Introduction
Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience adaptation and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. Today we speak to Rob Wheeler, the Ecovillage Resilience Project Partner for the Farm Ecovillage and Education Center in Tennessee, USA.
In addition to his work locally, Rob has participated actively in the UN’s primary conferences and processes on climate and sustainable development for the past 25 years. He is the North American representative on the Facilitating Group for Action for Sustainable Development, which works with the UN on the Global Week for Action for Achieving the SDGs. Rob serves on the Advisory Council for the Ecosystem Restoration Communities and is the founder and CEO of Sustainably Wise, which will be a web portal to assist all interested people and stakeholder groups to achieve the SDGs and to transition as rapidly as possible to a fully sustainable world.
Rob is also the Global Ecovillage Network’s main representative in the United Nations and a newly elected board member.
I hope you enjoy diving into the projects of the Farm Ecovillage and finding the gems of wisdom in Rob’s storytelling.
Interview
Eva: All right. Welcome, Rob Wheeler. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Rob: My pleasure. Happy to do it.
Eva: Rob, I wanted to start by giving you an opportunity of sharing a bit how you came to this podcast today. I know it’s probably a very long story, but in short, how you came to know The Farm Ecovillage where you’re living and how you came to the Ecovillage movement and thus this project.
Rob: This goes all the way back to my love for the Earth and living here on planet Earth. When I was a kid, I was in the scouts and we spent a lot of time out in nature, camping, canoeing, hiking, backpacking, and I just fell in love with the Earth. It’s like one of the most wonderful things that you could do is be out there in nature and see the beauty that’s there. Not all of nature is that way. There’s plenty of else that goes on, but there’s certainly that element of it. When I went to college, I moved up to Humboldt County in Northern California and started doing gardening, recycling, studying solar energy. It was a time of free love, peace, and brown rice. I had lived just 50 miles south of San Francisco and the whole hippie thing was intriguing and very exciting to me. I started studying environmental education in college, took Native American studies. I taught in resident outdoor schools and the Youth Conservation Corps with high school kids. In around 1970 or 71, this fellow came to my university at Humboldt State, Peter Caddy from the Findhorn community, which is where the headquarters from the Golden Eagle Village has been and the founding of it. I had the wonderful opportunity to go there in 2015 for our 20th anniversary. Peter came and he talked to us about the creation of Findhorn and how they got guidance from spirit. He had plans to do something else. He was told to go down this road to do something and he drove down into this huge pile of manure and compost. He’s like, oh my God, this is exactly what we need for our garden. He picked it all up. His wife and his good friend that they lived with there, it was out in the dunes. There was nothing there. It was abandoned Air Force base and spirit told them one day to go there. That started the community. So Peter told us all these stories and I said, oh my God, this is incredible. They were given guidance and they grew these incredibly beautiful, big, sweet, juicy produce where there was nothing but sand before. So I took a workshop from Peter and I followed that story of the development of the Findhorn community. Then Monday Night Class came out as a book from Steven Gaskin, who was the founder of the farm with several hundred hippies that drove across the country. Again, this is the time of the Back to the Land movement. Humboldt County was a place in California where there were still wild lands. We would go to the beach and it was free love. We all took off our clothes and jumped in the ocean and laid in the sun. It was a wonderful time to be alive on the planet with a lot of other young people. So, you know, the Back to the Land was very intriguing to me. I had a friend that bought a couple acres out on the river and we would go there in the summer and have a potluck cookout, work on his homestead, etc. I had a wonderful composting toilet. We have one in the farm community where I live now at the Ecovillage Training Center. It could be 35 degrees out and I’ll go outside to the compost toilet rather than use the one in the house because I love it so much. All of that nurtures our bamboo grove, and the bamboo grove goes into the biochar pit. The biochar goes into our compost piles, which then goes into the gardens themselves. Last year, I taught at the farm school. I was just here for a couple of days and they sent my resume to the farm school. The farm school hired me three days before school started and said, we need you, come and teach. When I went there, they said, we’d like you to teach English with a focus on caring for the earth. I said, how could I not?
Eva: What a job offer, beautiful.
Rob: Yeah, so I brought the kids down to the Ecovillage Training Center. We made the biochar. We took earlier biochar and spread it with the compost and raked it into the gardens. So as we plant the spring, then that will be ready to go. So what had happened then, after I had done a sustainable community campaign in Santa Cruz where I moved after college, I decided to move back east to get involved with the UN. We had our sustainable community campaign, which was one of the initiatives that came out of the Rio Plus 20 Earth Summit Conference. We did that for five years in Santa Cruz and the 50th anniversary of the UN happened at the same time as the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, which happens to be on my birthday, April 22nd each year. So each year I celebrate with millions of people around the planet.
Eva: That’s fitting.
Rob: Yeah, so I did a video film festival during the nine weeks for the earth from the 25th Earth Day to the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. And we showed videos throughout that high-end period. But through that process, I saw how the UN is wonderful in some ways, in other ways, it’s somewhat dysfunctional. So I decided I wanted to go back east and get involved at the UN and see if I could help it become a more effective institution. People generally say the UN is a norm-setting institution. It invites governments to do the right thing. But then it’s up to each government whether they’re going to do it or not. And it’s not so good at establishing programs, but it is pretty good at partnership initiatives. So I moved back east and I did get involved with the UN. And one of the first things that happened is I went to a talk on ecovillage development and Albert Bates, the founder of the Ecovillage Training Center at the farm, spoke. And I was like, oh my God, this is wonderful stuff. So I followed through with that. And I got to be good friends with Albert and with some other of the ecovillage organizers who I’m still very good friends with today and started to get engaged with the ecovillage network. And then after COVID happened, it was a time in my life to move. And I wanted to go to an ecovillage community. And I called Albert up and I said, is there any chance that I could come and visit the farm? And he said, well, we’ve had it shut down for two years because of COVID, but we’re just going to start opening up. Why do you want to come here? And I said, well, I’m ready to move and I would need a community. And he said, well, we would love to have you come down and visit and we’ll see if it works out. And so I did. And like I said, I got hired at the school in a month and three days before school started. And so here I am.
Eva: Amazing. What a lovely story. Thank you so much for sharing, Robert.
Rob: You’re welcome.
Eva: Can you help situate us in the world a bit? We have been traveling in this podcast to all the continents. Where are you calling in from today? What is your bioregion?
Rob: Planet Earth. So I consider myself a world citizen and that’s my nationality, being a citizen of the Earth. But we live in the United States in Tennessee. Like I said earlier, the community came in 1972, 71. They drove across the country, a caravan of hippies in school buses and vans looking for land and settled in Tennessee. My girlfriend here lives just off the farm where the caravan landed. And a good portion of my time I spent at her place where the caravan came 50 years ago and settled into this community. Within a year, they had bought a thousand acres here. Community expanded to 1500 people within a period of six or eight years. They were growing all their own food, developing all the infrastructure. There was like three buildings here when they arrived and they had to figure out how to do everything. These are city kids from California that migrated to the Haight-Asbury and then decided to be back to the Landers. It’s amazing the community is still here 50 years later.
It’s thriving. There’s 230 or so people here. We have 30 kids in the farm school, midwife training center, which is known all over the world, book publishing company. Albert, the director of the farm, has had a number of his books that have also been published by Chelsea Green and are very well known on Biochar and the need to transition to a climate-friendly economy and world. But the book publishing company has 400 books they put out. There’s a number of 30 different businesses here on the farm with only 230 people.
Eva: I think The Farm is a wonderful example. It is a very old establishment, a great resource for starting projects. I greatly look forward to getting into a conversation on resilience and seeing what wisdom we can maybe find among the stories.
Rob: Well, like I said, I came here in August a year and a half ago after having represented the Golden Eagle Village Network at the UN for the past 20 some years. I was thrilled to be living here. The thing that popularized Steven Gaskin and all these hippies was he did Monday night class at San Francisco University. He soon got 2,000 hippies all came to his talks that he gave on Monday nights. Ever since then on the farm, they’ve done Monday night class or Monday night circle. Right away when I came here, Albert took me there to go to those sessions. We knew the grant application had been approved for the Golden Eagle Village Network and that they wanted 20 communities to join in. So I said to Albert, I said, why don’t we do an introductory thing at Monday night class? And he said, that’s a great idea. So we introduced it at Monday night class and Albert suggested people that should be a part of our coordinating team to do climate resiliency on the farm, people that have been on the land use committee and worked on our trails. We have a trust here, a land trust, 4,000 acres in land trust to preserve the area around the edges of the farm and all the money to purchase the land in perpetuity. So the land will be preserved in the natural area along Swan Creek and the tributaries going into Swan Creek. So it’s Swan Trust. And so some of the people that engaged with the Swan Trust for a couple of decades as well, that are now a part of our coordinating team for the climate resiliency project on the farm.
Eva: This is beautiful. How has the team been engaging with the project? You started talking about it briefly, aside from the historical infrastructure like the Swan Trust, how is it going about resilience and community?
Rob: Gen Climate Resiliency Project has been now a year and a half. And every three weeks we have meetings of the coordinating team. So I’m one of the representatives from the farm on the global coordinating process that have met. So we have these 20 eco villages that then our representatives all meet every three weeks. And then we’ve had about six community workshops that we’ve done during that year and a half. Our coordinating team meets every two weeks or so to plan for what we’re doing here on the farm. I would have done some things different from the beginning than the coordinating team from Gen does, but no fault of that team. It’s like fantastic what we’ve learned and what we now are ready to share with the world. But I would have liked to start the envisioning process and implementation processes earlier than we did. But I also realized that the farm has been here 50 years and some of these eco villages have only been around for 10 years or they’re much smaller and not as well established as the farm is. So at The Farm, most of our eco infrastructure is handled by The Farm itself. We do have internet access and electricity that comes from off farm. So we do have a number of large solar arrays as well. But otherwise, the water system is ours, the road maintenance and the initial paving came, it belongs to the farm. So we’re pretty far along, but the roads are so old that they need repairs now. And a lot of the roads are still just chert, which is a kind of a mix of gravel and clay that is endemic to this area, this bio region. So we had wanted to pave the roads with biochar. If we’re able to do this, it’ll be one of the first demonstration projects in the United States. You can imagine how much carbon we can sequester with the biochar into the construction materials. That’s one of the best opportunities for demonstrating climate resiliency around the world. And we can be one of those first examples in the US. But when we started the climate resiliency project, the farm was already planning to repave some of the roads to repair where they’ve got what’s called alligator cracking.So you see this maze of lines where it’s cracking and whatever, and it starts to separate. And where we are located, it gets down to freezing and below, we had zero degree Fahrenheit temperature for a week this winter. And it just like the pavement started to bubble up. So there’s about six spots where all the just chunks of pavement coming all loose. So it would have been great if we had been able to do that with biochar already. But it was just this week that Albert sent us an email and said, we’re ready, we can do the demonstration now. But it took till then for the business to be established in the US that could do the work. And in the meantime, we’ve signed a contract with the paving company. So I don’t know what’s going to happen if we’re going to be able to biochar there, that’s going to have to be paved with asphalt. And then we’ll do some of the other spots with the biochar. But we expect to be one of those first in the country. But you know, it would have been good if we had started with visioning and implementation earlier on. So with our community, we’re very interested in regenerative agriculture. But it’s taken us a year and a half to get to the point to where we’re really engaged now with the discussions of what we’re going to do to advance this. But I mean, we have these wonderful projects that are already underway on The Farm. So it’s not the end of the world that took us a year and a half, but I would just sort of like to see it happen sooner. So we’re interested in doing a greenhouse that will be biologically heated from the siding of the greenhouse. We have a large community garden that’s the now biointensive row crops we’re looking into. We have pasture land that needs to be some type of fertilization of it or whatever. So the question is, are we going to do the cheap route, which is chemical fertilizer? Are we going to do biochar with composting and cover cropping and all of that? And those are big questions. We have 230 people. The communities that have 20 or 30 people, it’s even more challenging because you have these wonderful project ideas, and then you don’t have enough people to carry out everything you’re doing. All of humanity needs to make such a huge transition to get to climate resiliency. And so far, the investment capital to do that is limited. So you can’t just go and hire people to do the work that needs to be doing. You have to find those resources somehow or other to make the transition and to raise the capital to make the changes. And that’s for all of humanity. So the extent to which humanity invests in capital investments in the transition is the extent we’ll make the change in time. And we know that here on the farm too. So that’s one of the things that we will be focusing on doing planning is raising capital to make these transitions in a timely manner. We have a blueberry patch, which is like an acre large of nothing but blueberries. And they’ve been here for, I don’t know, three or four decades, and they’re just eight foot tall plants and they’re thriving. We have a food forest that needs a lot of work, 200 trees that have been planted that we have to continue to support the trees thriving and keeping the grass cleared back from it. So many different things have been done. Last year we grew watermelon, I think of all these training centers that we shared with the kids when they came down to do the biochar burn. So this year we have a unity garden that’s two acres in size. It’s all fenced in and ready to go. Now we just need the human power in order to get it to the point where it can be replanted again. I would say a quarter of it has been planted and into row crops and stuff so far, but we need to do the rest of the three quarters of it. So then the question is, how are we going to do that? Where will we get the human power to to do those things?
Eva: Let’s see if you get any interested volunteers from this podcast.
Rob: Yeah, the food forest came from a university about 40 miles from here where we’re located. They’ve come down a couple of times and helped with the planting of the trees and digging out the holes and adding the nutrients into the soil and preparing where the trees would go. So our watermelon patch this year is going to be done in unity garden and the kids from the farm school will come down. They’ve worked in the food forest as well this year. So it’s been a wonderful project. I just went to get seed for the watermelons yesterday and we found some seeds for 200 pound watermelons. Can you imagine? So because I’ve done the biochar with the compost with where I lived before, chicken manure and horse manure, I was growing 35 or 40 pound watermelons, which is already, you know, it’s like to carry it. Oh, beautiful.
Eva: Thank you so much for sharing about your ecologic approach and the decisions between affordability and sustainability that even established communities like the farm are making. It’s really nice to hear you’ve already included some wisdom, but very briefly in the mention of biochar and different methods that you’re using at the farm. I’m wondering if you have an opinion of what the most valuable lesson on resilience that ecovillages could share with the wider world is.
Rob: It’s a very good question. It could also be the farm specifically. First, let’s start with the challenges humanity is facing because everyone needs to know this. I mean, it’s so important. Like I said, I represented the Gold League Ecovillage Network at the UN for the last several decades. So I’ve been through these UN processes all throughout that whole time period, but we’re far beyond the carrying capacity of the earth. It would take five earths. If everyone lives like people in North America and Europe live in the other developed countries, we would need five earths just to sustain it. We’re rapidly depleting the natural environment, whether it’s forest, soil, water, and that’s got to change. So UNEP said 10 years ago that we only had 60 years of topsoil left. So now it’s 50 years of topsoil left. I just read this morning that we lose five and a half tons of soil every year, topsoil per acre, five and a half tons per acre. So per hectare, that would be like 15 tons. A ton is 2000 pounds. That’s an enormous amount of topsoil. It’s so valuable. And nature’s processes take an incredibly long time to regenerate soil. I mean, it’s like thousands of years, tens of thousands of years to generate just an inch of soil. We’ve gone from 10 to 15% for the natural environment of humus content in the soil, organic matter in the soil, down to around 2% of organic matter in the soil that we’ve lost because of humanity’s farming practices. I did this for 2015. The Global Ecovillages Network did a webpage on climate resiliency that I helped to develop. And at that time, we said that humans put into the atmosphere as much carbon from farming and from soil degradation and from the degradation of the natural environment as from fossil fuels. So what that means, though, is that we have the opportunity now by restoring nature and by practicing regenerative agriculture practices of drawing that back out. Project Drawdown with Paul Hawkins identified the 100 best practices say that two of the best things you could possibly do to transition to regenerative farming with biochar is equestrian, all the carbon from biochar, which is made from burning any type of wording material without oxygen. When you do that, you get a char which then can be brought into the soil or into construction material. And that sequesters that carbon and keeps it there for thousands or tens of thousands of years. So it’s a wonderful solution. And then the third is the restoration of the natural environment and the forest, which interestingly enough, was a project that I was working with, with Gen people 20 years ago, we went to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, 23 of us from the Global Ecovillage Network, which is how I got so well ingrained with the community of all of those going there that were in leadership positions in Gen. During the run up to that from the Fintorn community again, Alan Featherstone, he has a project for regreening the Caledonia forest in Scotland. He was working with Roger Doudna. And Roger knew of me from the Global Ecovillage Network. He said, we have this project, we’re holding conferences on restoring the earth, and we want to invite the UN to do a global decade and a global century of restoring the earth. And the project was called Restoring the Earth. And I said, wow, what a privilege to be able to represent you and to invite the UN to do that. So I did indeed. And at that time, no government supported it whatsoever. But every chance we’ve had at the UN to talk about restoration and nature-based solutions, we have. And in 2015, the UN started supporting this idea of nature-based solutions to address climate change. France at the Paris Climate Summit conference that we were at said, we’re going to use nature-based solutions. And we are going to do a regenerative agriculture project. And France took the lead on it. It’s called the 4 per 1,000 initiative to increase 4 per 1,000 every year in the soil nutrients going back into the soil and organic nature going back into the soil. So now there’s 35 countries that are part of that initiative that France launched there for regenerative agriculture. So in 2019, the governments decided to launch the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. There’s a beautiful strategy plan and every country is now invited to do that. So we seeded that idea in 2002. And then, you know, seeded the idea of nature-based solutions, regenerative organic agriculture through the ecovillage movement. Almost every ecovillage I know has some type of a project to grow their own food, along with eating a vegetarian diet, which now the UN endorses as well. And that was an initiative through the ecovillage network and the hippies around the world saying, the animals don’t want to live the way they live in factory farms. We should be eating a plant-based diet. And most communities have incredibly delicious vegetarian food. And that was one of the reasons I was really happy to move to The Farm. We just, we have a senior luncheon that happens once a month and it’s just the best food that these hippies have been here for 50 years have just made. And many people were our second generations. Now we have third and fourth generations that are living here on the farm, as well as many new people coming that are intrigued by the climate resiliency, regenerative lifestyle that’s been developed here.
Eva: Now, I just want to thank you for sharing so much about the resilience you’ve been able to build on a global scale through your work with the UN and GEN.
Rob: A lot of the things that have come through ecovillages then get adopted by governments and then the governments bring it to the UN. They don’t like to just blatantly support civil society, but they love to copy what we’re doing. And that’s a civil society at large, not only the ecovillage network. So that’s one thing that we have with the climate resiliency. Now we just received funding notice a month ago that we will get a second phase of a climate resiliency project. So communities will be sharing this with the world and the farm. We’ve been already that we want to be, continue to be a part of the project, focus on implementation and what we’re doing here on The Farm, focus on sharing that with the world and focus on running training programs throughout our bio region and North America. So we can share what we’re doing with others that are interested in climate resiliency. And you were going to ask me another question.
Eva: I’m wondering if I can take it in a different direction. So please let me know if you’re not done expressing this one. You mentioned that you live at the farm with multiple generations, and this is something that’s stuck in my brain. I have really enjoyed projects that I visited that have had three, four generations living under the same roof.
And for me, it plays to the resilience of a community on a social side. I’m curious what your experience has been living in multi-generational housing and how you see the social resilience of The Farm.
Rob: Living in a community has positives and negatives and I don’t think any of us living in these communities want to sugarcoat that, but I mean it’s the same that happens. We’re like a microcosm of the world, you know, but I lived in another community earlier and there were only 25 people here so there were only like 15 to 20 adults and the rest were kids and I said this is like being married to 15 people at the same time. You have the same issues that come up with a couple’s relationship but now 15 people are totally invested in those relationships, again for positive and negative. So we would have incredible birthday parties for kids at all ages whether you’re five years old or 85 years old with the whole community coming to the birthday parties and celebrating together. In the summertime we would eat dinner all together with the 15 or 20 of us and then we would go outside and play foursquare together or one of our interns was a dancer with a fire hoop and did a fire hoop thing with us. So it’s so nurturing to have the younger and the older people together like that. Here on the farm we have a farm road that goes from our welcome center where you start the farm and then it runs along through the horse pastures where that when they had 1500 people here that was all farmed and now it’s pasture and a lot of it’s horses but it runs along there. We have the head of the roads which is where Monday night class and we have a big fire circle and before you get to that it’s a community garden and then the roads go out from there. So we’re on a ridgetop plateau and then there are ravines go down that are wooded down towards where our swimming hole is and then the houses are along the top there of the ravines. So as you go across the farm field you could look at out there’s a big huge oak tree right alongside the road. Many people on the farm have golf carts, electric golf carts. So if you do have a solar panel it’s charged with the golf cart. If we lose electricity on the farm at the Ecovillage Training Center we have a solar array that has backup energy to keep our refrigerators and our lights running and the golf carts charged up. So you see whole families in their golf cart together you know and as the kids get to be 16, 18 years old they can take a cart to school. In the summertime we had our summer program. It’s just a wonderful experience to be able to share like that across the generations. My girlfriend wants to have a regenerative elders area which is near the school where the young people and the middle-aged and the elder people that you know would end up going to retirement home where they could live in community together instead. We have a fairly large population now because so many came here 50 years ago. So now they’re in their 60s, 70s, some into their 80s. We need to take care of these people well along with the younger kids that need to be with their grandparents and need to experience all elements of life. Absolutely. Coming from a community with 50 years experience there’s a lot of history that informs the evolution of the farm. A cemetery here that you know was started I mean was here when they when they came already and now I don’t know 50 or 100 people have been buried in the cemetery in just a year and a half. I’ve been to four funerals there and again it’s all ages. When I was young a great-grandma just disappeared and my parents hardly talked about it you know even though the cemetery was only a half mile away. To have the kids experience all those elements of life and have it be acknowledged rather than hidden is I think it’s really important. So during our seminar on caring for the earth we studied green cemeteries and green burial measures and we were doing press conference. So a couple of my kids did press conferences on green burials and why it’s something that is much needed in the world. Now they like to composting of the human body. One of the worst things you can do is crematorium and you know it’s like you have to heat up to I don’t know how hot in order to burn a human body and then the toxic materials are there. Good to learn about these things.
Eva: Absolutely and as you said that each ecovillage is a small microcosm of their system. It’s funny that maybe you’re seeing some patterns of your wider structural interplaying there.
Rob: I mean we’re all learning. We’re all learning together. We live in a time when we recognize that basis of humanity our economic system has been a competition dog-eat-dog world and we’re learning to move towards a cooperative ways of living together and doing things rather than just competing. With the Global Ecovillage Network we met with this fellow Graham Boyd from Evolute 6 last week on regenerative economy and we’re exploring doing projects with Evolute 6 and you know the focus is yes competition has a place. You know kids love games and they love to challenge each other but yet you have to have collaboration and learn how to work together and treat each other with respect and show good sportsmanship and you know you get so much more out of much more effective when you collaborate. That’s the way nature does it and that’s what Graham said that to us. He says you know nature just doesn’t compete everything against each other. Everything supports each other in regenerative processes in nature in order for things to thrive. So you have symbiotic processes with the oak tree, with the lichen that goes in the soil, with the soil microbes, with the mushroom mycelium that supports life coming up from under the ground. All of those things help nature to thrive and sustain itself and you couldn’t nature would not thrive without the processes of decay or regeneration. A human can’t either, it’s just a part of the natural cycles again. Just happy to be here and be a part of this project and sharing the things that we’re learning with the rest of the world.
Eva: In your many years of involvement with the ecovillage network with the UN and with ecovillages themselves, what practices have you seen observed to dealing with resilience? I think ecovillages dig a lot into the social so I have already had a lot of examples as well as the ecological which we’ve talked about a bit in this interview, biochar, different forest management and garden practices. What are some of the tools that you’ve seen that build resilience that have excited you?
Rob: Attributes is one of them. There’s like six or eight attributes and Jen has created now as a part of the climate resiliency approach a set of indicators for these attributes and they’re the things a community needs to do to move you rapidly and stably towards climate resiliency. So they include redundancy. So if you have a water system, you want to have a water system that can back itself up in various ways. The last time we had a major freeze here, we’re in a little town next to Summertown. You go to town, there’s a road sign for the city and it says the farm lives here on the bottom of the side for the community. So that’s pretty special. Now there’s like a couple thousand people in the farm with 230 have been recognized on this along with the town’s baseball team. Anyway, oh the attributes, redundancy, they lost their water supply in the town. We have our own tower that’s set up. Two smaller systems that were set up earlier on and they went and purchased a larger one and it took 30 people to load it onto the truck with the flatbed truck and bring it across Tennessee and then big heavy equipment in order to install it and put it up. There are wildflowers. Because we have all these ravines go down and it’s all forested, it’s protected, it’s all protected conservation status, more than half the land on the farm. But there’s wildfire danger from that, you know. The fire sweeps up the ravine. All our houses were purposely built at the edge of the forest, which has been very nice. We have all this open space and everything. But if you have a house that’s next to the forest, you have a number of different threats. We’re 80 miles from one of the largest tornadoes to ever hit the South in the United States. We had 20 minutes warning that that tornado was coming. And we’re just 80 miles away from the path of that tornado. We have straight line winds from what’s called atmospheric rivers. So they come across from California where all the hippies came 50 years ago. A huge amount of water sweeping across the country with a huge force of wind. Because you have cold with the hot, it pulls everything up into the air to get through the freezing cold and drops it down. And it creates these winds that come rapidly across the country. So you get these really cold in the wintertime blasts of winds and knocks down these 80 foot tall trees. All of the Eastern United States was clear cut centuries ago. So there were white oak here when they came, but shortly before the land had been cleared, before the hippies came here, which is why they could afford to buy the land. And they were able to farm it. But the end result was the white oak has been decimated and it’s been replaced by red oak, which is not as resilient. And now we need to move back towards mature forests that will be able to thrive with climate change. So Albert is a fond of all this information. He’s lived here for 45 years on the farm, and he shares all this information with me of the changes that we need to go through and are going through. These challenges exist now that we are going to have to face. And so these things hold to me as a being a part of the course and the learning situation. So redundancy is one of them. So we need to now have not only our water tower, but we have like four natural ponds, but we need a natural pond close to where all the residences and all of our agriculture is. So that as we start to grow, bring back regenerative farming on the farm, we need to have access to that, not from our water tower, but from the holding ponds that we could feed the agriculture. So we calculated it out during one of our climate resiliency meetings, and they said we’d run through the water in that tank, which is 100 feet high every day. All that water is drawn down to take care of 230 people on the farm. So we need to have resilient systems and backup so that we continue. If we lose our power for a week on the farm from coming in, we’ve got big problems. So we need to make solar panel backup system for the truck that pumps the water through the farm system out to all the houses, the types of things. But then there’s like six or eight of those attributes that are important that we now have a set of indicators for any community can see how well you’re doing implementing those different attributes.
Eva: I will be sure to include those attributes in our show notes as well. Thank you so much, Rob. You are a wealth of knowledge. It is lovely talking with you. I feel like you’ve interviewed yourself before we separate for the day. I’m wondering if there’s anything you would really like to talk about that we haven’t touched on yet.
Rob: Well, you know, I had started at the beginning. I got off track again with the things that we learned about the challenges. We are facing tipping points as humanity. There’s different of the leading scientists have been studying the tipping points for a number of years now. We no longer have a period of 20 years or 30 years to move towards climate resiliency. We have at most 10 or 15 years before it’s going to, changes are going to seriously hit the fan. The whole question of how bad are we going to make it for our children, even for ourselves, if we’re even going to be able to recover from it. You cut a large percentage of the trees already in the Amazon rainforest. I think, I don’t remember this clearly, but it’s something like if you cut 23% to 28% of the forest, then you’re going to lose two thirds of the forest without cutting them all, just from the impacts from climate change. And we’ve already cut 17%, which means there’s only 5% left. Every year we lose 17 million hectares of forest each year, destroyed as large an area of land degradation as all of South America. Two billion hectares of land that we’ve degraded from farming practices and deforestation and illegal logging, all of that needs to be repaired and restored. It’s such a huge project that humanity has. There’s almost nothing that we do now on the planet earth that’s done in a fully regenerative way. It would be almost impossible to do it. But fortunately, many governments are now setting goals to move towards electric vehicles, which would be a huge plus. There’s major effort to get off of fossil fuels today. Many countries are moving in that direction. There’s a non-proliferation that’s been proposed by civil society that a number of small island development states have embraced that. At COP28, I was there this year in Dubai, and Colombia agreed to support that initiative, the non-proliferation fossil fuel treaty. So the support is building all around the world for that treaty to get off of fossil fuels and to move towards renewable energy systems. These changes have to take place. That’s the Amazon rainforest. That’s just one of those ecosystems. We’re very concerned about permafrost melt in Siberia and in northern Canada, where you know that there’s massive wildfires this year. The melting of the glaciers is a major concern. These things that are now happening, not 10 years, 20 years, they’re happening already. The permafrost, they’ve measured it down 30 feet. It’s heating up 30 feet under the ground. The earth is excellent insulation. So imagine that now the earth’s heating up 30 feet under the ground. That’s a huge concern. The loss of the corals in the ocean and the loss of the fisheries, because that’s the hatching ground for so many of our species of fish. And there’s something like a half of a billion people are dependent on fisheries and the ocean health in one way or another for their livelihood. And we’re threatening those due to climate change and due to the heating of the ocean and the acidification of the ocean. So the faster we can get off of fossil fuels and onto renewable systems and into regenerative farming and make the other changes that are needed to move towards climate resiliency, the better off we’re all going to be. And there’s something all of us can do, no matter where we live and who we are, changes we can make in our personal lives to help make that difference.
Eva: I think that is a great way to end. Thank you so much, Rob, for all of the work, art, commitment you have put into this movement and representing also the ecovillages in the UN.
Rob: It’s been my joy to do it. I just love to be a part of the change. Now, I think so many of us have come in with that in mind to help make this transition. And I just salute you as well for everything you’ve given the ecovillage movement over the last several years to help us to continue to thrive. And all of the viewers, all of your commitment as well to help as we go through this transition.
Eva: Thank you very much, Rob.
Outroduction
Before we end, I invite you to take a moment to sit with the concerns brought by Rob. I invite you to close your eyes if you can, to take an intentional breath and to sense into where you hold the pain of the world in your body. Sit with it. See if through grieving, through honoring this pain, you are able to transform it into the motivation to actively participate in the transition to a resilient and regenerative human presence on earth. I will leave you with a quote from Joanna Macy’s book, Active Hope:
Our pain for the world arises out of our inter-existence with all life. When we hear the sounds of the earth crying within us, we’re unblocking not just feedback, but also the channels of felt connectedness that join us with our world. These channels act like a root system, opening us to a source of strength and resilience as old and enduring as life itself.
Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening public crisis.
While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.
GEN Staff
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