Firefighters versus aliens. It’s all in a day’s work for these Twin Oaks Community kids.
Children
Quink Kids
by Paxus (from Your Passport to Complaining)
There are lots of different strategies for taking over the world. Keenan’s is to keep building larger and more elaborate play spaces until we finally accept that we should take ourselves less seriously and unite the kids we love with the kids inside us.
Keenan is the manager of the Twin Oaks Conference site, which will be busy for 4 different events this summer.
- QuinkFair – July 20 – 24, 2023
- Queer Gathering – Aug. 4 – 6, 2023
- Women’s Gathering – Aug. 18 – 20, 2023
- Communities Conference – Sept. 1- 4, 2023
This site is in the best shape i have seen it in for the last 25 years. And one of the big improvements is the space designed for kids.
It was in Europe, traveling with Victoria, Hawina and Sky that i first realized that there is no such thing as a “general playground”. Instead, public playgrounds are designed to accommodate kids of specific ages. There are different pieces of play space equipment based on the expectation of the agility and balance of the kids who are going to use it. The way around this age limitation on equipment is to stock the space with lots of different pieces of equipment designed for different levels of physical strength and kids capacity to operate them.
But well equipped space is only part the first piece of what you need to have a great kids program at an event. You also need great staff and planned activities. And this year’s QuinkFair is lucky to have several pros helping run our kid program. Saman (aka Macaco) has been practicing Capoeira for many years, and teaches the songs and moves of Capoeira to all ages. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian cultural practice – simultaneously a fight and a dance – that can be interpreted as a tradition, a sport and even an art form.
Saman often teaches Capoeira to kids
Faith Acorn will also be guiding the QuinkFair kid program
(see here with her own kids, Taozen and Rhyzley)
Several parents have been coming to QuinkFair since we started in 2019 and for them this year’s event will offer the most support and focus on kids.
History, Party, Produce, and Award
Another week with little tidbits from the communes via what we post on Facebook.
We posted this from Serenity Solidarity (a commune in process) about a Louisa history lesson.
This post just did okay on Facebook, but it did get four likes and over a hundred views.
The Magnolia Collective (a rather small community) had a party that brought in a lot of the Louisa communes.
Their Instagram post has a little video (the picture above is a still from it) from the party.
This post did very well, with five likes and three loves and almost a hundred and ninety views.
East Brook Community Farm makes its money selling at Farmer’s Markets (most years except this one), and also through their CSA and farm stand–and this year they also have produce for sale at a store in town.
This post did very well also, with ten likes and two hundred views.
Twin Oaks was very happy that Ira (who left Twin Oaks to start nearby Acorn) won the James Beard award (which we reported here a couple of weeks ago).
Here’s a link to the video.
I said when I posted Acorn’s piece on Ira winning the award (complete with pictures of Ira) that while I usually hope for a hundred views or more, when it’s about Ira I expect at least two hundred views. This post was a big exception. I don’t think that picture was very exciting and it obviously didn’t draw in folks. In spite of five likes, two loves, a comment, and a share, it only got a disappointing sixty-nine views. It seems clear to me that having a picture of Ira is a big draw.
I will repeat Zamin’s comment because it does reflect Ira’s impact.
Living Energy Farm April–May 2023 Newsletter
April–May 2023 Newsletter
LEF in the News
There have been two articles published about LEF recently in the media. Matt Dhillon at Cville Weekly did one of the best brief summaries of LEF we have ever seen. The article is entitled “Power Shift, Award-winning Living Energy Farm Makes Living Off-grid Sustainable“. Truthdig did an article on LEF by Megan McGee, an excellent review of our work in Puerto Rico. It is entitled “Decolonizing Puerto Rico Through Solar Power“.
We continue to post new videos on Youtube. The latest is Solar Power Systems That Last Forever,focused on our solar powered kitchen.
DC Solar in Puerto Rico
We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback about the DC systems we installed in Puerto Rico last winter, along with requests for similar systems from other individuals and community centers. We’re working on building solar kits and fundraising for another round of installations, probably in January and February of 2024. It’s likely these installations will be mostly in Maricao, a mountainous municipality which is the poorest in Puerto Rico. We’re collaborating with a team of organizers from this region, including Jacqueline Pérez from Fundación Bucarabón, Andrew Hermann from Monte Azul, and writer Aurora Levins-Morales. Our goal is to install DC battery kits, direct drive refrigerators, and DC pumps for up to 15 working class families. We’re moving forward on a purchase of direct drive refrigerators for this project. Andrew and Aurora are working on fundraising, as we don’t yet have the funds to cover the shipping and installation.
Sponsor a Boricua to Learn about Direct Drive DC!
We’re pleased to be working with El Departamento de la Comida (El Depa) once again this summer, on a second DC Solar Immersion and Training for Puerto Ricans (Boricua), to be held at Living Energy Farm. El Depa is a non-profit based out of Caguas, Puerto Rico that promotes food and energy sovereignty. (We installed a DC Microgrid in their community kitchen in Cauguas last winter.) Read more about the upcoming immersion/training program on their website.
It costs about $1,000 per participant to bring someone from Puerto Rico to Virginia to train. We want to offer this program free of charge to ten participants. Please consider contributing to El Depa’s fundraiser.
This year, the program is going to include online classes and a week of in-person training focusing on skills required to install the DC systems. We’re asking that participants contribute at least 30 hours of follow-up volunteer work, helping with installations in Puerto Rico in 2024. Millo Huertas and Eva Campbell, who worked with us on installations in PR last winter, will be coming to the training and are also doing a lot of the organizing work. Tara Rodriguez Besosa, who organized last year’s training, is involved this year as well, and will be coming to the farm to help with interpretation. We’re so excited to see everyone again and continue to push this movement forward.
Solar Equipment Available through Living Energy Lights
We have solar refrigerators, pumps, and 12V lighting and charging kits in stock and available for sale through our nonprofit solar company, Living Energy Lights. Profits from these sales go directly towards subsidized installations for people who can’t afford the full price. Find out more about our products.
Teaching Kids About Renewable Energy
We have been doing a kids’ shop class for kids from neighboring intentional communities, as well as Rosa and Nika who live here at LEF. Alexis is teaching metalworking and mechanics. We believe it’s important for kids to learn the skills they need to build themselves a sustainable future. And it’s fun, too! We have been making chess pieces (on the lathe) and a metallic maze (on a milling machine). Now we have started converting an old gasoline engine to run on steam. That is relatively simple actually, and a project we have been thinking about undertaking for our own reasons. Such an engine will have very poor efficiency, but the advantage of steam is that you can use anything that burns to make a machine move. If you think of all the machines in modern times (cars, trucks, trains, etc), then we can’t go back to steam, and a small gas engine is a pretty crummy steam engine. But if you think of emergency power on a small farm, then such a simple conversion might make some sense. It’s a fun project with the kids, and one that might be useful in the future.
Simplified Combine
Alexis has been working full time on trying to make our simplified combine harvester work. This machine is important because it is much simpler than any combine harvester ever marketed. It could make small scale grain farming more economical for farmers all over the world. I (Alexis speaking) think it is our most important invention.
At LEF, we made a mistake this year in planting our wheat. We were having disease issues in the variety we were growing previously, so we decided to try a new variety. Unfortunately, we did not do adequate research on the new variety, and now we have a wheat crop that is four to six feet tall. Modern commercial wheat is mostly about 18 inches tall, which is much easier to harvest. This tall stuff at LEF has forced us to modify the intake on our prototype combine. I suppose the silver lining is that we now have a machine that can harvest grain of most any height. At this point, the machine works. We have “proof of concept,” though it needs some more tinkering.
We are still considering whether or not to patent the machine. Our first priority is to make sure the technology is available to small farmers. But if the machine is ever mass manufactured, it would be highly beneficial for us to make money on that to use for spreading knowledge about the combine, as well as our DC Microgrid. That issue is not resolved, but we are looking at options.
Farm Update
It’s hard to say how much of weather is related to climate change, but it has been a peculiar spring. We had a warm winter, and now a very cool spring. Debbie has been focusing on solar projects, so Carrie, Brenda, and Otto are running the farm and taking care of the gardens this year. We have the usual crops of grains and vegetables, including the largest sunflower crop (for seeds) we have ever grown right in front of the house. That will be a glorious site when they bloom! So far our crops look good and rainfall has been sparse but not in severe shortage. Overall the season is going well. The spring garden is in full swing, and we are eating well.
The orchards have not fared as well. We lost a lot of fruit to late freezing weather, though the persimmons and blackberries always pull through. We are still eating lots of dried persimmons from last year, which are super tasty.
Alternatives to Deforestation
Our work in Puerto Rico has been a success by most any measure, except it is clear that the uptake on people adopting our technology is going to be a long, slow process. The DC Microgrid can provide energy services without coal, nuclear, natural gas, or industrial solar. If you think that last category is benign, think again. We have lost thousands of acres of land to industrial solar fields in our county (Louisa) alone, and we are but one county of hundreds in the southeastern U.S. There are now more than a dozen applications on the books to build more solar fields in our county that will destroy thousands more acres of hardwood forests to build more solar fields. Over six thousand acres have been destroyed already within a few miles of LEF. “Solar strip mining” may be a provocative term, but if the forest is destroyed and paved over, is it not accurate?
And deforestation is only one environmental cost of industrial renewables. An attempt to power American consumerism with solar panels and batteries would require mineral extraction on an unprecedented scale, and would be catastrophic for many indigenous and frontline communities. According to the article “Green Tinted Glasses” from Truthdig, “The quantity of minerals required for the presumed energy transition will be equal to all of the minerals ever consumed to date in the course of human history.” For example, “over the next 22 years humanity will have to mine more copper — some 700 million tons — than has been mined in the last 4,000 years.” Maricao, Puerto Rico is currently being targeted for mineral extraction, mostly because of the demand for electric cars.
There is an alternative. The response to our work in Puerto Rico has been encouraging, and we’ll keep that project moving. Closer to home, where staying warm in winter is central to any energy system design, we would like to build (or retrofit) off-grid “condos,” buildings with LEF’s thermal and solar electric systems that can keep people comfortable without devastating the forests. Is that not a far smarter approach than destroying our forests in order to pump energy into badly insulated houses and badly designed appliances? LEF’s energy approach is NOT more expensive, but it does represent changing our relationship with energy. We are looking for funding to make the alternative energy systems more widely available. In general, people just want to be comfortable. They want to be warm in the winter, to eat cooked food, to have lights at night. But they don’t understand their options. We are going to keep trying to open that door wider, to help people understand that we don’t have to destroy the forests to provide for our basic needs. Please support us if you can.
Living Energy Farm is a project to build a demonstration farm, community, and education center in Louisa County that uses no fossil fuels. For more information see our website, or contact us at livingenergyfarm@gmail.com or Living Energy Farm, 1022 Bibb Store Rd, Louisa VA, 23093. Donations to the Living Energy Farm Institute are tax deductible. To make tax deductible donations, do not go to the Virginia Organizing website, go here instead. Make sure to designate your donation for Living Energy Institute (formerly the Living Energy Education Fund).
Land Day, Cheese & Quackers, Sunrise, CSA, and BBQ
by Raven
A decent but not exciting week on Facebook.
Acorn was advertising their Land Day, which is a celebration of when they got the land for the community–and this is a significant year.
This did pretty well, with three likes and loves and 138 views.
The Magnolia Collective posted a pretty cute picture with some puns attached.
This did okay, but barely, with one Haha and a slow slide to a hundred and one views.
LEF just posted a lovely photo.
And it did pretty well for such a simple picture.
At Glomus, it’s time to start farming and get their CSA going.
This post did the best of any this week. It got only one like but it got more views than the week’s other posts.
Finally, with all of their preparations for Land Day, Acorn decided to have a barbeque the weekend before.
And this post did okay, with only one like but a hundred and eleven views.
Violets, Climbing, Party Prep, Labor Sheets, and Societal Collapse
by Raven
Our posts on Facebook were fairly diverse and did pretty well last week.
We started with a pretty picture from the Magnolia Collective.
While it didn’t do great, it got a couple of likes and did well enough for a simple photo of flowers.
And at Acorn, they are literally climbing the walls.
This got seven likes and did pretty well with views.
It was party time at LEF and Xander came prepared. (Incidentally, Dumpra is the communitarian’s dumpster deity.)
This got six likes and also did fairly well.
Twin Oaks posted about their labor system and their labor sheets.
It didn’t do quite as well as the last two posts on Facebook, but it also got six likes.
Finally, I haven’t posted a question on Facebook for a while, so I was hoping this would do well–and it did. My question was:
I was looking for something that might be controversial and might also get a bunch of comments, and this got a bunch of comments.
It only got one like and one love but it got seven comments and two hundred and fifty views (so far) and while there’s been several posts that have gotten a lot more views in the past, this is definitely in the high end–so I’m pleased.
Theremin, Solar Truck, Winter Farm, and Building Changes
by Raven
It’s Friday and time for another recap of the week’s Facebook postings.
At Twin Oaks, home schooling can mean you often get to learn what you want, including how to make exotic electronic instruments.
This post did pretty well, although not as well as some Twin Oaks posts do.
Living Energy Farm posted about one of their members driving a very full truck.
This one did really well on Facebook.
Glomus Commune hasn’t posted anything for quite a while, but I think I know why, so I reposted this old Instagram shot.
A simple old photo but it did very well.
While many of the communes aren’t posting much, Twin Oaks is posting a lot. Thus I began and ended the week with reposts from them. This is about changes to a building–both in terms of construction but even in terms of the building’s name.
This also did very well, but not as well as that old Glomus winter farm photo.
LEF: Puerto Rico, Orlando, and Virginia
from the Living Energy Farm January 2023 Newsletter
Deb, Alexis, Rosa, Nika, and Deb’s sister Carrie are in Puerto Rico. We have been here about a month. We have finished our first solar demonstration sites at Fundación Bucarabón in the mountains of western Puerto Rico and at El Deparamento de la Comida (El Depa) near San Juan.
Fundación Bucarabón is housed in a large, concrete school building. They operate various programs supporting farmers and the community, including a commercial-scale community kitchen. Their building is well built, but the original utilities are in poor condition, and grid power is very expensive and unreliable in their area. They are off-grid.
In years past, Fundación Bucarabón received a few grants to install solar equipment. They installed two conventional battery-based solar electric systems. Those systems are on the large end of what you might find in an off-grid home. Even with a lot of battery power, they have been unable to pump water as they need, or to run their kitchen. The solar equipment that was installed before we arrived was well constructed, not cheap, and not small, but you can’t just plug in a bunch of AC equipment into a solar kit and expect it to work.
Unfortunately, a lot of the messaging in the popular media around environmental issues and solar suggests that solar can directly supplant fossil fuel systems. It just doesn’t work that way. One normal refrigerator can be enough to drain most off-grid systems, even a sizable system such as they have at Bucarabón. To say that another way, a single refrigerator could cost you $10,000 or $15,000 in solar equipment if you simply focus on supplying energy instead of setting up efficient equipment. Sadly, not all solar suppliers are truthful about these basic facts.
Sourcing materials in the mountains of Puerto Rico has proven challenging. Try to find a pressure relief valve — good luck! But we have persevered, and the systems we are building are solid. At Bucarabón, we built three solar electric circuits: one high voltage direct drive, one low voltage direct drive, and one low voltage with a battery. We installed a insulated solar electric cooker (ISEC), and a smaller Chinese made solar electric cooker, and left them with an operational, direct drive blender. We spoke with them about converting more of their appliances to direct drive.
We did a lot of work to upgrade Bucarabón’s plumbing. We installed a multi-stage booster pump from Sun Pumps. (The Sun Pumps are very high quality, though a bit pricey. We did some work, and some testing, and found a similar Chinese made multi-stage pump of good quality, at 1/5th the price. So we are importing some of those.) The Sun pump is up and running, and providing them improved water service. We have installed one Sunstar refrigerator (which is very well insulated, and uses no batteries) at Bucarabón. The Sunstars are custom made for us by Sunstar (in Indiana) with a German Secop compressor. We are planning to return to Bucarabón later in the trip to tie up a few loose ends and conduct a workshop. The folks at Bucarabón are very enthusiastic about our technology. The irony in all this is that our equipment is both much cheaper and more effective.
El Departmento de la Comida (El Depa) is similar to Fundación Bucarabón in that they do lot of educational work, and support the surrounding community in various ways. They also have a commercial kitchen. Like Bucarabón, El Depa has an existing off-grid system that, though quite robust, has no chance of running their kitchen. At El Depa we installed two high voltage circuits, one to power a couple of ISECs, and one to power their existing solar kit. We installed two Sunstar refrigerators, each on its own circuit. We also installed a nickel iron battery kit (with 55ah Ukrainian nickel iron batteries).
The mountains around Bucarabón are pretty idyllic in terms of climate. It’s cool enough this time of year such that you want to wear a long sleeve shirt in the morning. But the temperatures are quite moderate. The views are beautiful and numerous. The small towns are charming beyond measure. Our interactions with the local folks have been universally positive. We are in San Juan now, closer to El Depa. The city life is certainly noisy and hectic, and the people less patient, than in the mountains. The only serious frustration we have had so far has been dealing with vehicles. Looking at two months of potential rental fees, we tried to buy a used truck that could be sold or donated when we left. That turned into a fiasco. We are making plans to borrow and rent some for the rest of the trip. We have been working pretty hard. Most of our equipment has yet to be installed/distributed.
the roof.
International Electrical and Electronics Engineers Competition
As we mentioned in a previous newsletter, we advanced to the second round of the IEEE’s Empower a Billion Lives competition. Their national conference is in mid March in Orlando. And we are going through Orlando on the way home. How convenient is that? They are paying expenses for our main presenter to attend and speak. There will be thousands of folks there, including people who have undertaken projects much larger than ours. We have already been exchanging thoughts and ideas with some of them. This event may significantly increase exposure for our technology.
Our demonstration sites in Puerto Rico will serve as our “field test” for the competition. The competition is focused primarily on very low income people in other parts of the world. That said, energy doesn’t get any cheaper than our “daylight drive” DC Microgrid. At this point, we are early in the setup stages of putting things together in Puerto Rico. We have benefited from talking to people who have undertaken large projects in other parts of the world distributing solar equipment for low income people. For us, there are a lot of questions to answer yet as regards “business plans” or an ongoing nonprofit campaign. Certainly many people, both private individuals and organizations, are very enthusiastic about what we have to offer.
Wood Rats vs. Biogas
Back home at LEF, Brenda, John and Otto are holding down the fort along with a few new folks. Alexis noticed as we were leaving Virginia that something had gone wrong with our new, large biogas digester Seymost, but he didn’t have time to fix it. Seymost is a 2000 gallon tank with solar thermal heating and two layers of straw bales wrapped around it. A biogas digester with auxiliary heat, it turns out, is a very nice winter habitat for wood rats. Oh darn. Some of the biogas plumbing is plastic, and the rats have been chewing up the plastic pipe. So now, thanks to John and Otto, a lot of straw has been removed, pipes repaired and rat-proofed. Hopefully these lessons will put is in a better position to help others build biogas systems with less trial and
error.
Support us if you can.
Living Energy Farm is a project to build a demonstration farm, community, and education center in Louisa County that uses no fossil fuels. For more information see our website http://www.livingenergyfarm.org, or contact us at livingenergyfarm@gmail.com or Living Energy Farm, 1022 Bibb Store Rd, Louisa VA, 23093. Donations to the Living Energy Farm Institute are tax deductible. To make tax deductible donations, do not go to the Virginia Organizing website, go here instead: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/1388125
Make sure to designate your donation for Living Energy Institute (formerly the Living Energy Education Fund).
on the roof at El Depa.
East Wind, Acorn, Twin Oaks, Magnolia, and Living Energy Farm
by Raven
I complained last week about Facebook switching things all around and making these compilations harder. Since then they’ve made more changes which made doing this (at least showing the statistics) even harder. Given that, this week I’m not going to even show the ‘Reach’ statistics from FB, but simply quote them. I’m not sure at all what I will be doing next week.
East Wind put up a little video clip about their geese.
That’s a still from the video. Click on this link if you want to see the whole thing.
It just did okay on Facebook with a Reach of 105 and just three likes.
Acorn put up a picture of Ira chopping vegetables.
Anything to do with Ira usually draws in folks and this did fairly well, with a Reach of 249 and 21 likes and loves and a couple of telling comments.
Twin Oaks published a picture of one of their outdoor tables on a nice day with people eating at it.
Twin Oaks reposts also generally do well and this was no exception. It had a Reach of 296 and twelve likes.
The Magnolia Collective posted a picture of their woodshed.
This did pretty good, too, with a Reach of 269 and seven likes and loves.
Finally, Living Energy Farm said Bon Voyage to a family that has gone on what looks like a working vacation.
Surprisingly to me (since LEF posts often don’t do as well as some others) this post did exceptionally well with a Reach of 343 and 25 likes.
Communes in Space!
by Raven
I will confess. I’m a Trekkie. I love watching the various Star Trek shows. I’m old enough to have watched the original series as a kid, but I really got into it with The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. But when folks want to talk with me about the space program, I’m really not interested. I think that we have enough problems to solve here on earth before we worry about sending folks out into space.
So why am I interested in shows about people living together on starships and space stations, having to work closely together and figure out things with one another and build relationships in close quarters? When I thought about it, I realized that I see these programs as metaphors for community living.
Recently I discovered Becky Chambers, an author who writes science fiction stories, but although there are lots of aliens and AIs, a few space pirates and the occasional explosion, her Wayfarers series focuses on relationships and, I think, community. Here is the last sentence in the blurb for the first book in the series: “To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.” That seems like a good description of communal living to me.
As far as I’m concerned, each of the books in the Wayfarers series illustrates a different aspect of community living.
The first book, which has the strange and wonderful title of The Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet, I see as an examination of what it’s like to join a community. Rosemary isn’t sure what she’s getting into when she joins the ship and there’s at least one not particularly likable member but, over time, they do become family. The ship is also a very small community and reminds me of other small communities that I’ve been a part of (like Glomus, for example).
The second book in the series, with the enigmatic title of A Closed and Common Orbit, at first seems to have no semblance of community. The AI from the first book is reborn and needs to find her way on the planet she is sent to, slowly making friends (and mistakes). It isn’t until the very end that she is able to gather all her new friends together and create a space where they all live and work together. If The Long Way… was about finding community, I think A Closed and Common Orbit is about creating community. I see these two books as the fictional counterparts to Diana Leafe Christian’s Finding Community and Creating a Life Together.
The third Wayfarers book, Record of a Spaceborn Few, is about life on a space station. Where her first book reminded me of life in a small community like Glomus, this book, to me, is about life in a big community, like Twin Oaks or East Wind. Instead of close intimacy, you have a large group of folks, with a lot of variety and options, united in working together to make it all exist and continue. I think there are pluses and minuses to both small and large communities and this book explores life in a large community where there are multiple interconnections between lots of folks, and also has bits featuring the perennial problem of how to deal with curious visitors.
The final book in the series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, again might not strike folks as having much to do with community. Certainly, this story doesn’t end with many of the participants living together. What I think this story is about is temporary ephemeral community–the kind folks find at festivals and gatherings–or in crisis situations. I think that this is also a kind of community. In this book it comes out of an unplanned crisis situation where everyone was thrown together longer than they wanted and had to get to know each other. The story lets you see how it affected all those who were involved for the short time they needed to depend on one another, and how this created relationships that looked like they might last beyond the crisis. These things happen in real life as well and the community that is created is real if short-lived. I always hope that if people get a taste of community through something temporary, it might awaken the longing for something more permanent.
I also want to mention one more similar if unrelated book. Open Earth is a graphic novel (and, warning, it is very graphic in parts, erotica so to speak, and you may not want to look at it if naked cartoon bodies and sexual situations bother you). This is a story about life on a space station and focuses on relationships and, more particularly, how the next generation there views life in the community that they are born into. This is a challenge that real communities that last a while find themselves facing–for example Twin Oaks, which has raised many kids who have moved on and more recently had folks who were raised there decide to stay and become adult members. In the book there are discussions about how the younger folks can create change to make this space community more the way that they would like it to be. (Again, this is something I see happening in the older communities when younger, newer members join. Older members then have to decide whether to accept these changes or resist them.)
However, one thing that I didn’t like in this book (and it was also in the background of the Wayfarers series but it is more directly discussed here) is the reason that they were all on the space station was that Earth had been trashed and needed to be abandoned. This is a common theme in a lot of science fiction and has been proposed as a reason to support the space program. This is also why I am so supportive of communities like Living Energy Farm that want to find ways to live that support the planet. I like reading about fictional space communities but I am a lot more interested in creating communities that will make Earth more livable. I’m interested in building communities right here on this wonderful world–not way out in space.
commune life 