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Coydon Wallham wrote:
Evan Stowers wrote:I like your ideas!
I myself has always wanted to do something more ambitious but it's hard to find others who believe they can pull something like that off! I think it's important for there to be people out there doing bigger projects to help accelerate the change!
Myself and a couple friends would probably be very interested in what you are doing and we are from the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. We are planning on traveling and living on the road starting in about a month so there is a good chance that we can come and help out on your project(s) at some point and share any types of info or knowledge and good food and resources we might have! Good luck to you!
Ideally I would have the land in about a month and be starting to evaluate it for plans, but being ready to jump into straight labor at that point seems like a stretch, unless I find a good parcel that has an obvious spot for a wofati and y’all want to do a bunch of digging. I suppose prepping logs would be an early helpful step, have to look into acquiring the tools for that. If anyone has experience landscaping/homesteading with a permaculture mindset, might also be nice to stick a few stakes in the ground and discuss sand castle possibilities. Regardless if you just want a place to set up camp for a while, I'm guessing that would work too. How long do you think you’ll be around the area?
I feel like I could do a daily blog in this thread about things I am researching, why it should be done, how I am going about stuff, what kind of people I think would fit, etc., but don’t want to bog down with details at this point. I’m trying to distill ideas down to more universal elements. Even with that limit in mind things have been picking up in recent weeks and I’m not finding time to write much.
I’ve been talking with various people about what would make a group situation like this work and some points continue to clarify little by little. One major hurdle is placing an emphasis on direct oral communication. In the end that is what determines if a group actually works, and trying to screen for this through writing or even video recordings is paradoxical. Any time I start to write ‘this is what will work’ or ‘that is what won’t work’, I feel like I need to add ten more lines that start with ‘unless...’
The dailyish email that Paul sent out yesterday resonated with many of my goals, around the idea of how non-profit organizations seem to end up producing more profits and accomplishing less toward their claimed goals than people just doing stuff. I’ve been involved recently with an outdoor school in the area that is known for their survivalist program. At the risk of trivializing the life changing experience that is immersion in a program like they offer, one takeaway I’ve had is that, as useful as it is to know how to start a fire with stuff you find on a forest floor and how to forage enough calories to keep yourself moving, the key survival skill just might be developing sincere and supportive connections with others around you to produce something that matters to the entire group. Finding a way to make that last would amount to prosperity. It seems most of us have lost the ability to value such bonds significantly. Easy money and instant gratification are just so much sexier.
I’m looking for a few other human beings that just want to do stuff the right way, to live a fulfilling life in nature and not stress out about how to force the rest of the world to fit into some massively detailed plan. Political parties and NGOs that try to 'save nature' don’t seem to end up accomplishing much more than feeding the propoganda of their declared opposition. These entities are all building blocks that would be beneficial to learn to deal with in some shape or fashion, but I’m not holding my breath that I’m going to get to Utopia on a Tuesday any time soon. This site is a treasure trove of things we can do for real in our own lives to make things better, so I’ll be looking to connect with others who are headed along the same path.
And I’ll probably be rewriting the ‘goals’ of this "ecocamp" project every few weeks here so that I might eventually figure out exactly what the hell it is that I am doing...
