Are the Kibbutzim socialist? A Chinese filmmaker tried to find out.
Social Change
C-ville Article, Prison Abolition, and Watermelons
by Raven
We are now into early September articles on Facebook.
And we start off with yet another article about the Twin Oaks fire–but this one is from a local newspaper.
This did fairly well on Facebook, with six likes, a ‘care’, a ‘sad’, one share, and a hundred and sixty-seven views.
Serenity Solidarity posted about an “anti-prison” event.
This, unfortunately, did not do very well, with no likes (etc) and only sixty-seven views.
Finally, East Wind posted about their watermelons.
This post also did well, with thirteen likes, six loves, and a hundred and eighty-six views.
LEF June/July 2024
Living Energy Farm
June – July 2024 Newsletter
How to Bring Climate Change to a Screeching Halt
Conceptually at least, stopping climate change is not a difficult task. People need to live close enough to work so they don’t need a private car. If you live in a temperate climate, you need to live in a home where walls, solar space heating, and solar hot water systems are shared. It really helps to eat food that is primarily plant-based. Top that off with a DC Microgrid like we have at LEF, and you have a modern lifestyle at something like a 98% reduction in energy use compared to the average American.
Sound impossible? Well, in the coming decades, we are moving toward some industrial simplification whether we like it or not. But landing an airplane is very different than crashing one, though either way brings you back to the ground.
The tools we have developed at LEF are a live demonstration of how you can live in a
comfortable, energy independent home with modern conveniences. Our home is warm in winter, we take hot showers when we want, and we have ample electricity for lights and electronics. All of that is accomplished without grid power, nuclear, coal, natural gas, industrial “renewable” energy systems, a generator, or even much firewood.
We want to see our model grow. We want to start a movement that builds hundreds of cooperative housing projects and ecovillages powered by DC Microgrids. Imagine you live in one of these ecovillages. Your home looks much like a typical condo or apartment building, with thick walls that surround several units, big windows on the south and shade trees on the east and west, and solar collectors (both thermal and electric) on the roof. There are gardens and orchards south of the buildings. There’s no grid connection or propane tanks on site. Instead of paying electric and gas bills, residents pay a modest monthly fee to support a caretaker. That caretaker keeps the biogas digester fed, waters the batteries, and pops your dinner in the solar cookers before you come home from work. Then you get to enjoy your dinner in the company of the other people who live there, or in the privacy of your own unit. Over time, the residents become a community of people who know and support each other. If you get tired of it, you sell your unit and move on.
We need an alternative to the mass “electrification” plan that has turned into a mass deforestation program. Here in Louisa County VA, the local board has “limited” the solar deforestation of the county to “only” 3%. Taking down tens of thousands of acres of hardwood forests and paving them over to put up solar panels in the name of stopping climate change is very, very wrong, and has only a marginal impact (if any) on actually reducing fossil fuel use. We cannot hope to address the climate crisis with these supply-focused solutions alone, we need a demand-side solution that reduces energy consumption to the levels required by our ecological emergency.
WE NEED YOU. Living Energy Farm is a small organization. We are farmers, parents and
teachers, we are wizards of pipes, wires and things that whirrr, but we have not had the resources to promote our ideas all that much. Starting this fall we would like to do speaking events, to talk to people about ecological living at 2% of current resource use. We need you to help us get out (or connect online) with more people. So please help us set up events. Talk your friends, your church, or some strangers. Tell them we are for real. Find us a venue, or help us set up online meetings.
The goal is to help small groups of people in create entities that can build or retrofit cooperative homes using DC Microgrids. Where we are going could be a good place, but bringing people together to make that happen is going to be a challenge. We look forward to hearing from you.
DC Solar Training at LEF
In July, we hosted a four day DC Solar Training at LEF. We had a dozen focused, motivated people representing many exciting projects in Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It certainly helped that the weather was perfect for the training. But that said, the infrastructure at LEF did not hiccup at all with a dozen extra people here. Everyone was fed. Everyone took showers and charged their devices at will. This training was focused, a bit shorter than prior trainings, but the group was very technically inclined and picked things up quickly. They were very enthusiastic about taking on challenging electrical projects, like converting appliances and building charging stations. After a few days of workshops, the group went over to Little Flower Catholic Worker (a small community 8 miles from LEF) to work on upgrading their DC Microgrid. We installed a 55AH 12V battery kit, and extended their 90V direct drive electrical supply into their kitchen so they could use the power for cooking (previously they were only using it to run their well pump).
Instead of asking people to pay for the event, we asked them to commit to helping with a socially worthwhile project. We discussed various projects and will look forward to seeing how that unfolds.
DC Appliance Conversion Workshop
Biogas
In the last newsletter, we were excited about our cheap air mattress biogas storage system. It seemed like a good idea, until they all started leaking. Darn. Biogas bags for sale in the U.S. are very expensive. We found a Chinese company that sold us a couple of quite large, very cheap biogas bags (Shenzhen Teenwin Environment Co., Ltd). As we head to print, we are plumbing those up and putting up a shed to house one large bag. Meanwhile, we have gotten some practice keeping Seymour (the biogas digester) under control. It’s fairly easy to push production up or down. If we cut off food and heat, biogas production tapers down over the course of a couple weeks. Turn on the heat and feed it, and it only takes a few days for biogas production to climb noticeably. We are pleased to realize how easy it is to produce more or less gas as we need it. We remain convinced that biogas, solar thermal, and solar direct drive photovoltaic power are the most accessible energy sources available for our sustainable future.
Horse Progress Days — Hanging Out with the Amish
The largest Amish gathering in the USA is an event called Horse Progress Days. The event focuses on horse drawn farming equipment, and there are many demonstrations of farm equipment. But the event is huge — well over 50,000 people in one very large field with massive tents, hundreds of vendors, and quite a festive atmosphere. The Amish are using a lot of solar energy at this point, primarily small, battery-based systems. We spoke to hundreds of people about direct drive DC energy.
The long term impacts of those interactions remains to be seen. The Budget newspaper — a paper read among the Amish — published an article about direct drive. The Amish are similar to LEF in some ways. They consciously limit their consumerism. They have farms and large families that function like small communities, and least in some ways. It seems like direct drive DC systems could be of benefit to them. If the Amish started using more direct drive DC systems, it would help the technology to spread.
In driving into the event area, we saw solar panels on many homes. We also saw quite a few very small horses. We were puzzled. The Amish are such practical people. What do they do with little horses that are too small to pull a plow or a buggy? Well, we got the answer at Horse Progress Days.
Those small horses are tended by the children, and hooked up to very small buggies that the children use to zip all over (think Amish drag racing). Thus the kids learn the skills to drive larger horses as they become adults.
Harvesting wheat with the combine that has one belt and eight spinning shafts.
Easy Reaper
We mentioned in the last newsletter that we were using our Easy Reaper — the simplified combine harvester. We harvested barley, oats, and more than an acre of wheat. We were enormously pleased. We have spoken to a few agricultural equipment manufacturers, and have not found anyone who wants to make Easy Reapers just yet. Our current plan is to keep working on them at LEF. We have been making some upgrades to our tooling to make that (and other projects) easier, though our shop is feeling pretty undersized at this point. We are trying to get pricing from some local fabricators who might make the drum and shell, which are the hardest parts for us to make. Meanwhile, we will probably be participating in a World Food Prize event called the Borlaug Dialogue. The dates are October 29 – 31 in Des Moines Iowa. That is a large event with thousands of participants from many academic, governmental and business entities. This may be a big opportunity for us to bring some attention to the project.
And, here’s a video of cutting wheat with the Easy Reaper.
The Farm
The farm is doing pretty well this year, although the rabbits ate most of the cantalopes, the deer went after over fence to get to the beans and peanuts, and did considerable damage to the watermelons. The birds ate a lot of the blueberries, and now a very large, and not very shy, black bear has taken to ripping the limbs off the pear trees and helping himself. Other than that, things are great.
We are canning lots of peaches. We have quite a bit of fruit in spite of the managerie of animals showing up at the dinner table. The corn crop is untouched thanks to Otto’s diligent efforts. Last fall, a landscaper brought us a huge pile of leaves.
Those are great for building soil, so we did some large scale sheet mulching. That was a mixed bag. The leaf mulch worked amazingly well with our spring potato crop, it was our best in years. The melons were more challenging; we should have transplanted them as the leaves tend to cool the soil and blow around a bit, which makes seed sprouting difficult. Then the rabbits showed up.
We are moving into the peak of harvest. Our seeds crops are a bit smaller than past years, but still some considerable work. We are looking forward to the persimmons, as well as making apple sauce, and perhaps some pear sauce, depending on the activities of the bear.
How many pears is a large black bear allowed to eat?
As many as he wants, apparently…
We look forward to hearing from folks who can help us set up speaking events.
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
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.
Articles and videos about LEF:
Low-Tech Magazine (based in France) did an lengthy, well-researched article, largely about LEF, entitled Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries. It’s at
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
That article talks a lot about optimal utilization, translate “community is the magic bullet that makes renewable energy work.”
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. It is at https://www.c-ville.com/power-shift
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. It’s at
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/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. See https://youtu.be/6XiHClx8d2Q
How to Never Pay an Electric Bill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Wk7inoIxI&t=201s
This video is a walk-through of our energy systems at Living Energy Farm. It is a concise
summary of how these systems work, and why they are not in common use already.
Solar Installations In The Navajo (Dine’) And Hopi Reservations, March 2020
http://livingenergyfarm.org/solar-installations-2020/
This is a photo essay about our project to bring durable solar energy systems to the Dine’ and Hopi Reservations, where thousands of people live without grid power involuntarily.
Support Living Energy Farm’s Climate Justice Campaign, and Bring DC Microgrids to People
Who Need Them
http://livingenergyfarm.org/support-our-climate-justice-campaign/
This is an updated web page describing our broader social justice ambitions.
How to Live Without Fossil Fuel (Introductory Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri2U6u8p65E
Powering a Community with Solar Electricity (LEF has the only DC powered community that we know of, here’s how it works) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvdExgvHnRI&t=23s
The Best Way to Store Off-Grid Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wOxQ3sL9zc
Batteries that Last (almost) Forever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfrgLsyFs0E
Virginia Homegrown created a program at LEF (the LEF part starts at the 29 minute mark in the program)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDGP0C9MIzU
International Permaculture has done 2 articles on LEF. One is in issue #93, Autumn 2017, and the second is in issue #94, Winter 2017. See https://www.permaculture.co.uk/
Article about LEF at the Atlantic Online Magazine
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/anarchism-intentional-communities-trump/
513086/
Article about LEF in The Central Virginian
http://www.livingenergyfarm.org/cvarticle.pdf
LEF on CNN
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/09/us/communes-american-story/
Cville weekly in Charlottesville VA
http://www.c-ville.com/off-grid-model-environmentalism-made-easy/#.VcHobF054yo
Black Utopians, Sign, Community Threads, Bike, and Fennel
by Raven
It was an up and down week on Facebook, with a post from Serenity Solidarity scoring high and posts from Twin Oaks and Acorn not quite making it. (Posts from Twin Oaks and Acorn usually have high numbers and it’s often Serenity Solidarity, sadly, that struggles with the numbers.)
Serenity Solidarity posted about what they were reading.
I’m so pleased to report that this post did very, very well, with ten likes, one love, three comments, a share, and lovely two hundred and sixteen views.
On the other hand, I reposted from Twin Oaks about a handmade sign.
The sign is pretty, but the statistics were not. It got just one like and only ninety-four views.
That was bad but Acorn did worse. They posted a very appropriate poem with a nice picture.
Again, it seems sweet, but the stats were not. This got one love and only eighty-seven views.
But on to bigger and much, much better. East Wind Nut Butters (who are posting a lot more than the general community these days) celebrated Bike to Work Day.
This post did very well, with twelve likes, three loves (including one from East Wind Nut Butters!), and a hundred and eighty-five views.
And finally, another repost from Acorn, of a member dancing around a fennel plant. And this one did a lot better than the earlier post.
Unlike their previous poem and picture, this post did very, very well here with twelve likes, six love, two comments, and an amazing two hundred and thirty-nine views.
Message Dog, Today, Combine, Conferences, and Convergence
by Raven
Yet another week on Facebook. Most posts did okay and one did very, very well.
Acorn often posts weird pictures and I try to go with it. Here they’ve posted a dog with a message.
This post just did okay with one like and a bit over a hundred views.
When I was down in Virginia in January, I took a bunch of pictures with the idea of posting them when things got quiet. This is one of my last. It was from one of the many boards Twin Oaks has in their dining hall.
This did pretty well, with seven likes, one love, and a hundred and thirty-three views.
Living Energy Farm put out this bulletin about a harvesting combine that they are developing.
This did phenomenally well with nineteen likes, five loves, one wow, two comments, three shares, and a full three hundred and sixty-six views. (Three shares is a lot of shares–very few of our posts get even one–and I suspect that contributed to the large number of views.)
The fire around Twin Oaks spared the residences but it decimated their industrial area as well as the conference site where Twin Oaks usually holds summer events. And they are still planning to hold them, as they are working on the site as quickly as they can.
This did fairly well on Facebook, with eight likes, three loves, and a hundred and seventy-one views.
In the blurb for that post, I mentioned that there would be a brand new event this year. Here’s a bunch more about it.
This did fairly well also, with six likes, four loves, and a hundred and sixty-two views.
LEF May 2024
Living Energy Farm
May 2024 Newsletter
There have been two big events at Living Energy Farm in the last month. The first is that we are now using our simplified combine harvester in the field to harvest grain, and it’s working. The second is that, after 14 years of cooking on solar and wood, we are now making a lot more biogas and have enough to say goodbye to firewood.
And The Central Virginian newspaper here in Louisa VA did a very good article about LEF. That is here.
Easy Reaper
We have renamed our simplified combine harvester the Easy Reaper. Almost everyone relies on grain for food directly or indirectly. In the U.S., farmers have access to old American equipment. But the smallest combine harvesters are still fairly large, and quite complex. Globally, the lack of small harvesting equipment cripples the economic viability of small farms. The Easy Reaper could be a big help.
A video that shows a step-by-step walk through of how the machine works is here: https://youtu.be/5CF4laghKd4
A second video that shows the machine harvesting grain is here: https://youtu.be/i5GDyEB_VA8
The Easy Reaper is a product of many years of work. It has one belt and eight spinning shafts. In terms of the number of moving parts and overall mechanical complexity, it is an order of magnitude simpler than any other combine harvester of which we are aware. It could probably be mass manufactured for well under $2000. The cheapest Chinese made combine harvester currently available costs several times that much. We have contracts the University of Missouri and an entity called the Feed the Future Soybean Innovation Lab to produce Easy Reapers in Africa.
Our connection at the University of Missouri is Kerry Clark, (PhD, Assistant Research Profession in the Division of Applied Social Sciences, the CAFNR International Programs Director, and Project Manager for smallholder productivity for the USAID Soybean Innovation Lab) refers to the Easy Reaper as a “game changer for small farmers across the African continent.” She goes on to say “There are few people like [Alexis Zeigler who] dedicate themselves to helping smallholder farmers. His design will help revolutionize crop production in Africa.” We hope those statements prove true, and we are doing our best to make them come true.
Going forward, we are going to “tighten up” the machine. That means moving the fan and cleaning screen to reduce the detritus in the grain. We want to build an Easy Reaper with a smaller threshing drum, and build one that is powered from its own wheels so it can be pulled by draft animals or a small tractor or tiller, and perhaps build a self propelled model. We also need to put some work into making the actual assembly simpler. Although the Easy Reaper is already much simpler than any other harvester, any prototype has many inefficiencies in assembly. We can reduce the number of parts, and make assemblies of parts that can be put together more easily (stamped and spot welded sheet metal instead of welded and riveted steel, for instance).
Many people have asked us, “why didn’t someone invent this before?”
Everything we do is influenced by legacy — the traditions and habits we inherit from those who came before us. That legacy can be helpful or crippling. Grain harvesting moved from one manual step to another, from one machine to another, and the grains themselves have evolved. Wild wheat is six feet tall, modern wheat is 18 inches. No one ever went back to step one and tried to simplify the whole process in one machine using modern materials and considerations.
Our job at LEF is to challenge legacies and find more sustainable ways of living. We are very happy with what we have achieved.
Biogas
We have been building biogas systems for over 10 years now. Without recounting that long and inglorious history in detail, we have arrived at a biogas system that will produce a phenomenal amount of gas. A biogas digester is a colony of archaea. As the microbe colony matures, it becomes more productive, and more resilient.
Our current digester, named Seymour, is a seven foot tall, seven foot diameter tank. It has 3 feet of straw wrapped around it. It has a five panel solar thermal rack keeping it warm with internal stainless steel heat exchangers. Now that have figured out how to do this, we can say that Seymour is probably larger than we actually need.
The most astonishing thing about Seymour is how efficient he is. We had pictured something resembling a haying operation, mowing grassy fields or collecting wheat straw, bringing in lots of organic matter to feed Seymour. Well, we currently have a biogas flush toilet (which is less smelly and buggy than composting toilets, which is nice). We are feeding grass clippings from the front yard and small amount of kitchen waste twice a week. And that’s it! It’s really quite surprising that we are getting enough gas to cook three meals a day, right through long cloudy spells, with so little feedstock.
We have expanded our storage. We have found that air mattresses cost much less per cubic foot/liter than official biogas storage bags. So we have put lofts in various spots and filled them with biogas. The whole system generally runs at less than 1/2 psi (15 inches water column max), so lightweight storage containers work fine. It remains to be seen if we can make it all the way through next winter. But currently we are turning off the solar heat and keeping Seymour on a diet so as to prevent over-production.
Crunching some numbers about how much energy the farm uses and how much Seymour can produce, it’s quite clear we can produce enough gas to power small tractor(s) on the farm. The problem with biogas is that it has very low density. The burnable fraction of biogas is the same thing as natural gas, and that is methane. There is a lot of industrial handling of biogas and natural gas, including CNG (compressed natural gas). We are looking at the equipment to do that on a modest scale. Our friend Kris in Missouri continues to be a very helpful consultant on figuring out things like compressors.
Seymour’s good health owes a lot to Otto who tends to his needs diligently. Biogas is a lot like having a flock of animals to care for. It’s not a huge amount of work, but it must be tended regularly.
Both the expense and the regular tending of a biogas digester argue for community scale systems instead of household scale. One problem with biogas is that the digestion process is smelly. That’s not a big problem in rural areas, but it hard to imagine a lot of digesters in the crowded urban areas. Perhaps that could be improved (??) Sure would be handy to have a commercial biogas consultant on call…
Many rural ecovillage projects rely on a lot of firewood, which is not sustainable at all on a global scale. We are at the point where we can go through most of the year with no firewood at all. We do burn a small amount of wood in winter to back up our water heating system, but the amount is microscopic compared to most rural households. We are pleased with the level of energy self sufficiency we have been able to achieve.
Which Way Forward?
LEF is already fully energy independent at the residential level, and that with 250 watts of solar electricity per person and biogas. (Plus good insulation, cooperative design, and solar thermal systems). In considering setting up a biogas tractor, it is exciting to think about being fully energy independent, on a reasonably modest budget using durable technologies. We are continuing to work on plans for energy self sufficient communities (aka off-grid condos) outside of LEF. We get some donations (thank you very much!) that get used to buy solar materials for Puerto Rico and other projects. We have a lot of projects on our plate, and not all of them move forward quickly.
Much of what we do at LEF is to challenge unhelpful legacies — with building design, energy systems, and food. Even the Easy Reaper has proven a little disruptive. It’s clear that some people do not believe what we are saying, or are offended by our presumptions of simplified harvesters or making grid power obsolete with DC Microgrids in conservationist oriented communities.
The glass is always half full and half empty in terms of support and recognition for our work. We communicate with people inspired by our work on every continent. And we remain a small organization that is entirely volunteer run. We would like to spend more time promoting the idea of conservationist lifestyles, but it’s hard to know which is best. Do we spend our time making better machines, or talking to people? Promoting lifestyles that challenge consumerism is never going to be easy. We keep trying to do what we can.
Our farm is doing well. It is a good fruit year. We have an excellent, dedicated group of people at LEF. Rosa has learned how to make cherry pies from our sour cherries. Nika is honing his arguing skills to a sharp edge, especially when it comes to matters like chores and personal hygiene. David is still improving the simple washing machine. David and John continue to improve the electronics connected to DC power systems. Otto takes care of everything that everyone else forgets. Deb is managing the farm and planning our summer immersive on DC Microgrids (registration is now closed).
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
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.
Articles and videos about LEF:
Low-Tech Magazine (based in France) did a lengthy, well-researched article, largely about LEF, entitled Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries. It’s at
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
That article talks a lot about optimal utilization, translate “community is the magic bullet that makes renewable energy work.”
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. It is at https://www.c-ville.com/power-shift
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. It’s at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/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. See https://youtu.be/6XiHClx8d2Q
How to Never Pay an Electric Bill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Wk7inoIxI&t=201s
This video is a walk-through of our energy systems at Living Energy Farm. It is a concise
summary of how these systems work, and why they are not in common use already.
Solar Installations In The Navajo (Dine’) And Hopi Reservations, March 2020
http://livingenergyfarm.org/solar-installations-2020/
This is a photo essay about our project to bring durable solar energy systems to the Dine’ and Hopi Reservations, where thousands of people live without grid power involuntarily.
Support Living Energy Farm’s Climate Justice Campaign, and Bring DC Microgrids to People
Who Need Them
http://livingenergyfarm.org/support-our-climate-justice-campaign/
This is an updated web page describing our broader social justice ambitions.
How to Live Without Fossil Fuel (Introductory Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Ri2U6u8p65E
Powering a Community with Solar Electricity (LEF has the only DC powered community that we know of, here’s how it works) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvdExgvHnRI&t=23s
The Best Way to Store Off-Grid Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wOxQ3sL9zc
Batteries that Last (almost) Forever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfrgLsyFs0E
Virginia Homegrown created a program at LEF (the LEF part starts at the 29 minute mark in the program) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDGP0C9MIzU
International Permaculture has done 2 articles on LEF. One is in issue #93, Autumn 2017, and the second is in issue #94, Winter 2017. See https://www.permaculture.co.uk/
Article about LEF at the Atlantic Online Magazine
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/anarchism-intentional-communities-trump/513086/
Article about LEF in The Central Virginian
http://www.livingenergyfarm.org/cvarticle.pdf
LEF on CNN
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/09/us/communes-american-story/
Cville weekly in Charlottesville VA
http://www.c-ville.com/off-grid-model-environmentalism-made-easy/#.VcHobF054yo
MAMA, Training, Megafauna, Earth Day, and a Question
by Raven
It was a busy week on Facebook, about a month ago.
The folks at Serenity Solidarity pointed out to me that they had just become able to support a project they really wanted to support.
This did pretty well on Facebook, with ten loves (including one from Serenity Solidarity), one comment, two shares, and one hundred and twenty-seven views.
Meanwhile, Living Energy Farm announced that they are offering a training for solar installation.
Since this is a photo off of Facebook, you can’t click on the link but here’s the application form.
This did pretty good as well, with seven likes, three loves (including Serenity Solidarity), one comment, and a hundred and forty-two views.
There’s a band made up of folks from Acorn Community called Megafauna and Acorn made a very trippy video of them.
This is a still, but here’s the actual video.
It’s a really interesting video but it didn’t do that well. It got one like and just fifty-seven views.
East Wind Nut Butters is East Wind Community’s business and they wanted to honor Earth Day.
A lovely message but it didn’t do great on our Facebook feed. While it got three loves (including one from East Wind Nut Butters), two likes, and a care, it only got eighty-eight views.
I’ve often said, that if I want to rack up the Facebook views, all I need to do is ask a controversial question. “Controversial” is the key word here. This time I asked something simple.
Even though I thought it was an interesting question, very few other folks apparently did. This bombed on Facebook. Not only did it get no responses, it got no likes, and only fifty-nine views (just slightly better than Megafauna, which at least got a like).
Serenity Solidarity, Acorn Land Day, and Twin Oaks Gravestone and Eclipse
by Raven
There were five Facebook reposts on the week we are covering this week, but they were only about three different communities: two posts about Serenity Solidarity (at the beginning and end of the week), two posts about Twin Oaks, and one post about Acorn’s Land Day.
Serenity Solidarity is a very interesting community in formation, BIPOC focused, activist, community service oriented, and income-sharing. I’ve always been interested in them and wanting to support them. I was very excited when I learned that they had finally acquired land, not in Virginia where they were originally looking, but in New York state (not that far from where I am now). I republished their post about the new place, with lots of pictures and it did very well:
As I said, it did very, very well, with eight loves (including from Serenity Solidarity itself) and fourteen likes, two comments (including one from Ericka, one of Serenity Solidarity’s organizers, explaining what they do), and a lovely 263 views.
Which was great, but except for Ericka’s brief explanation in a comment, this didn’t say anything about what Serenity Solidarity was or what they did. So I found their website and did a post featuring it, starting with a selection of quotes from their website:
Here’s a link to the actual website. Check it out. I think they are amazing.
Unfortunately, this bombed on Facebook, with no likes, comments, or shares, and only thirty views.
I couldn’t figure out whether this was because it didn’t have a lot of pictures or because Facebook doesn’t like things that are too political. I tried something else a couple of weeks later–and I will report on that in the future.
Acorn just turned thirty-one. I’ve already put some of the reposts on here already, but here’s one with pictures from the celebration.
This did pretty good, with six likes, two love, and a hundred and thirty-two views.
Finally, a couple of posts from Twin Oaks.
Yes, they are still recovering from the fire but neither of these post are about the fire per se. One is however about something that was found during the work to stop the fire and one had absolutely nothing to do with the fire, except that it was lovely to take a break from all the work of recovering from the fire.
What was found during the digging to prevent the fire from getting close (ie, creating a fire break) was at first a mystery and then a communal historical find.
In the original post, Twin Oaks didn’t know.
Then Twin Oaks posted, as a comment:
The one that was found, once folks looked close enough, apparently said: “KATHLEEN KINKADE – ALL IS WELL”
This post also did well enough, with two likes, two wows, a love, one comment, and a hundred and fifty-seven views.
Finally, not long after the fire, was a solar eclipse. This gave Oakers a much needed diversion.
This post did very, very well, with eight likes, two love, and two hundred and fourteen views.
The Communitarian Moment
by Raven
The commune movement in the US during the 1960s was not an isolated phenomena. There have been waves of communal movements, many dating back to long before Europeans discovered North America. One very fertile period for communities in the US (often called ‘utopian experiments’ at this time) was in the nineteenth century.
I was reading a very important book called Collective Courage by Jessica Gordon Nembhard (subtitled, “A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice”.) It’s a great book giving a detailed look at Black cooperative organizations and Black mutual aid from early in US history. An early section in the book was entitled ‘Black Communities or Communes and Utopian Ideals’. Of course I read this section with great interest.
The book talked about three early communal attempts. I knew about two of them. The Nashoba Commune was, of course, mentioned–a well meaning attempt by suffragist Fanny Wright to create a community for ex-slaves. A second one was the Combahee River Colony, a group of “several hundred African American women who occupied abandoned farmland where they ‘grew crops and cared for each other’” during the Civil War. I’d heard of it but didn’t know much about it. But I had never heard of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry.
I’m currently living in a small commune in western Massachusetts and we visit Northampton occasionally. I’ve visited Northampton since I was a student at UMass/Amherst in the 1970s. I had never heard of this place. It wasn’t really a Black community, but an abolitionist community that practiced racial and gender equity in the 1840s. Sojourner Truth was a member there and this was where she became an abolitionist. Frederick Douglas was a frequent visitor and said of the place: “The place and the people struck me as the most democratic I had ever met. It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. I, however, felt myself in very high society.” I had to know more about this place.
I looked for more information about the Northampton Association and found a book called The Communitarian Moment by Christopher Clark (subtitle, “The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association”). It was in the local library system, so I ordered it and read it.
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was not a Black community. It was a predominantly white community with only a few black people there. But it was a community devoted to equality. Not only were black people and white people treated equally, but also women and men, at a time when that wasn’t usually true, even in the abolitionist movement. It started off as an attempt to create an abolitionist community focused on silk manufacturing and although it started as being connected with a company with ‘wages’, “In what the historian Arthur Bestor once referred to as a ‘coup’, a majority of members took steps during 1843 to move the community in noncapitalist direction… at the annual meeting… members ensured that the wage system would be scrapped. In a succession of votes they overturned the founders assumption that the association would operate like a company.
“The meeting… moved the association firmly toward a more communal organization.”
The author situates the Association in the nineteenth century communal movement, particularly in the 1840s, the period he calls ‘the communitarian moment’. While he refers to many other communities occurring during this period, he focuses on the Northampton Association and compares it to three other communities, also in Massachusetts during this period: Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Fruitlands in the town of Harvard, and “Adin Ballou’s ‘Practical Christian’ community at Hopedale.” He also says, “Recent scholars of utopian movements have pointed out that communities were being founded throughout the nineteenth century and were not less common at other times than they were in the 1840s. Otohiko Okugawa found 119 communal societies established in the United States between 1800 and 1859, and Robert S. Fogarty lists 141 more that were set up between 1860 and 1914… Nevertheless, there is merit in the view that the 1840s were an especially significant period for communitarianism. At least fifty-nine new communities were founded between 1840 and 1849, more than in any other decade.”
The Northampton Association lasted four and a half years (1842-1846), which was longer than forty-three of those fifty-nine communities (the average lifespan was two years or less). There was always a tension between the aims of the community and the economic needs of running a business. It was a nonsectarian Christian community, started by abolitionists, with interests in “nonresistance” (ie, nonviolence), moral reform, temperance, diet, and health. All of the original founders were white men, active in the abolition movement, but included businessmen, including two with silk manufacturing experience. The founders brought their families and soon it was almost thirty people. By 1844 there were a hundred and twenty.
“Early in 1843 they declared that ‘association’ together provided the best means of enacting ‘the principle of equal brotherhood, the all-embracing law of love so emphatically taught by true Christianity.’ They rejected the ‘distinction of rights or rewards’ made in ordinary life ‘between the strong and the weak, the skilful and unskillful, the man and the woman, the rich and the poor’ and sought a social equality that would ask ‘only of all honest effort according to ability.’” While I’m not sure the Northampton Association would qualify as an income-sharing community, it was certainly headed in that direction and they were working hard toward egalitarianism.
Unfortunately, they never did well with silk production, lost a lot of money, and had several ideological rifts. This all culminated in moving from being a community to functioning as a business. “Northampton’s change after 1846 from community into factory village was another strand in the shift from social critique to acceptance of industrial capitalism.” The author saw it as part of a bigger movement at the time, “a retreat of sorts, one that left abolitionists less likely to perceive the need for communitarian ventures, less likely to criticize social conventions, and more likely to accept… the growing consensus that the ‘free labor’ system was the only logical alternative to slavery. The collapse of the communitarian moment, in other words, helped cement the alliance between abolitionism and capitalism that some radical reformers sought to avert at the beginning of the 1840s.”
As far as I can see, the problem with the Northampton Association, the problem with most of the nineteenth century communities, and the problem with many of the twentieth and twenty-first century communities, is that changing an established way of life like capitalism and creating a brand new culture in addition to starting a new community, often on the fly, is just not going to be easy. A more egalitarian and communal way of living seems logical to many people and this book is just one example of creating communities to meet those desires, but we are going to have to be smarter and more persistent if we actually want it to work within a society that’s heading in the opposite direction. The ‘communitarian moment’ may have passed in the 1840s and the 1960s but I believe that we can bring it back around and make it a communitarian way of life if we’re willing to work hard enough.
(Here’s a bit more about the Northampton Association.)
Serenity Solidarity in Pictures
“Serenity Solidarity is a collective of mostly Black, Brown, and Indigenous people rooted in land based collective living, activism, and community service. We are an income-sharing community that also shares collective ownership of community resources, such as land, buildings, and vehicles. We work together with our mutual aid network to support vulnerable people and to support BIPOC-led community service efforts. Our first community is currently starting up near so-called Albany, NY on Mohican land.”
commune life 