permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 11:28 AM, <scott@permaculture.org> wrote:

> I spent some time in Academgorodok, Siberia teaching permaculture


It is impressive that you were invited to teach there. Was it an outright
invitation or did you seek the opportunity to do a PDC there yourself?
It should be considered an honor for permaculture to have such a position
of prominence in this academic environment.


> and was amazed at the bounty within the dachas on the edge of the city.
> Siberia has a wide range of zones primarily 2 in the north and 4 in the
> south and coastal regions.  There is plenty of agriculture and gardening in
> all of those zones, much as there is in Alaska.


an interesting photoessay from the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jan/05/akademgorodok-academy-town-siberia-science-russia-in-pictures
The original Silicon Valley: inside Siberia's science town – in pictures
It was a hotbed for Russia’s finest minds, built in the middle of Siberia
in 1957. But then Akademgorodok was left to languish for years. Now, it’s
coming back to life, with bars and coffee shops, the next generation of
innovators – and its very own beach
Step into Silicon Forest, Putin’s secret weapon in the global tech race
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/05/silicon-forest-putin-secret-weapon-global-tech-race-siberia-russia
Akademgorodok is set in birch forests in central Siberia. In 1957, the
Soviets conjured the town out of nothing as a home for the Russian Academy
of Sciences.

The Academpark is not some random outpost in the middle of nowhere, but the
latest part of a plan to revive Akademgorodok, the Soviet science town that
was established here in 1957, and long since left to languish. The
brainchild of mathematician Mikhail Lavrentyev and then premier Nikita
Khrushchev
<https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/series/greatspeeches+world/series/great-speeches-nikita-khrushchev>,
the “Academy Town” was conceived as a way of huddling the country’s
sharpest scientific minds together in one place, away from the distractions
of Moscow, to work on fundamental research. Sited deep in the forest 30km
south of Novosibirsk city, it was built as a woodland campus for
Novosibirsk State University along with 15 institutes for the Soviet
Academy of Sciences, ranging from nuclear physics and geology to cytology
and genetics. At its peak, it had accommodation for up to 65,000 scientists.

Its far-flung location in the Siberian woods meant that life here was
blissfully distanced from the ideological meddling of the central party
apparatus. Scientists were drawn by the promise of spacious apartments,
lively intellectual debates in the bars and social clubs – and the lure of
an artificial beach. Created by dumping hundreds of tonnes of sand along
the edge of the Ob reservoir, the beach became a popular place for picnics
and nude-bathing “seminars”.
A sense of intellectual and social freedom reigned. The House of
Scientists, the campus’s modernist cultural centre, put on exhibitions of
banned Soviet artists, held risque poetry evenings, and hosted provocative
travelling bards, activities unheard of elsewhere in the Soviet empire.
Scientific investigations blossomed in areas previously forbidden:
Lavrentyev was instrumental in saving both cybernetics and genetics, which
had been dismissed as dangerous pseudoscience in Moscow. As Gersh Budker, a
physicist who developed one of the world’s first subatomic colliders here
in the 1960s, put it: “It’s great to have a place that the bigwigs don’t
visit – and we don’t permit the little ones to join us.”
-- 
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
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