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>