This giant greets you when you get off the Mass Pike in Chicopee, which makes me VERY glad I’m staying at the Motel 6 here!

The ride up with Kai was great. Turns out his mom is one of the few midwives still doing home births, and she was our backup for our second daughter. We have a lot in common and started brainstorming ways to get the word out. He’s getting his Certificate in August at Finger Lakes. Steve Gabriel is presenting tomorrow, so hopefully they can hook up together.

Brian managed to make it down too and we were introduced while touring Tierra de Oportunidad farm, somewhere between the goats and the Paso Fino horses. He remarked that he thought he was getting away from the farm for a few days, only to be back on the farm.

The farm itself is pretty amazing- 30 acres in the heart of a highly developed industrial city. Four acres here form the main entrance and “public facing” part of the farm, but behind this is another 26 acres of amazing veg and animals. I’ll try and post a picture of that tomorrow.

I met a bunch of folks including Tom and Philip who post at Energy Bulletin, then Eric who gave the keynote, which basically boils down to “get to work!” We need a Permaculture Platform on issues such as Energy, Transportation, Consumption, Poverty, Education and so on. We also need some plant breeding programs to do things like make air potatoes hardy in the northeast. He demonstrated the shared design process that the farm underwent to reach its current state, what the elements would be and how they would be placed. One thing that he said that continues to become more clear to me is that we do not lack for technical solutions to all these problems- they boil down to social and political problems.

Tomorrow looks like a monster day. I’m looking at sessions by Ethan Rowland (Scaling Up), Steve Gabriel (Starting a Permie Project), Kay Cafasso (Natural Building) and Dave Jacke (the Certification Issue). Eric’s also going to conduct a tour downtown to the Nuestras Raices Centro, and then there’s…

Permaculture Olympics featuring Dale Swigging, Contour Conundrum, Salad Forage Triathalon and other events. I wonder if we can field a team?

Anyway, it’s getting late and my new playlist is almost finished, so I’m going to hit it. Will check in again tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 2:31 am and is filed under Permaculture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.