The Truth On The Ground
开云体育Arun dropped me a message yesterday mentioning that he has some thoughts but wasn't sure he wanted to post them to the list. His hesitation is that "whoever does the work will end up deciding how it will/should be". (I hope he doesn't mind me quoting him.)I totally agree. It would be pretty naive of us to believe that a mailing list was going to set the direction for construction of a single house, much less an entire village or city. I think the mailing list can serve a few purposes: 1. Brainstorming. Generally, I've been thinking about this stuff for years now, but I mostly think about it in a box by myself. The more I run into other people who are thinking about it, the more I want to have a broader conversation. I'd like to avoid doing the Calvin & Hobbes Design An Ice Castle thing where we fantasize about unrealistic scenarios. But there are always new ideas worth discussing that other people maybe haven't had the time or inclination to explore. For example, Kamal sincerely brought up the idea of standing up a local cellular tower when we were discussing this in Maitri Collective, months back. That's a concept that's never even occurred to me -- I always assumed villages would rely on the same telecom infrastructure as the surrounding towns. 2. Broadcasting. It's hard to keep up with energy storage hardware, radical construction techniques, and air purification systems (as a few random examples) much less sort out the hype machine from functional solutions. I don't want to live in a mud hut crawling with bugs but I'm open to the idea of using local materials if they build a house that will last 50+ years. Maybe someone on the list knows about construction materials that I don't. Or maybe someone's running a local experiment (AQI, water purification, mesh networking, library models, who knows)... here's a place to discuss the results. 3. Connecting. If someone's seriously considering a construction location, here's a place to tell like-minded people and possibly get a couple houses nearby each other. Ragul and Kamal are seriously considering a spot outside of Salem (TN). I'm super excited about the Nilgiris but I hadn't heard of Salem's climate, so that was cool. I'm on the lookout for spots in North India but everything good (so far) seems to be in Himachal or Sikkim... where none of us can legally buy land. If someone kicked something off up there, I'd be tempted to follow. 4. Educating. I've learned some really helpful stuff from my friend Sandy, who built a cabin next to the fortyfourforty.com property in Nova Scotia. He's researched off-grid hardware and construction techniques much more than I have. I'm hoping this can become a pool of resources for people across all sorts of disciplines, not just off-grid plumbing and electricity. YouTube videos about reforestation or ground-breaking books ostensibly about architecture (I'm thinking Alexander, obviously) are just as valuable. Economics are another example: Ragul was shocked when he learned that 20 acres of land in Nova Scotia costs $20,000 (10 lakh rupees). The economics of rural Japan are just as shocking. and the Japanese government is finally opening the borders. 5. Encouragement. Self-doubt plagues all of us and it's easy to file away these ideas as silly and unrealistic. It helps to know other people who are experimenting or even just hearing from folks who think this stuff is cool. Arun is spot on that the list won't determine what actually gets built. It's possible that people on the list will never even meet each other, so it's undesirable (and unrealistic) to expect that we'll construct some sort of manifesto or even a guidebook. Those things might exist in 30 years... but as a reader, I'd hope the author built something herself before putting pen to paper. Initially, the weight of reality (the truth on the ground) will set direction. We still have a gasoline generator at the fortyfourforty.com property because our solar is eaten up by refrigeration. We're still struggling to filter the manganese out of the well water for drinking. Etc. Infrastructure is expensive in Canada so our cabin 90% off-grid but not winter-capable yet. The fun thing about all this stuff is that it's just one more data point that other people can build off of by hearing about it on the list. And if we build within a village, we can help each other out. :) -steven |
Steven Deobald