Compost Toilet – Minimus (459kb PDF)
• Urine-Diverting Toilet, Vietnam (3.4mb PDF)
• Low-Cost Compost Toilets (3.45mb PDF)
• The Humanure Handbook

Meet Doris. Prior to the quake, before the little El Manzano community decided it was pertinent to seriously consider things they could do to build resiliency into their village, Doris was already paying attention. She took the advice of the Eco Escuela El Manzano team and got herself a hand pump, so if the lights went out, it didn’t have to mean she and her family would be without water as well. Hence her describing the fact that the community had TWO hand pumps to supply water after the quake hit.

Now the whole village wants to get a hand pump. Imagine that.

I’m uploading this after 15 hours without power. Some mischievous people nearby cut cables during the ‘wee hours of the night’ – taking a good length of them so they could sell the copper wire they contain. Quakes, cable theft, energy crisis – whatever. Low tech hand pumps are saviours here where all water must otherwise come via electricity powered pumps.

The chicken/egg argument comes into play here – as a community builds new homes, while the new homes build the community.

Miguel Louis Suazo looks forward to moving out of his shed
[Picture taken with ultra wide angle lens - room is much smaller than it appears]

The night of my arrival almost two weeks ago, I was invited to an El Manzano village meeting. Being dog tired, I wondered if I shouldn’t skip it so I could work more efficiently the next day, but, nevertheless, asked what would be on the table for discussion. It was being held to discuss who, amongst the many poor in the community, should receive the new earthquake-resistant, eco-friendly demonstration homes Grifen, Javiera and team were busy trying to secure funding for.

Initially these homes were intended to replace the two homes damaged in the quake, but one of these families, camped out with children in tents with the nights getting colder, needed to work quickly to put a roof over their own heads. Waiting for funding was not an option. With a lot of assistance from the El Manzano community, they managed to bring a replacement in from nine kilometres away on a truck (pink house pictured below).

This event was, Grifen described, the first time he observed the community really getting together to unselfishly support one family. It seems to have set a precedent for what, you will observe from the rest of this article, may well become a continuing trend.

Having one of the homes already replaced has really worked well in this instance, as many of the villagers here do not have a place they can call home. Some families are even split up from necessity – sons, daughters, husbands, wives, are billeted throughout the village where a corner can be found for them. Now there was the opportunity for this ‘extra’ home to find a good… er… home! Given this understanding, I wondered what the mood of the meeting would be, and how it would progress. I wondered how such a decision would/could be made. Who should get the new home?

Needless to say, I was going to the meeting!

The object was for the villagers to work together to build two low-cost, simple, sustainable and comfortable demonstration homes – which would then be showcased to local government as sensible examples of reconstruction for the recent earthquake, for future disasters, and, of course, for better housing technologies for all Chileans.

Representatives of the village families met together to discuss who should
get the new demonstration houses to be built

Grifen lead out in the meeting. Rather than dive right in and try to immediately ‘vote’ or otherwise find a suitable owner for the new ‘extra’ home, Grifen instead asked the representatives how this decision should be made. In other words, Grifen didn’t come with a pre-thought idea of how to go about this, but put it on the community to agree on a plan for their own process of elimination.

The community decided to make a grid on the board, that would be a matrix of the few simple parameters that all community residents fit within:

1. People with land but no house
2. People with land but a ‘crap’ house
3. People with no land and a crap house
4. People with no land and no house

They then started to write down where each family fitted within these categories. Some people had a ‘crap’ house to live in, but were living on land owned by their employer, so they didn’t want to put community effort and funding into land that wasn’t their own. They agreed that they should eliminate families within this part of the matrix.

People without land to build a house on were ruled out from necessity.

Finally it was decided that one older, single man should have the extra home – as he had land, but didn’t have a house. Funding was tight, but there should be enough for two small single resident homes. Up until now this particular individual had been living in a shed that was tacked on behind someone else’s house (see picture at top of this article, and the one below), and so really would benefit from having a place of his own:

61 year old Miguel sits outside his room
– a shed tacked on to the back of a house

It was great to see the community talking these things over, objectively, and coming to a compassionate resolution. And, yet again, as I did when covering Sarvodaya, I saw that the greatest need for community transition is community awakening. Blending people’s hopes, dreams and ambitions and merging them in constructive ways to align with current economic, political and environmental realities, is a dance that’s both challenging to enact and beautiful to watch. It cannot be hurried, it cannot be coerced.

Now we have the community of El Mazano starting to comprehend the implications of climate change and peak oil, and choosing to work together, to help one another, to work towards a united goal of building resilience and growing their community along healthier lines. The Eco Escuela El Manzano team are merely offering information, support and discussion facilitation. It’s up to the community to respond, and it appears beautiful green shoots of life are starting to spring forth from the seeds sown.

The new homes will be simple structures, just large enough for a single resident. They are being designed by two professional volunteer architects, who you’ll meet soon in this series, and will be built by all the able-bodied people in the community. I’m looking forward to seeing this come together, and hope you’ll follow along in this process!

As for Miguel. Well, he looked rather surprised, but very happy. On his way out the door at the close of the meeting, he took Grifen by the hand and simply said, "muchas gracias".

Stay tuned for the next edition….