adob-gas.txt

adob-gas.txt - - - - v6-26-06 permaculture activites biogas natural-building

Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5Back to Abundance-Ecovillage
"EcoFair 2001: Designing for the Next Seven Generations" is an event organized
and paid for by the students at Maharishi University of Management located in
Fairfield, Iowa. The focus of the weekend is to raise campus and community
awareness on Sustainable Living methods. Topics covered will include sustainable
agriculture, renewable energy sources, and ecologically sound buildings,
including the process and materials used. The event is free of charge, but
participants should bring lunch,or plan to eat in our dining hall for up to
$7.00 a meal. Our dining hall offers 85% organic and 100% vegetarian meals.The
event is open to anyone who is interested in attending. For questions or
comments you can contact Jana ffitch or Simone Griffith at (641)472-4525 or
(641)919-3873. Our email is ecofair2001@mum.edu.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Schedule of Events: Thursday evening, May 3rd--Student Union Theatre, Maharishi
University of Management, Fairfield, IA 7:30-9:30 pm: John Jeavons "Grow
Biointensive" Sustainable Mini-Farming- A Global Solution to Soil Fertility,
Food, Income, and Community In the Smallest Area. John Jeavons is the Director
of Ecology Action, an environmental research and educational organization
revolutionizing sustainable mini-farming around the world.
Friday May 4th --Student Union Theatre
Permaculture: Designing for Abundance with Douglas Bullock, Lonnie Gamble,
Michael Havelka, Al Rutan, Tom Wahl
Doug is one of the top permaculture designers in the US. He has been developing
a permaculture farm on Orcas Island for the last 18 years. He has taught and
worked on permaculture projects in Iowa, Hawaii, Washington, Costa Rica,
Austrailia and New Zealand. He organized the first Permaculture course in the US
wit Bill Mollison.
9:45am - An introduction to Permaculture with Doug Bullock
11:00am - Elements of Permaculture Design including: Home Gardens, Orchards,
Food Forests, and Edible Landscaping
12:00pm - Lunch
1:30pm - Elements of Permaculture Design continuing with Energy, Building, and
Village Design, and Waste and Water in the Environment
2:30pm - EcoVillage Presentation
3:00pm - Walking Tour of Campus: A Vision of The Future
Evening, Student Union Theatre
7:30pm - Permaculture Slide Show with Doug Bullock
Saturday morning, May 5th-- Student Union Theatre
10:00 am - Ecological Building: Better for People, Better for the Environment,
and Better for the Pocket Book with Alexis Karolides, Senior Consultant from the
nation's leading experts in energy efficient buildings and transportation, The
Rocky Mountain Institute.
Saturday afternoon, May 5th-- Student Union
12:15pm-- Bar-B-Q Lunch
Plus hands on demonstrations on:
Earth plastering & straw bale construction
Double-Digging
Solar Oven: Baking
Candle Making
Aromatherapy
Apple Cider Pressing
Natural Cosmetics with Colleen
Bio- diesel production
Methane Gas Production
Solar Electric power
Wind Power
Solar Hot Water
Alternative Transportation
And More!
Presentations :
Tofu making and its history with Alex Green, Food policy in Iowa with Francis
Thicke, Prairie in Iowa with Ray Reeves, and Alternative Building with Steve
Vessey. And more!
Also! A Film Festival on Permaculture around the world will be taking place
throughout the afternoon in the Student Union.
Saturday night, May 5th, Student Union Ballroom
M.U.M."s Annual Eco-Jam Fashion Show featuring clothing made from natural fibers
followed by live music and a dance! (time TBA)
Bio's on speakers:
Alexis Karolides
Alexis Karolides is a registered architect who came to Rocky Mountain Institute
with six years of experience in commercial, institutional, and industrial
architecture. As a senior research associate with RMI’s Green Development
Services, her consulting projects have included a prototype energy efficient
supermarket for Stop & Shop, a new gymnasium for the US Air Force Academy, spec
homes developed by Hines, various environmentally sensitive projects with Aspen
Skiing Company, a life-sciences incubator building, and a monastery in Tibet.
She has also provided educational seminars and integrated design workshops for
communities and institutions such as the New Mexico Department of Energy &
Natural Resources, the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Florida Gulf Coast University, the
Sear Brown Group, and the city of Pittsburgh. She has been invited to speak at
numerous conferences, including the DOE All States Meeting, the Austin
Sustainable Communities Initiative Conference, a symposium in Colorado Springs
sponsored by the Partnership for Community Design and an annual conference for
the National Park Service. Ms. Karolides has also been a guest lecturer at
various universities and colleges including Dartmouth College, Florida Gulf
Coast University, Rice University, Berea College and the University of
Wisconsin-River Falls. She frequently provides input for radio, magazine and
newspaper articles on topics of energy efficiency, healthy design and
environmental sensitivity for commercial and residential building projects.
Ms. Karolides graduated magna cum laude from Carleton College with a Bachelors
of Arts Degree in Physics and distinction for research work on solar and
alternative energy systems. Following a Richter Fellowship in Germany, where she
studied post-war architecture, Ms. Karolides completed a Masters of Architecture
Degree at Rice University. She interned at the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Department where she researched sustainable staff housing, and at the Texas
Governor's Energy Office. While in Austin, Texas, she was her firm's
sustainability manager, a member of the local AIA Chapter Sustainability
Committee and a member of the Austin Sustainable Building Coalition. She was
also an adjunct faculty member at Austin Community College in the Building
Construction Technology Department.
Douglas Bullock
Since 1982, Douglas Bullock has lived with his extended family, friends, and
interns on their Permaculture site on orcas Island. Douglas has facilitated or
directly participated in comprehensive Permaculture projects and classes at
their site and at sites around the world, including Australia, New Zealand,
Hawai'i, Costa Rica, California, and Washington.
Having traveled extensively collecting and studying plants, he is familiar with
a wide range of climate strategies and crops. His specialties include
Permaculture, tree crops, nursery practices, creating small and large scale
wetland environments and implementing appropriate technologies. Douglas has also
written articles and pamphlets on Permaculture that were featured in the
Permaculture Activist and in the International Permaculture Journal.
Lonnie Gamble
Lawrence (Lonnie) A. Gamble, P.E., owner of Surya Nagar Farm, does consulting,
equipment furnishing, and installation for renewable energy projects including
solar electric, and biomass. He has worked on a wide range of projects, from
remote cabins to large grid connected homes, from 100 watts to 30,000 kilowatts
(30 megawatts). He has a BS degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina
State University and is a registered professional engineer. He teaches solar
energy and building with natural materials at La'akea permaculture teaching farm
in Hawaii and at the Bullock brothers permaculture farm on Orcas Island in
Washington State. He is also developing two small permaculture farms, one on the
Big Island in Hawaii and the other in Fairfield, Iowa and an ecovillage of 40
homes in Fairfield Iowa.
He lives in Fairfield, Iowa in a solar powered neighborhood. The neighborhood
has become a hotbed of experimentation with natural building systems (straw
bale, straw clay, faswall block (80%wood chips, 20% concrete), earth plaster),
natural energy systems (solar electric, biomass, solar thermal, wind, geothermal
cooling), organic gardening practices (organic hydroponics, french
intensive/biodynamic, inexpensive unheated greenhouses, row covers, innovative
season extenders, permaculture orchard and garden design, square foot gardening
methods, Fukuoka type no-till natural gardening), and water sources (roof
catchment, direct solar-powered well pumping).
John Jeavons
John Jeavons is a master gardener, ecologist, and director of Ecology Action, a
non-profit tax-exempt organization located in Willits, California. A Yale
University graduate, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for
International Development and Stanford before joining Ecology Action and
devoting a subsequent quarter-century to the development of what is widely
regarded as the most highly evolved method of organic gardening ever devised.
Background
Formed in 1970 to revolutionize sustainable mini-farming and food production
around the world, Ecology Action employs Biointensive gardening, a refined
combination of horticultural methods variously used by the Chinese 4,000 years
ago; 18th century French Gardeners; Austrian Rudolph Steiner in the 1920's; and
British horticulturist Alan Chadwick, who united the biodynamic and French
intensive method before introducing it to John Jeavons in the 1960's. Jeavons
and Ecology Action further developed the method over several decades of
meticulously-recorded research and experimentation. The result is a method of
organic gardening capable of providing a family of four with fresh, organically
and sustainably-produced vegetables for an entire year in 800 square feet or
less (the size of an average tract home's front lawn), while actually building
soil rather than depleting it.
Al Rutan
Al Rutan was born in Portland OR. His college work was performed at a
Benedictine Abbey in Oregon called Mt Angel, which granted him a BA degree.
He taught high school in eastern Montana for several years before moving to
Minnesota to pursue a career in publishing material that focused on alternative
energy. His company, Rutan Publishing, was one of three in the nation during the
70ªs that pioneered information on how to convert starch grains to a fermentable
substrate for the on-farm production of alcohol fuel. Farmers knew about the
moonshine days of Prohibition, but they did not know about the production of
ethanol without using sugar which was the practice of the old bootleggers.
The early text from Rutan Publishing that shared this information was Making
Alcohol Fuel - Recipe And Procedure by Lance Crombie.
Al Rutanªs work with methane gas production began during his teaching days in
Montana in conjunction with a group of cattle ranchers who were exploring ways
to slow down the strip mining of coal on the western plains. Strip mining
seriously disturbs the water table underneath the range when it cuts deeply into
the earth in that arid region.
The research work with methane gas production continued in Minnesota with the
publication of Rutan‰Ûªs book in 1979 titled The Doªs & Don'ts Of Methane. And
he contributed regularly to a magazine published at Milaca, Minnesota, called
Alternative Sources of Energy. The title of his column was Al Rutan, the Methane
Man.
In the intervening years he has conducted workshops and demonstrations that
focus on what is necessary in order to make harnessing anaerobic fermentation
energy efficient. His demonstrations have been featured in TV newscasts on three
different occasions in the Minneapolis area. In 1977 at the Minnesota State Fair
in St Paul, Channel 5 TV televised him cooking bacon and eggs on a gas hotplate
which was fueled by a 300 gallon methane digester just off to one side. Manure
for the digester was gathered from the pig pens at the U of M Ag School just
outside the Fairgrounds.
Presently, Rutan Research provides information on how to harness anaerobic
fermentation efficiently by means of two websites:
http://www.methane-gas.com
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/energyrenewables