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  • From: mIEKAL aND <dtv@mwt.net>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] where you from?
  • Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 08:44:53 -0500

Dreamtime Village is located in the heart of the driftless bioregion in SW Wisconsin. The driftless area is the largest unglaciated area in the northern hemisphere, an area 120 miles across & approx 200 miles north-south. According to some of my research it has actually remained unglaciated for the last 6 glacial ages, each time the glacier coming down from the north makes our "island" smaller. Id say the next glacier is gonna push us off the map. In other words, we here are living on very very old soil.

We started as a community in 1991 when our non-profit art organization was donated about 80 acres of discontiguous land & an abandoned school in a tiny town, called West Lima WI, population not including us, about 60 or so, about 8 blocks or so & we have 2 blocks of buildings in the town including the former post office, the teacher's hotel, & an old boarding house.

We held our first permaculture design course in 93 (when they were still 17 days long! frightening..) & Michael Pilarski & Chris Evans did a remarkable job of making sense pulling off the event despite all odds. We've had one more full design course & a number of much shorter events, but we've grown away from that style of distributing the permaculture mindset, instead setting up more as a resource center, a demonstration garden & free clonal reserve for other young permaculture projects starting out. permaculture here is spelled with a small "p" & as such is integrated into a lifestyle of rural, living on the land, & anarchist community that is most often a combination of experiment, common sense, the cult of personality & unfinished projects. Probably more than 300 people have stayed here for an extended length of time over the years.

My main interest in permaculture is heavily accented toward the "cultural" part of permanence & I have spent much of my time these last years applying natural sustainable principles to digital culture, to the arts & performance, to inventing instruments with plants that we grow or grow locally, toward getting artist to stop working with such toxic materials, etc. This is a realm where these ideas are not necessarily preaching to the choir.

One of the main missing links to community building, ie economies, has in the last few years been given a major boast by the success of Organic Valley a few miles away. They have become the largest distributor of organic dairy & meat in the country, employing more than 200 people in the area, & finally after all these years they are starting to grasp some of the permaculture concepts & could possibly become a nationally recognized label that could help move "pools" of nuts & fruits (a few of us are working on them). They have just bought 30 acres of land for their new corporate headquarters & I think I & a few others will be able to convince them to donate a few acres for a permaculture demonstration garden a few years from now.

mIEKAL




mIEKAL aND
memexikon@mwt.net
<www.dreamtimevillage.org> | <www.cla.umn.edu/joglars>





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