The Earthville Mayor's Blog

Now That I Know You, What Is Your Name?

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:11:10 -0700

Smiles all around at the close of our second annual silent meditation retreat with SanghaSeva at the Dharmalaya Institute in the Indian Himalayas.

It's always fascinating to spend a week with people without hearing their voices, and then finally get to 'meet' them, while having a sense of already knowing them in a way.

Now we're preparing to welcome new arrivals for an eleven-day service-learning retreat in sustainable building. Good times!

Growing Skyward

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:07:00 -0800

LET'S SEE, WHERE WERE WE...?

When we left you with the season finale cliffhanger last June, we had just bundled up our baby building with prayers that she'd survive the monsoon rains without a roof. That was asking a lot from a big mud sandcastle, and we put her fate in the hands of a few well-fastened tarps, some slate shingles sheltering the tops of the walls, and a whole lotta flax husk mixed into the mud plaster in which we dressed her up for the occasion. Well, the monsoon was merciless: It was the longest and heaviest in recent memory at nearly four months of battering downpours. But it turns out flax is up to the task!

When i returned in early November and made my way up the hill to the site, i was delighted to find the building in almost exactly the same condition as when we had left in June. One internal wall had been damaged by a leak in the tarp, but that was repaired with one day's work. Everything else, amazingly, was in great shape. Score one big one for linseed husk! And thanks also to Raju, our site manager, for regular visits in the pouring rain to check up on things and fix what needed fixing.

The other big question over the monsoon was how would our "vertical orchard" fare? One of the big projects we took on last year was reshaping and replanting the giant landslide that threatened to erode even more of our hillside if it should have to face another monsoon unchecked. But check it we did: with our spirited group of volunteers from last March's service retreat with SanghaSeva, we landscaped the entire landslide area with microterraces, transplanted patches of turf onto them, and then planted over a hundred trees, bamboo stands, and roses, all of which sent their roots into the loose soil to help give it a firmer footing. Well, upon return, i was overjoyed to see that not only was the hillside intact, with no further erosion, but also all but one of our trees were alive and thriving. A few had grown over a meter during the monsoon. It was a joy to see that we had succeeded in transforming a small disaster into a big asset. Three or four years from now, the vertical orchard should be bearing sweet fruit for the eyes and the belly.

First up on the autumn agenda: more mud bricks. We rounded up the crew and got to work making thousands of these rectangular mud pies, destined to become the upstairs walls. Our skilled carpenters from Sidhbari, who had spent some of the monsoon making our window and door frames at home, also resumed work on site, preparing beams for the long-awaited roof.

Then, come the new moon of December, it was time to harvest bamboo like there's no tomorrow. After having been caught short of the titan of the grasses last spring, we weren't about to learn that lesson a second time. We dispatched a legion of able-bodied bamboo whisperers, who returned with several hundred poles of strong, thick specimens, which we promptly set to smoking in our kiln to make them less appealing to termites and more appealing to the gods of structural integrity. We're told we have more than enough now, but we'll be harvesting more during the new moon of January, just to be sure we have plenty for the huts and whatever else we may be inspired to build with this beautiful, versatile, and rapidly renewable building material. We like bamboo!

Now, with all the pieces in place, we resume the delightful work of assembling the puzzle. The wooden beams and bamboo joists are laid across the tops of the ground floor walls to give the masons a place to stand (and a long enough lever, naturally) while building the upstairs walls.

Simultaneously, the walls continue to climb.

And, gradually, the picture starts to come together...

The bamboo joists that support the ground floor ceiling are covered with split and flattened bamboo, creating both an attractive ceiling for the ground floor and a strong base for the floor above.

With the upstairs walls in place, at last we are able to place the trusses to support the roof.

And, at this stage, the emerging shape of the building gives tantalizing glimpses of what’s to come.

Now it's all about fashioning all that storied bamboo into the framework that will support our lovely slate roof, which we're racing to complete in time for our two March retreats with SanghaSeva (which this year will include a one-week silent retreat with revered meditation teacher Ajay Pal Singh of Lucknow, followed by a ten-day service learning retreat on sustainable living, akin to last year's program).

TREES!

Our other big winter project is trees, trees, and more trees! In this climate, winter is the time to plant non-citrus fruit trees, and a fresh blanket of snow is now melting into the soil to moisten it, welcoming new arrivals. In the next few weeks, we'll be planting hundreds of saplings. You can join us, too, by sponsoring tree plantings at $2 per tree, which helps offset your carbon footprint while providing green jobs through the winter for our local villagers. See the Earthville Orchards page for details on this win-win project.

The exciting news for the Earthville Orchards is that the Libra Foundation, who generously supported our tree-plantings last year, has awarded us a matching grant for 2012. We need to raise $5100 by February 21, and every donation we receive will be matched by the Libra Foundation. More bark for the buck! See the Earthville Orchards page for details on this win-win-win program.

2012 PROGRAMS

Far be it from us to wait for construction to be finished before starting our educational programs: the creation of the Institute is half the fun and a great opportunity for learning. And, of course, you're all invited to join in the fun or support from afar.

CARE TO GET INVOLVED?

Here are a few ways you can participate:

VOLUNTEER: Come to Bir (in northern India) to volunteer. details »
DONATE: Make a charitable donation to support our eco-construction and the green jobs it creates (tax-deductible in the US and India). details »
SPONSOR TREES: Offset your carbon emissions for the year, while creating more green jobs, by sponsoring tree plantings in the Earthville Orchards at just $2 US per tree (also tax-deductible). details »
SPREAD THE WORD: Forward this story to your friends, post it on your blog, share this story on Facebook and "like" the Earthville and Dharmalaya FB pages, send forth a mighty tweet, or, you know, talk to people. :-)

For more information about the Dharmalaya Institute and how you can get involved, see the Dharmalaya website.

Monsoon Update

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 07:07:00 -0700

The biggest news on the construction of the Dharmalaya Institute is in regard to our race against time to get the roof on our baby building before the onslaught of the monsoon rains this month... and the update is that, well, we couldn't win, so we've done our best to change the game.

To understand the snag, one must first have an idea of the way traditional roofs are built here in the Kangra Valley. Local roofs are gable roofs made of slate shingles fastened to a truss of wooden struts supported by bamboo rafters. The strength of the roof relies primarily upon the bamboo, and the strength of the bamboo, in turn, depends upon not only size and age of the bamboo but also the time of year when it is harvested.

For maximum durability, the bamboo must be cut during the new moon of late December or early January. If that sounds like hocus pocus, then consider that this is the time of year when the plant is most dormant and thus its sugar content is lowest. If bamboo is cut at other times of year, the more plentiful sugars harden as starches, a delicacy for termites and other critters. When feasted upon, such bamboo loses much of its strength and no longer can be counted upon to do its job holding the building up (and so must be replaced, generally within 10-15 years). When bamboo is cut at its most dormant moment, however, it contains very little that is appetizing to insects and thus the structural integrity and strength of the bamboo remains intact for decades (and, in some cases, such as when it is thoroughly smoked, it can last for centuries).

Bamboo kiln

Bamboozled

Accordingly, during the new moons of December and January, we organized a couple of big bamboo harvesting expeditions.

Turns out they weren't big enough, though: we wound up with less than half of the bamboo required to complete the building. If you're thinking, "oops," then you got the picture.

How could such a miscalculation happen? Well, turns out there are different ways to count bamboo around here: some people count one pole as one pole, while others count one pole as two or three poles (depending on the sizes into which it will be cut). Our local crew who did the cutting were not familiar with the counting method used by the people who told us how many to cut, so a request for 180 was taken as 180 cut poles, when what was actually intended was 180 uncut poles (which would translate into as many as 360 or even 540 cut poles, depending on the lengths of the cuttings). By the time any of us caught the error, it was May — far too late to harvest any additional bamboo — and suddenly we realized that there was simply no way that we would be able to build the roof this year.

What to do? We had just completed the construction of the walls of the ground floor level, but had not yet begun raising the upstairs walls. Better to leave it that way, all agreed, for the simple reason that a shorter wall is easier to protect from the elements than a taller one. So, knowing now that our construction would be halted till autumn, our attention turned completely to the pressing puzzle at hand: how could we protect our half-finished mud-brick building from the assault of the impending monsoon rains without a proper roof — and fast?

Rain damage

Shelter Seeks Same

Studying the rain and wind patterns during the pre-monsoon showers of May, and the way they affected our vulnerable adobe walls, we saw that the north face of the building was hardest hit and thus most in need of protection, while other areas had different needs and the various shapes and sizes of spaces begged for different solutions. So, our eco-architect, mentor, and friend, Didi Contractor, walked us through the creation of a patchwork plan to give each part of the building what it needed while ensuring that drainage from each section would be channeled in such as a way as not to create trouble in a neighboring section.

First, we prepped what little useable, smoked bamboo we had at the ready to build a ceiling over the office and adjacent hallway, topped with a thin layer of ferrocrete that will serve as the base of the floor for the room upstairs — and, meanwhile, will help keep the water out, allowing us to use the office and hallway for storage of our stockpile of unused mud bricks through the monsoon.

Ferrocrete ceiling

Next, we built a temporary framework of (unseasonal) bamboo to support an ad-hoc roof of plastic tarps over the bedrooms. Then, a system of drainage ditches encircling the building to channel the torrents away from the walls and safely distribute the water across the hillside.

Bamboo truss

Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

One of the most important protective measures we took was to render the walls of the building with a plaster made of mud mixed with the husk and chaff of flax (yes, flax — the same plant that produces the seeds that are added to some supposedly salubrious cereals for marketing purposes but actually don't do a bit of good for the health when the seeds are eaten whole because they're too small to be broken up by the teeth so they pass right through the body and come out looking just the way they did in the cereal box). It's well known in the green building world that flax seed oil (a.k.a. linseed oil), in addition to being (genuinely) beneficial for the body, is also an effective water repellant and sealant for walls and floors, but we learned that the chaff (the husk of the flax seeds and the straw of the surrounding plant) is also useful as a waterproofing agent when generously mixed into the mud plaster.

Mud and flax render

As soon as we completed an initial render on the critical north wall, Mama Nature gave us a chance to test-drive the flax plaster, in the form of a couple of thunderstorms that rocked the valley and pelted the newly flaxed-up walls of our building. The results were strikingly impressive: while areas of wall lacking the flax chaff were visibly eroded by just a few hours of strong rain, the walls with the mud-and-flax render were almost completely unchanged. Eureka!

Seeing what a difference the flax chaff makes, we went on to render all the exterior and interior walls of the building for good measure. Practitioner's note: applying a fine mud plaster by hand is an epicurean joy, but can trigger cravings if one can't escape the associations with chocolate frosting. ;-)

Wrapping It Up

For double protection, we strung a collection of tarps across the bamboo frameworks and draped a few more over the vulnerable northern walls, and then carefully laid slate tiles all along the tops of the walls to serve as a first defense against the most direct path of the rain.

A raincoat of tarpaulins

Altogether, it seems we now have the best possible solution, given the circumstances. We'll have a skeleton crew working through the monsoon season (mostly planting trees), so of course they'll be monitoring the building as well as the landslide and the new drainage systems. And, as our local friends say, "rest is stars."

All wrapped up

We plan to resume construction work in sunny November. We're planning at least two or three intensive service-learning retreats for autumn 2011 and spring 2012. And, of course, you're all welcome to join in the fun or support from afar.

Wanna get involved?

Here are a few ways you can participate:

VOLUNTEER: Come to Bir (in northern India) in late 2011 or spring 2012 to volunteer. details »
DONATE: Make a charitable donation to support our eco-construction and the green jobs it creates (tax-deductible in the US and India). details »
SPONSOR TREES: Offset your carbon emissions for the year, while creating more green jobs, by sponsoring tree plantings in the Earthville Orchards at just $2 US per tree (also tax-deductible). details »
SPREAD THE WORD: Forward this story to your friends, post it on your blog, share this story on Facebook and "like" the Earthville and Dharmalaya FB pages, send forth a mighty tweet, or, you know, talk to people. :-)

For more information about the Dharmalaya Institute and how you can get involved, see the Institute's page on the Dharmalaya website.

Planting a Vertical Orchard

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

This week, during our first service retreat program (see news article) on the Dharmalaya Institute's new Himalayan eco-campus, we had a precious opportunity: our friends at SanghaSeva brought sixteen wonderful, hard-working volunteers from all over the globe to work with us, so we figured this was the time to take on a couple of major projects that could only be done with that kind of person power.

The March 2011 retreat family

The first endeavor was digging and planting the first organic herb and veggie beds at the site of the Institute, which was a lot of fun. Everyone got to contribute their ideas and inspirations, and the final result was a great blend of all the various elements drawn from each of the participants' unique experiences and creative ingenuity.

Sowing the first herb and veggie seeds

But the next project was a monster challenge: As some of you who have been following the Dharmalaya news page may recall, we were dealt a surprise from Mama Nature during the summer 2010 monsoon rains, in the form of a landslide that knocked out two large sections of the access road to our construction site and left a steep, jagged slope of loose scree, barren of life, that threatened to tumble even further in the next rains. We'd had to make quick repairs to the road in order to resume construction, but it was clear that if we didn't find a way to landscape the landslide and repopulate it with plants with strong root systems to prevent further erosion, we would surely lose a lot more of the hillside (and, with it, our road, again) in the next monsoon rains. It was a daunting prospect, and one of our hardy volunteers later confessed, with good humor, that when i first mentioned the plan to landscape this rockslide to create an orchard (as a part of our new Earthville Orchards project), he thought i was "completely mad." If so, the results we've achieved so far would seem to argue in favor of a touch of madness now and then. ;-)

The first step was to venture out onto the loose scree of the slope to dig a network of footholds and eventually paths so that we could traverse the whole landslide area and stand securely enough to dig deeper holes for planting. These were developed into a series of microterraces covered with bits of turf transplanted from nearby.

Carving footholds & microterraces

On the 3rd day, the new saplings arrived: about 12 varieties, including pomegranate, guava, lemon, and grapefruit. A few dozen rosebushes, too.

Hmm... which of these babies wants to go where? The pomegranates like drier, sandier soil, but otherwise let's mix it up...

It took a day and a half of resourceful teamwork to dig the holes, fill them with a mixture of dung, compost, soil, and sand, then carry the saplings out onto the slope...

And finally, the saplings began to find their homes in the ground. As we planted the trees, we filled in the surrounding areas with patches of turf transplanted from nearby.

Most of the volunteers had never planted trees before, and they took great care to give each sapling a happy home.

A nearly-vertical orchard, beginning to take shape...

We're off to a great start, thanks to the generous hard work of our volunteers and our local crew, but there's a lot of work left to be done. Many more trees, flowers, grass patches, and bamboo shoots must be planted before the monsoon rains begin in June.

Would you like to help? Here are a few ways you can participate:

VOLUNTEER: Come to Bir (in northern India) this spring (or next fall, or spring 2012) to volunteer. details »
DONATE: Make a charitable donation to support our eco-construction and the green jobs it creates (tax-deductible in the US and India). details »
SPONSOR TREES: Offset your carbon emissions for the year, while creating more green jobs, by sponsoring tree plantings in the Earthville Orchards at just $2 US per tree (also tax-deductible). details »
SPREAD THE WORD: Forward this story to your friends, post it on your blog, share this story on Facebook and "like" the Earthville and Dharmalaya FB pages, send forth a mighty tweet, or, you know, talk to people. :-)

For more information about the Dharmalaya Institute and how you can get involved, see the Institute's page on the Dharmalaya website.

A Picture of Progress

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:40:00 -0700

We'll be posting a detailed update on the construction of the Dharmalaya Institute soon. For now, here's a little picture of progress... :-)

Fueled by Kindness

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 08:49:00 -0800

So much in life can't happen without the kindness of others, and this is especially true here in the Himalayas.

In a "subsistence-plus" economy such as we have here in Himachal Pradesh, most villagers have enough land to feed their families, more or less, so they don't necessarily need to work for anyone but themselves in order to survive. Like their fellow humans across the globe, though, modern Himalayan villagers seek more than mere survival. They want some comfort and convenience, and they want a better life for their children.

The costs of staple foods, fuel, and energy are rising continually and, these days, a lot of the locals also want an addition to their home and an upgrade from bicycle to scooter to motorcycle to car — maybe even an iPhone. Even in the enchanted forests of the Himalayas, these things don't grow on trees. If you want anything more than you can grow on your own land, you'll need to find paid work. For all of these reasons, most of the villagers here must look for outside jobs.

Even so, they don't show up for work just because you pay them. If these dignified Himalayan villagers leave their own land to work for someone else, it's not only because the wages are compelling, but also because they think the work itself is worth doing and they have a reasonable degree of respect for the people with whom and for whom they're working. Otherwise, most self-respecting Himachalis would sooner stay home (and, truth be told, they often do, as anyone who has tried to build or repair something here will attest).

So, in such a climate, what happens when the work to be done is even more difficult than usual, the location remote, and the conditions somewhat unreasonable? And what if the one who needs the work done is a nonprofit organization with a sandal-strap budget and a mountain to scale?

Well, it all comes down to kindness.

Take our recent avalanche, for example. This past August, exceptionally heavy monsoon rains triggered a massive landslide that knocked out over 300 feet (nearly 100 meters) of our access road — the road we’d spent most of last spring building so that we'd be able to bring in large stones, bamboo, and other building materials that aren't available at the building site of the Dharmalaya Institute. Without the road, we couldn't resume construction and, judging by the extent of the damage, it appeared we might fall weeks or even months further behind schedule. Such a delay simply was not an option, since Mama Nature imposes an inflexible deadline for mud-based construction in South Asia: Get the roof on your building before the start of the monsoon rains in June or everything you've built melts back into the earth like a sand castle at high tide. Our budget was already overstretched, and there was no way we could afford to rebuild the road with enough cash left to finish the building, and yet we couldn’t even take the next step without the road, so we needed a small miracle.

"No problem," said Chohan Singh Diman, a local builder. Now, these are words one learns to take with a generous pinch of Himalayan rock salt in this neck of the woods, but Chohan took things seriously, with attention to detail, in a way that engendered confidence. We surveyed the landslide for over an hour and Chohan formulated a plan for the gradual rehabilitation of the road, starting with first aid to restore the road to a minimally serviceable state that would allow a tractor to carry the urgently needed materials to the top ASAP, with further reinforcement and improvements to come later. To accommodate both our limited budget and the urgency of the need, Chohan kindly offered a discounted bid and simply asked that we give him more work in the future so he could gradually earn back the difference. He quickly assembled a team of half a dozen local laborers and made short work of clearing the landslide debris and building stone retaining walls across the landslide area to support a new road. Just over a week later, to our great relief (and some astonishment), the tractor was able to haul the cut stones for our plinth all the way up the hill to the construction site.

We were back in action but now a couple of weeks behind, with nature's clock ticking audibly, so next up was the challenge of organizing an accelerated construction schedule during the busiest time of the year, when both fall harvests and an astrologically ordained six-week parade of three-day weddings keep most of the village's labor force preoccupied with fields and family. Here again, we were saved by the kindness and wisdom of our beloved friend and renowned eco-architect, Didi Contractor, and her talented (and charming) crew of green builders from Sidhbari (Naresh, Kaka, Rooplal, Bali, and Kamlesh), who repeatedly made the two-hour trek to Bir to contribute their seasoned ingenuity to solving our puzzle. Soberly assessing the circumstances and limited local resources, they helped us piece together a plan to start where we were and get where we need to be in the shortest possible time (relying heavily on a generous jump-start from our Sidhbari gurus working on-site and training our local laborers).

Central to this plan is the formidable challenge of incubating a skilled green building crew locally, where none currently exists. And, in this, we would've had no chance at all to succeed without the considerable kindness and generosity of several people who answered the call and then some. Our committed local partners (and Dharmalaya board members) Ravi, Savita, and Jaswant Paul have made critical contributions in facilitating logistics and offering guidance at every turn.

And one of the brightest rising stars on our hilly horizon is shining in the form of one Raj Kumar ("Raju"), Dharmalaya's first full-time employee, who originally joined us as a taxi driver providing occasional help with logistics and then impressed us all by rising to the challenge of stepping into the key role of foreman-in-training for our entire eco-building project. To say that Raju has gone the extra kilometer would be understating things by about a light year. We're all pleased to witness both his enthusiastic interest and his capacity to learn and take on responsibilities and manage them well. As our friends from Sidhbari observed, it is rare and precious to find a young person with such a keen interest and aptitude for learning the arts of high-quality traditional building, so we intend to make the most of this win-win gift by providing him with training from the best green builders in Himachal (namely, Didi and her team) so that, in concert with them, we can work to preserve that local wisdom and spread it near and far.

As it stands now, we're nearing completion of the plinth (the stone base of the building, above the foundations and below the floor and walls) and, after a couple of weeks, when we've laid a few more courses of stones to raise the walls to the level of the window sills, we'll begin setting up the molds for the rammed earth portion of the walls. Meanwhile, we're also midway into the construction of our first mud hut, which will serve as a dry and secure place to store our tools and materials and will finally allow some of us to stay on site rather than commuting daily from the town of Bir. So, we're catching up, and so far we've created about 18 green jobs to make it all happen, with more on the way. It's inspiring to see it all coming together. (And we're documenting everything with photos and videos and will be posting to the Earthville blog and to YouTube and Flickr.)

Without a doubt, we simply could not be doing what we're doing without the kindness of these big-hearted people, and others like them who are playing their parts to make this possible. It strikes us many times every day that this mothership runs entirely on kindness — it's the fuel and the fabric of all that's happening. We feel deeply grateful for our team, our laborers, our building gurus, our donors, and all the many forms of support that are coalescing around this effort, and we feel fortunate to be a part of this love-driven global community barn-raising adventure.

And we warmly invite you to be a part of it, too! Here are a few ways you can participate:

VOLUNTEER: Come to Bir (in northern India) this spring or autumn to volunteer for the "barn raising." details »
DONATE: Make a charitable donation to support our eco-construction and the green jobs it creates (tax-deductible in the US and India). details »
SPONSOR TREES: Offset your carbon emissions for the year, while creating more green jobs, by sponsoring tree plantings in the Earthville Orchards at just $2 US per tree (also tax-deductible). details »
SPREAD THE WORD: Forward this story to your friends, post it on your blog, share this story on Facebook and "like" the Earthville and Dharmalaya FB pages, send forth a mighty tweet, or, you know, talk to people. :-)

A Passage through India

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:07:00 -0700

A familiar sea of humans, cows, and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws... with some new features: People of all stripes gathering around giant outdoor projection screens to cheer every turn of the Indian athletes in the Commonwealth Games... Brand new Delhi Metro terminals, still not-quite-finished and already falling apart, teeming with hurried passengers, mostly unfazed as twelve more press themselves into the already-packed subway car... iPhone ringtones fill the air as police, no doubt instructed to put a new face on Delhi's streets for the Games, remove beggars from their usual spots... Young women in uniform holding rifles very nearly their height peoplewatch like ghosts in the swarms of shoppers... A slice of New Delhi in 2010.

Tomorrow, the long, dusty road to Himachal Pradesh, a crumbling wagon trail of a thoroughfare with (very) slowly elongating patches of smooth black tarmac, always under construction (inconvenience regretted). It's there that i'll begin to feel strangely at home again, as the concrete monstrosities ("biggest and longest mall north of Delhi," boasts one sign) gradually give way to what remains of the rustic beauty of the villages.

The purpose of the journey? A tiny effort to preserve a speck of that beauty in the face of all this "development," and a humble aspiration to inspire and train interested villagers and visiting global citizens to do the same. Our budding sustainability project in the Himalayan foothills will take a big little step in the coming weeks: the stone foundations of our new baby, the Dharmalaya Institute, spent the last four months settling and curing in the monsoon rains, and soon we'll start raising her lovely mud walls.

It's a dream i've nurtured for nearly 20 years, so it's a slo-mo rapture to see it taking shape... but it's a fairly sober high: i've spent years enough in India to know that things often fall apart faster than they come together, so the prospect of constructing anything here is guaranteed to be, to some extent, an exercise in futility, vanity, and existential humor. With the road to the building site vanishing seasonally, with the world-class red tape of a singularly quirky bureaucracy, with intermittently absent laborers, with a formidable cultural divide that in some ways seems to grow only wider (and richer) with time and familiarity, and with a shortage of funds to meet expanding expenses, how on earth will we get the roof on this thing before the beginning of the next monsoon torrents...?

And, more importantly, if we succeed in finishing the building (and i have an utterly irrational faith that somehow we will), will it actually make a difference? For us, the international team of volunteers who get to take this great ride, it will no doubt be far more than worth it; we have so much to learn here. But for our friends the noble villagers whose green ambitions we endeavor to support, and for the tenacious-yet-fragile environment that sustains them, will this be helpful? That question, more than the overwhelm of myriad mysterious logistics, is floating in the background of everything today.

Of course we believe it can make at least a small contribution toward sustainability and economic advancement in the region or we wouldn't be doing this. H.H. the Dalai Lama advised us as we were just getting the Earthville vision on road back in the '90s (and i'm paraphrasing here), "It's important to understand that one can only accomplish so much in one short lifetime, but even if you can make a deep and lasting change in the life of one person, that is enough; your life has meaning. And if you can reach ten or even a hundred people, that's wonderful. And if you're very lucky, maybe a thousand..."

Well, seeing the suffering and environmental devastation around us, we can't help but hope for higher numbers, but we'll start out with baby steps, and let's see what happens...