Mugre ra! Basura ra! y Esmog ra ra ra!

El ecoloco habria estado orgulloso de las 4mil personas que disfrutaron de un evento en un parque de diversiones en Tel Aviv. Ayer trabaje muchas horas preparando pizzas para muchas personas que tienen una vision muy distinta de la mia en lo que a basura se refiere. Fue un evento para empleados, celebridades y colados de un canal de television. Habian puestos de comida y bebida y juegos mecanicos, todo gratis. Cada puesto de comida regalaba productos con envoltura, en platos desechables o botellas (donde yo estuve solo cartones y servilletas, al menos..). El poco tiempo que tuve para dar la vuelta y observar fue suficiente para entristecerme, la basura se desbordaba fuera de los botes, la gente estaba sentada rodeada de basura en el piso y todo parecia muy natural. En el puesto de pizzas estuvimos como locos tratando de satisfacer las demandas de gente a la que no le falta nada, pero esta lista para quejarse porque tiene que esperar 3 minutos a que salga la pizza del horno o porque no tiene exactamente los ingredientes que quieren. Tambien tuvimos que limpiar constantemente la basura que dejaban en nuestro puesto, botellas de las que tomaron solo un traguito, servilletas, plastico, todo porque no pudieron caminar 10 pasos al bote de basura mas cercano y tirarlo ahi.

Donde vivo reusamos o reciclamos casi todos los materiales que pasan por aqui, hacemos composta de los restos de comida (o se lo damos a las gallinas), y solo lo que de plano esta en un estado deplorable y apestoso se va a la basura.

En contraste, hoy como cada ultimo sabado del mes organizamos un 'mercado'(shuk en hebreo) en el que la gente trae lo que ya no quiere y puede llevarse cosas que otra gente trajo. Lo que para uno es basura para otro es util. El shuk nos muestra una y otra vez la abundancia a nuestro alrededor, llegan miles de cosas, le gente sale con bolsas llenas y aun asi siempre sobrea al final para donar o reusar. Cuando necesitamos algo especifico lo pedimos (al universo..) y muchas veces ha llegado con el shuk. Desde un cable, cera, utensilios, mapas, libros.

Vivimos en una epoca de escasez, escasez que nosotros mismos hemos creado porque en realidad lo que nos rodea es abundancia pero muchas veces no logramos verla porque estamos corriendo para ganar mas dinero para comprar mas cosas.

No espero que todos vivan como yo pero si puedo influenciar el sentido de abundancia y los patrones de consumo de unas cuantas personas estare satisfecha.

Fijaciones

Hay jardineros que tienen tendencias bien definidas...

Lotan

Kibbutz Lotan is the place where I found the path I'm on, the path of Permaculture, of doing things, of acting small scale and influencing the world in a big way. We went to speak about Yesh meain 2 weeks ago. I arrived with the usual anticipation, of seeing the progress at the Bustan Neighborhood, of walking into the dining room and hugging people that always greet me with a smile, of walking around the Eco-kef to check what's new (more vegetables, or another structure in the children's playground).

When I studied the Green Apprenticeship Course (GA) a year and a half ago we worked on the bustan neighborhood that was to host students like us in the future. During this visit we saw a neighborhood with students finally living and working there, making it more functional and prettier every day, a dream come true for many in Lotan and a sense of completion for the many hands who have worked there.

The bustan has now 8 geodesic domes made out of a steel frame, straw bales and mud plaster, they are beautiful and very nice, you almost don't feel like going out. Here is a picture of one of them.

The new composting toilets are one of the nicest I have sat on, so nice I could easily spend there a couple of hours.

Every dome is different, with its own personality.

The showers are also a very pleasurable experience, too bad it's not environmentally friendly to take long showers...

We started this part of the bustan! A grill and a wood oven.

This huge project is maybe one of the most important endeavors Lotan has embarked on, a constructed wetland to treat the kibbutz's waste water.

tan tan, the end

News from the Farm 2

The eco-educational center to be has a roof now!

I'm back at the farm and it feels like I never left. There are many more flowers, and a washing mashine with a tank that can be conected to fill the WC, and one hen less (but one rooster screaming his lungs out everyday), and carrots, potato, calendula and garlic growing on the old sand seedhouse, and yet everything is as small and beautiful as it was before. There is still hard work, financial need and abundance of resources and great people (it's truly amazing the amount of fantastic people that pass through here).

After many plans, many mistakes, many solutions, I am proud to announce that our composting toilet is now in use and I was the very first one to take a shit (sorry but I had to say it like this) and it feels great! I am no longer polluting perfectly clean water when instead I can create compost.

Here is Ilai, doing the things that would take me hours or months in no time. Here you can see the little ethiopian-style house he built.

This is the sand greenhouse with root crops.



Our carrots and peas are sweeeetttt azzzz

Idan and Lara are working on the taboon

Lara, Renato and Maya were our guardian angels during winter and part of spring (taking care of business and of Merav while I was gone)






After months hoping to have a grey water system, we got one and not without a story, when digging the hole to have our little constructed wetland we found a hand grenade from the period before independence. This is our very own constructed wetland, it cleans our greywater an will irrigate a tropical tree area.

Something new also happened while I was away, Yeshmeain started its first Permaculture course, it is a diverse, smart and fun 8-people group, and it's led by Shai which is a pleasure to listen to everytime. For me it's also an opportunity to keep on learning and to increase my eco-freako-hebrew-vocabulary

A 'moving' for our chickies was also planned, so one afternoon we decided to give it a go and now the chicks are sooooo happy under the mish mish and the pomegranate looking for bugs all day.

love thy neighbour

Two weeks ago our neighbour was killed in a car accident, it took me a while to reflect on it and write. Chemik was a kind, quiet man who gave us a hand with whatever he thought could be of help to us, be it cow dung, straw, tree branches, ropes, you name it. Sudden deaths are sometimes harder to accept, and yet somehow we have to believe that people who leave have somehow fulfilled their mission here among us, otherwise we could stay angry or sad forever. It brought back memories of people I loved and passed away and of how difficult it was at the time to accept.
I guess it is also a reminder of the fact that every moment is precious, that we should live in the present and enjoy as much as possible. It is also a reminder of how dangerous roads are in Israel (more people die on them every year than on wars or any other cause) and again to be present, especially when driving.
Here are some pictures of the Jezreel valley and Nahalal, the place that saw Chemik be born and pass away.

The man who planted trees

This story makes you want to go out and plant trees (especially on a dusty hot day like today), it's inspiring and moving. Make room for it (it's 30 min) it's worth it or read the story directly from the internet (just google it).

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Middlesex

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is probably one of the best novels I have read. I usually read novels very fast but with this one I tokk my time, enjoying his writing style and hoping not to finish it soon.

It was published in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. Ambitious and brilliantly conceived, Middlesex traces a rampant gene through generations of the Stephenides family, which caused narrator Cal Stephenides to be “reborn” as a boy when he’d previously been raised as a girl. Not a “him” in the strictest sense then, but a hermaphrodite. Cal’s story traces his/her Greek roots through the Depression, WWII and the Detroit race riots, up to the present.

Unlike most of my posts, this is a lot of words and a few pictures, here are a few excerpts of the book, enjoy!


"I'm working up with the foregoing to a physical description of myself...
As a baby, even as a little girl, I possessed an awkward, extravagant beauty. No single feature was right in itself and yet, taken all together, something captivating emerged. An inadvertent harmony was achieved by my irregular features. A changeableness in my expressions, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, always having second thoughts."

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy" or "regret." Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "

"To resume my parents' story, I need to bring up a very embarrassing memory for a Greek American: Michael Dukakis on his tank. Do you remember that? The single image that doomed our hopes of getting a Greek into the White House: Dukakis, wearing an oversize army helmet, bouncing along on top of an M41 Walker Buldog. Trying to look presidential but looking instead a little boy on an amusement park ride. (Every time a Greek gets near the Oval Office something goes wrong. First it was Agnew with tax evasion and it was Dukakis with the tank.) Before Dukakis climbed up on that armored vehicle, before he took off his J. Press suit and put on that army fatigues, we all felt - I speak for my fellow Greek Americans, whether they want me to or not - a sense of exultation. This man was the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States! He was from Massachusetts, like the Kennedys! (...) Look at the bumper stickers on all the Volvos. "Dukakis." A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking Americans like their president to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice. Why did Mario Cuomo decided against running for president? What conclusion did he come to as he withdrew to think the matter through? Unlike Michael Dukakis, who was from academic Massachusetts, Mario Cuomo was from New York and knew what was what. Cuomo knew he'd never win. Too liberal for the moment, certainly. But also: too many vowels."