Wolfe in Transition

Peak Oil happened in 2006?

2012-01-15T23:29:00.001Z

People have been predicting peak oil for years and it's been denied for as many years by the oil industry and most Governments. This link shows that the International Energy Agency has finally taken a position and stated that it has already happened - in 2006! Bizarre, I mean why aren't we already feeling rising fuel prices on a monthly basis already?

Anyway, this is a good introduction piece to the whole peak oil issue for anyone new to the theory.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Articles/International_Energy_Agency_Reports_Peak_Oil_Happened_in_2006/

A biogas digester septic tank for our home

2012-01-14T20:05:00.000Z

Our biogas digester coming along...
For more photos click

this

The time has come to install our septic tank. We’ve lived the past 6 months with an outdoorcompost toilet and a drain from the shower that goes into the gardenssomewhere, but a proper house with flushing loos needs a tank to deal with allthat waste.

What happens to our waste? Sewage – it’s so out of sight as to be out ofmind. It’s only when you are building ahouse, or working with people displaced by war or disaster that you have todeal with it.

Howthis post is going to work (it’s way longer than planned, but hey)

First off I’m going to describe the standard sewerage disposal andtreatment systems that we would be expected to use around here, then explainwhat we are doing and why. So bear withme. I want to take you on a short journey,the story of poo. I think it’s worthtalking about because we all have to deal with it, wherever people live, andit’s the cause of countless deaths in poorer countries, billions are investedto deal with it in richer nations, it pollutes our rivers and causes so manyproblems – and despite all this it can be an incredible resource – for energyproduction, soil enhancement and reforestation.

Then I’m going to talk about biogas and show a few examples. Then talk about the plan and biogas septic tankwe’re building outside our house in Portugal.

If you can’t face all this text and reading you can just skip to theslideshow which is

here (all photos and few wordsJ).

Conventionalsewerage treatment

The world over, we treat sewage as a public health hazard, and go toenormous lengths to get rid of it. In richer countries massive seweragenetworks are laid, linking each house to a treatment centre, that then deposits“treated” remains into the sea, or rivers. This systems works, but it costs fortunes to install and assumes afairly well organised and properly funded agency to maintain it all.

This is not the case in most of the world, where people have to dealwith it in other ways, which usually means open sewers, or houses depositingtheir waste into their backyard, or into open drains running through thecommunity. Pretty gross and aundoubtedly a source of water-borne diseases.

We live in a village of about 400 houses where there is no seweragesystem, so each house has their own septic tank. These usually consists of ahole in the ground about 3 to 4m deep into which a column of concrete rings areset, with a little gap between each one. When the sewage enters the solids sitat the bottom and the fluids seep away through the gaps between these pipes(which are usually around 1m diameter by the way). So basically these are soak away pits,probably polluting the local ground-water with faecal chloroforms (somethingyou really want to avoid unless you fancy a bit of dysentery or cholera). It’s not an issue here in Portugal as peopledon’t drink groundwater – it mostly comes from piped networks, is treated withchlorine which kills these bugs and anyway, the earth and rock probably filterout most of these bad guys before they get to the water table. Probably… Theproblem is in places with a shallow water table, but that’s another story.

Most septic tanks have two chambers divided by a wall; as the solidsbreak down (micro-bacteria work their magic on the “solids”) they loose massand rise to the surface (think of the scum and dirty floaties you see inminging beaches when you’re trying to catch a wave). Anyway, these bits float to the second tankwhere an overflow takes away supposedly “clean” water. It’s not really clean, butit’s cleaner than when it went it. Thiswaste or overflow water can be directed through a reed bed or an area filledwith plants to absorb the water and the nutrients that remain in it. Yes – there ARE nutrients. Something we generally tend to ignore. But most systems just redirect this wastewater back into a passing river or whatever. When the solids build up too much (after a few years) a tractor come to“de-sludge” the tank, which it then deposits on nearby fields to fertilise theplace. Gross? Not really, there’s mightynutrients in there, just like putting cow manure on the fields, but we’regetting to that…

The problemof methane production

As you probably know, sewage stinks, but that’s mostly the acids fromurine making the smell – not the methane, which is an odourless gas. All animal dung, including ours, producemethane as it breaks down – which happens when billions of bacteria feed on thestuff and it is they that produce the methane, not our poo. All living things give off gas: plants giveout oxygen, humans breath out carbon dioxide. These mega-bugs give off methane(and a bit of carbon dioxide too).

Every septic tank leaks methane: it’s lighter than air and seeps outthrough soil nice and easy. We don’t know it’s happening because it has no smell. I guess if you were to look at a communitythrough a gas-sensitive lens (like thermal imaging but for methane) you wouldsee plumes of the stuff heading sky-wards, from every backyard, or sewagetreatment plants – at least from those that don’t burn the stuff to cook or tomake electricity.

But you’ve probably heard that methane is a fairly potent green-housegas; apparently it’s 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Climate scientists are worried about meltingpermafrost releasing billions of tonnes of methane which will furtheraccelerate global warming. Well, nowthere’s 7 billion of us folk on-planet now, how much do we contribute every dayor year through our septic tanks?

I looked into this and read a recent study that found that septic tanksprovide around 100 kgs of CO₂ equivalent to the atmosphere perperson, per year. Arguably this isnegligible, but given there’s so many of us it adds up: let’s take a populationof 10m people (that of Portugal, or about 5% of Pakistan). Using this study we can estimate that thismany people produce around 1m tonnes of CO₂ (equivalent) per year,equal to about 100,000 Hummers (fuel-hungry American SUVs).

Checking against a list of countries’ emissions it’s fairly shocking tolearn that this is equivalent to the annual emissions of the Maldives, orSwaziland (or twice that of Liberia). And that’s only from the methane emissions of 10m people’s poo. Take apopulation of 1bn (India’s way past this point already) emissions from septictanks rise to 100m tonnes of CO₂equivalent per year, roughly equal to theannual emissions of Belgium or Iraq.

Does this mean that all our sewage waste is a major greenhouse gas? Itlooks like it, but I’d need to do more research to pin down these numbers. Has anyone else looked into this? If thesenumbers are right surely people would be applying for carbon credits (i.e.cash) to not emit this methane. (Iwonder if we could use these figures to raise carbon financing to build biogassystems in Pakistan, where I work half of the time helping rebuild afterfloods). Anyway, back to the case athand – biogas and our place.

Biogas – areally cool and viable alternative?

Studying at the CAT a few years ago I came across biogas production, afairly straightforward system whereby the sewage tank (or septic tank) is airtight(so no liquids or gas escape). A smallpipe is embedded into the top of the tank, which is round and dome shaped, sothere are no corners where pressure can cause ruptures. The gas in this case is a methane – carbondioxide blend and is flammable: it burns! In smaller systems it’s used forcooking, in large, city-size plants there’s so much more gas it’s used togenerate electricity via a gas turbine. I’ve heard that you can even connect this gas to the intake of a petrolgenerator to make it run, or compress it and make transport gas. Or generate hot water for heating, showers orwhatever.

My friend Sarah Kent did loads of research (and her thesis!) on biogasand told me about places in Nepal where for generations people had cut treesfor firewood till the place was completely denuded. Unable to survive there anymore people were starting to migrate to urban slums. So they introduced biogas plants, initiallyworking just on animal manure. Theseprovided enough gas for cooking; combined with reforestation they have beenable to deal with the problem in some communities.

Then I met David Fulford, of Kingdom Bioenergy, a former renewable energiesprofessor at Reading (UK) and for many years the biogas consultant for AshdenAwards. He worked in Nepal for years, introducing biogas design – and now thereare over 900,000 of small family or community sized plants working there.

I asked if he had a design we could use for human waste – in fact can itwork on our sewage? Given that most of the plants I’d seen worked with animalmanure only. He saw no reason whynot. But why not add in food waste, hesuggested.. And he then pointed me towards this amazing video of a system usedin India that works entirely on food waste.

To combine both human and food waste, David suggested we buy aninsinkerator (a kind of blender that fits below sinks, like in those Americanhorror movies). This would have to beplumbed into the tank, so thought about well in advance. David kindly agreed to help us by designing abasic plant (and has since been really helpful on many fronts!).

David also put me in touch with Govinda Devkota, a Nepalese biogasspecialist who has built thousands of these plants. Govinda sent some great technical guidancematerial which has helped. (He’savailable for consultancies worldwide by the way!).

On-sitefertiliser too!

One of the best “outputs” from a biogas plant is the slurry – which is“delivered” above ground by this system for use as fertiliser and is apparentlyan incredibly good source of nutrients for trees or gardens. Our land has fairly acidic, sandy soil, quitelow in nutrients so we could really use this. So could most of the planet as 80% of our agricultural land is noweffectively denuded by years of intensive chemical agriculture.

So insummary:

Biogas septic tanks (digesters) deal with the problem of pollution to rivers or ground water;
They provide a form of energy that would deal with environmental problems locally while reducing global emission increases from human-based methane production.
This energy can be used to provide free, smokeless gas for cooking – freeing people up in so many countries from the horror of fire-smoke, which WHO reports kills over 2m people per year.
The odourless liquid effluent that biogas tanks deliver could solve the massive food crisis affecting millions in poorer countries – by providing safe and highly effective fertiliser to increase soil fertility, which people can then use to grow more food at home and improve nutrition.

How ourbiogas system should work

First off, here’s a picture of the plan David kindly drew up forus.

The design we're using to build our biogas digester. Source - David Fulford, Kingdom Bioenergy

So far this is what I’ve learned:

- When the sewage in the tank rises to the top of the“digester pit” (see plan) it reaches the bottom of the dome “roof”. At thatpoint all the gas will be collected in the “gas dome”. As the gas pressure builds up here it will“push down” on the liquid in the tank forcing it to “displace” into the slurryreservoir, (to the right of the plan). This body of water in the slurry reservoir will then push down on thegas, providing it with about one bar of pressure – forcing it along the pipeand to the place of end use (a biogas cooking ring for example). As the gas is used up, pressure drops and theliquids will slowly return to finding their level again, until gas builds upagain. Get it?

- When the quantity of liquids in the tank increases,the slurry reservoir will fill up quicker and eventually reach the top, wherethere is an outlet. Here we will connecta pipe and allow it to drain into a small holding tank we’re going to build,where we’ll install a submersible sewage pump. When this holding tank is nearing full the pump to engage and push thewaste material uphill, some 30m away to a bit of land we have where we’ll buildyet another tank, where we will add sawdust to help the slurry become moresolid and manageable for transporting around. David told me about some women in India who added worms, which reallyimproved this process making it even better and more compost-like, which theywere then able to sell as a great fertiliser.

- The temperature in the tank should remain fairly warmto keep the multitudes of friendly bugs happy. This is around 30 degreesC. Very warm in other words. True, butthey do generate their own heat as they work away in their anaerobic(oxygen-free) environment down there. The problem might be the cold earth in which they are surrounded. So we might try and insulate the tank, on topat least. We also plan to put in aheating coil connected to our hot water cylinder so if we every have any“spare” heat we can share a bit of it with our billion-bug generator mates. I’ve included an electric wire so we can puta thermostat in there too, to keep an eye on temperatures. I’m told that theearth around here stays at around 17 degrees C, so we’ll see how theycope.

- We shouldn’t put in too much water into the tank, buttoo little isn’t good either. The amountyou get from a low-flush toilet is, David thinks, probably fine. When we wash food waste down the special sinkwe can do so with warm water, and so decrease the cold shock factor for ourlittle buddies.

- We’ll need a dedicated sink for the food waste cuttingthing – we shouldn’t flush all our washing up water down there, obviously. So we’ve found a space near the kitchen wherewe can have a special sink, but even then I think we should install a two-wayvalve outside, which we will have to turn manually every time we want to directwaste to the tank. That way we can stilluse the sink to wash veg or boots or whatever, and direct that water to thegarden or elsewhere. Complicated? Notreally, just another thing to do and it’s not as if we don’t have enough ofthose!

OK that’s all for now folks. I’ll try and keep posting updates as thingsprogress.

In honour of Pete Bursnall

2012-01-06T20:42:00.001Z

Pete

What a shock to learn of the passing of Pete Bursnall, a great guy I’dbecome friends with over a couple of years, back in ’06 and ’07. We were bothstudents at the CAT in Wales, both in that middle point in life, loads behindus, loads in front; both fanatical about dangerous things in the great outdoors– the difference being that he actually organised his time well so that hecould actually do most of them. He’d already written a guide book tomountain-biking an array of Welsh mountains (which he gave me! Seemingly handbound and printed too). Then he was offsea-kayaking; I saw a mad picture of him naked on some deserted islandgod-knows where, his sea-vehicle parked up on a rocky beach. A moment of bliss was that?

For a while we seemed to be comparing injuries. He broke his collar-boneor something falling out of his paraglider (or flying into a rock I think itwas). I failed to notice a massive hole in the ground while careering down ahillside on a mountainboard, breaking my elbow and wrecking my wrist. He thensprained something serious mountainbiking on the ice while I snapped a littlebone in my foot in a pathetically small skatepark in Spain.

Enough of this he stuff; this letter’s to you Pete, wherever youare. In fact what’s this you posted onfacebook to say you’re “I've gone flying.... Catch you later x” ? When exactly did you get tofit in that last post? Positive till the end. In fact it was your positive energy that always got me there inWales. Always so much to do, to debateand to fix, always an inspiration. Youtold me about blogging and persuaded me to get one going, which I did. In fact truth is I’ve been slacking for thepast, er, year or two, but now I’ll definately put more up there again, as youwould have harassed me to. I rememberyou telling me how you would put the kids to bed and type up your days post,while they lulled to sleep at your tapping. How you’d started kick-boxing at your kid’s club. Nice one. Again, I’mgoing to take up on that with my kids too. See: you’re still inspiring ushere. In fact they say someone’s notreally gone while their memory remains from those left behind.

Talking of memory, Monica and I decided to dedicate this years’ treeplanting to you. Couldn’t decide which one, so we just went for all of them ona certain terrace, right behind our little bothy we live in for now, on our spit of land inPortugal. So here’s what you get: aredcurrant, two raspberries, a blueberry and a lemon tree. Nikita (now 16 with hands like iron, tallerthan me, quite a craftsman and builder and a flow-master on deep fresh snow.You’d like him). Anyway, he suggested we look at what’s happened to the oldpart of the compost loo, now 3 and a half years old. We bust open the wee door Paulo built intothe bottom and behold – compost of joy! No smell either. Bizarre, impossible you might say, amazing weall said. Anyway, you’ll be thrilled (orhorrified) to learn that this power-mix went in with your berries to give thema good head start in life. Good bit o’muclh on top and I’ll keep watering them for a few days as we seem to beexperiencing a bizarrely late Indian summer over here.

Yer lemon tree.

Pete's berry terrace

the two raspberries

Thinking of my family I ache when I think of yours, the enormousemptiness that you must have left behind. Words can’t express the pain and torturethat they must be experiencing.

As Simon rightly said today, it reminds us of our mortality, the passingof a friend. So true; soon enough we’ll all be there with you. Will weremember? Will we think and feel anything? Nikita and I were just talking about this the other night: what part ofus stays on? Can we bring our memories with us? How painful will that be? Do weparticipate in some future part of the universe somewhere? Too many questionsand unknowns; shouldn’t dwell on it I reckon, just get on with life and makethe most of it we can. Every day, everyhour (Nikita says we only have 600,000 hours more or less in life). Given thatwe sleep through half of those, that leaves about 300,000 hours. Jeez.. whatpercentage of mine have I burned already? How many have I wasted watching somerubbish on telly or sitting around late at night wasting time… What reallymatters? Family, friends, adventure, adrenaline, Fun (of course), love (wellthat kind of comes with the former 5), making a difference on our time here forthose less fortunate. I think this is a major one, given that this “here” we’velanded on is both a heaven and a hell for people, and the vast majority of ourearthling cousins seem to have such a hard time of it. The energy we generate from the 5things-that-matter should, I think, be used to power ourselves forward to makelife a little better out there (or a little less crap, whichever way you seeit).

So this is my own humble send-off to you Pete – in reflection of youramazing life I prepare (in advance) a multi-berry blast to power you on yourway – red, blue, yellow, pink and green – all the colours of the fruits fromyour new berry terrace. I hope you enjoythem somewhere, somehow…

On bringing sunlight to the darkness

2011-05-15T08:02:00.001+01:00

I need to write more.

Every passing week I see a growing pile of months that represent the chunk of my life I've lived in Pakistan I wince at the stream of writings that could have been; horrified by my lack of recounting of stories of the peoples and places, ideas and opportunities, chance meetings, inspiring moments of passion in dance or music, children, community.

They say something about the longest journey, first steps, no time like the present and all that. So yes, now is the time, and I'll try to write in the moments between multiple events and busyness..

Where to begin? at this stage i usually get distracted by searching out pictures of recent ventures into the real Pakistan (Islamabad is lovely, but worlds apart from the bustling, noisy, dramatic and heady rest of the land). Not that there is one land, it's like several countries, meshed into one, officially for only 60 years, but really for thousands of years before that in an incredible history that makes our simple dwellings in Scotland a thousand years ago seem like the stone ages compared to what's been transpiring around here.

But today we're here, in the present. I'm still part of a team of advisors and managers of British taxpayers aid money to help flood-affected people rebuild their lives. My first time with DFID the department for international development (and rather an honour at that to be honest). A donor, one of the biggest donors out here, and it's been a pleasure to see how seriously the whole "institution" takes the quality and targetting of our limited aid budget. How efficiently they handle the information flow to Parliament and the beaurocracy which has allowed us to focus completely on the best, most cost effective and lasting types of emergency aid and, later on, investment into 'early recovery' projects. Having spent years on the other side of the table, as an operational organisation, asking donors like DFID for money, how we portion it out. How there's no influence or interference from commercial interests - like British companies being favoured for contracts from UK aid cash. Apparently Clare Short dealt with that sillyness years ago, and it's stuck ever since. British NGOs aren't favoured over any others either. Furthermore, I don't feel that we're under any pressure to make funding decisions based on UK foreign policy; it really is based on degree of humanitarian need, levels of coverage by other organisations and donors (filling the gaps), finding the most cost-effective solutions, those that also empower recipient communities, maybe even improve the dire nutritional situation, promote women's rights and represenatation, possibly reduce their vulnerability to abuse and attack, things that build community resilience to future disasters, and so on.

There's just so many issues out there, which is partially why I've never decided on what to start writing about. One at a time right? Small steps.

Let's start with a conversation I had with Farrah a couple of days ago.. Farrah runs a local NGO (called CCHD) that's been involved in womens' rights, advocacy and now with UNHCR setting up legal advice centers around the country, in an attempt to offer some level of representation to people who don't have access - to justice, aid, legal aid, advice. It's such a heavy task. Protection, and the entire legal safety net that we so take for granted in the "West" is shocking by its absence. Only then do I get a glimpse of what it all means. Where do you start with a case of sexual abuse, if the legal system doesn't have the will or means to deal with it? How can you protect the victim who has told her story? Especially in an Islamic culture - which has got to be one of the most gentle and justice-oriented religions out there, but there's so many other layers in society, tribal, family honour.

Anyway, Farrah and I talked about solar lights which she's keen to find out more about. I started looking into this last November when tens of thousands of people were still displaced by flood-waters living in spontaneous camps in any available sites, sometimes in more formal camps where the army or the humanitarians could provide decent tents, water supply maybe, some sanitation facilities, deliveries of food. We'd visit these camps - always during the day. Our security regs are such that we don't get to see these places at night. Having lived through war and displacement in Monrovia - Liberia - in 2003 I know fine what it's like: very dark. And scary, especially if you're a young girl, surrounded by strangers from other parts of town, or tribes. With no money and stuff people just don't have the means for light. So you get whole transitional townships which somehow function day and night. And imagine trying to find a quiet moment for a little wash, or when you're bursting for the loo in those long hours of night, and those scary strangers have wickedness on their mind, and, hidden in the cloak of darkness they descend on those most precious and vulnerable among us, causing immeasrable harm and trauma. It's such a nightmare and it's happened in every camp setting I've ever been in from Bosnia to Aceh - and now in Pakistan. And like most places, authorities would rather deny it's a problem, that it's happening at all, that the good people of these parts would never do such a thing. But they do, we do. Men that is. There's monsters within us that we battle with and sometimes, stressed and when our social order is thrown upside down by disaster and displacement the monster takes over.

Knowing this, we have to create means for social protection that are specially designed for life in camps and humanitarian chaos. And one of these should surely be light. Imagine the bustle of five thousdand people in a scrap of land beside a wood and a lake, at night where you can hardly see what you're stepping on. Then see another vision of the same place: a village bright with tiny lights, paths illuminated, toilets in carefully chosen areas lit up and watchable, surrounded by rows of eyes disguised as shelters. Even if nobody's watching, the warewolf knows that someone could be... How much much difference would this make? Surely...

So back in November, charged with coming up with a plan for my country's portion of aid money for shelter, I worked with some of the great folk at Concern to expand the provision of emergency shelter kits (2 high quality tarps, 6 long bamboo poles, some warm blankets for the winter season, etc.). I think we were looking at around 35,000 families or so. At this point I started looking into solar lights and presumed there was some local production facility. There could be, but it's a bit of shambles, and all the panels and lights they produce come from China and they just re-assemble them here. At around $30 a pop.

Folks in one of hundreds of villages where we worked with
Concern and Rootworks, their local partner, who
are rebuilding houses here, so they can move
out of these tents, a year on after the floods in Aug 2010.

OK so back up a minute - first we decide we need to do something about the problem of scary men/ prowling spectares, and lets say we focus on light. We agree that if there's any chance to reduce these horrors we should grasp them, we assume, on behalf of the tax-paying population that they agree (hope you're OK with that folks!). Right, next we have to find a product that's going to last more than a few weeks, that's robust and reliable, simple and easy to use. It should be cheap - so we can buy lots of them. There's plenty of $500 units out there, with batteries and fancy battery boxes and so on, but then we'll only be able to help a few families, and they'll probably end up in the richest man's household. No, they should be distributed to everyone, one per family. So price should be low.

As chance would have some samples were dropped off to our offices in London and sent out for sampling. A relatively new company, and product really - a robust panel using thin-film solar technology stuck to a chunky bit of plastic, offering enough of a trickle of current to charge a light that holds 4 LED bulbs. Pretty meagre light at first, but pressing the button a few times increases the brightness (while also reducing the time they can stay on). Optional extras include fittings for most mobile phones, batteries, radios and so on. Cost for the panel, cable and light only? About ten pounds stirling ($15 or so).

Talking to a family in Dadu, about their solar light (toughstuff) and how it had been amazing...

So we shared these with Concern and it turned out they had bought them before - in Haiti. So they bought 12,000 of them and gave them out in Southern Sindh. Feedback was amazing: they were saving about $3 a month on candles or kerosene and a further $5 on mobile phone charging... They had figured out where to find adapters to fit their mobile phones, which meant they didn't have to pay to go to town to charge them.

OK, so these were distributed long after they had been in camps - they had returned already, so they were "late" in that regard. But the "return on investment" seemed to be really good - i.e. the investment is paid back within a few months, after which they save money.

To cut a long story short, it has occurred to me that we should include solar lights in all future emergency shelter kits - as long as they are low cost and robust. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been in charge of the emergency shelter sector in Pakistan since Aug 2010. They are some really committed and passionate folks there, and keen on the idea of light, and I'm so pleased to see that this year lights have been included in the shelter cluster's priority list of non-food items.

So, moving forward in time now (this story has taken months to finish) we have funded IOM to provide emergency shelter for 18,000 families (over 100,000 people) in the newly flood affected areas in Southern Sindh. Each family will get a solar light. This time a different model - from illumination, which sell them at around $7.50 a unit, delivered to Pakistan. That's less than £5 each!

In two weeks I'm going to visit the people that received these lights and am going to find out what they think. I'll finish or continue with this post then.

Granny, at 92, with one of her tribe of great grandchildren, in a tiny village flattened by water in Jacobabad, Sindh. Poor, they may be, but look how healthy and positive and alive!

Multan Pottery - Punjab, Pakistan

2011-03-11T13:47:00.000Z

building collage

2011-02-22T20:55:00.000Z

Photos of summertime

2011-02-22T17:35:00.001Z

I just found out how to blog up photos from Picassa - wooh! So here's random selection from sometime last summer...

my favourite otter

Joao and son sorting out the steps

Too darned hot up, time for chilling down at the riviera

Romanians rain-protector wall freshly built at the Alambique

Joao with his Toy Story toy

Earth to mud to piglets and eventually to wall plaster sometime later

Kira kind of learning to roll:)

And to ride waterfalls! (this taken after she made it down that littl'un:)

Post Flood Housing survey - Pakistan

2010-12-29T00:49:00.002Z

Excellent report here by UNHABITAT covering all different types of houses, materials and designs in rural architecture.

From this we can see why so many houses came down (around 1.4m at last count)

Pakistan floods, firewood and recovery

2010-12-17T12:53:00.000Z

A school front door in Jacobabad.

The August 2010 floods in Pakistan dwarf any other humanitarian crisis for decades, well, on record probably (at least since we started this aid-effort thing. The measuring stick we can use to say "it's bigger than the last" is not how many people perished, but how many survived and need help to survive, rebuild, recover.

So in summer this year the monsoon rains opened up with all the built up ferocity of a planets' worth of energy, heat and smoke from a continent on fire (Russia, Portugal, etc.), droughts across Africa, floods in South America, a mighty freeze in Europe the winter before that has to balance out somewhere. And so it rained. The mighty Indus that flows from the craggy North to the desert South of this amazing country swelled and burst into irrigation channels built by the British a hundred or so years before, channelling water where it sholdn't have been, sweeping away decades of community. Luckily, most people had time to move out before the water (less than two thousand people died, amazingly few).

Camps of returnees, in the shadow of their former homes. Jacobabad, Sindh.

So, I joined the enormous humanitarian community in October to do my bit (it's what I do, rather did, before building things out of straw and mud) and in November had a look around in Sindh, the Southern province, home of Karachi, a port to the Arabian sea and beyond. Here over 1.2 million homes are thought to have been destroyed, displacing over seven million people (more than Scotland entire!).

We decided to visit Dadu and Jacobabad, the two districts al of which lost the most houses - about 150,000 each, and see how people were coping. Photos say more than I could... First we stopped in at a camp, for a few thousand folk

Cattle, we're told are people's biggest asset. They fled together and live as an extended family. Cows cost a fortune here and loosing one could cripple your finances. They eat straw mostly, which has go to be fairly nutrient-less, but hey.

In the camp,
a hand pump at work, recently installed by
Root Work, a local NGO working with Concern
an Irish NGO, who in turn have British taxpayers cash,
via the UK's dept for int'l development.
Confused? You should be.

So we travelled through Dadu, a district that lost around 180,000 houses (at 7 people per house that's a lot of people without a home).

Over here, there! Our village is ruined. there's nothing left.
Come and help out place (we were visiting some other community
of returnees. Our efforts are considerable (millions of pounds into all kinds
of services) but it barely touches the surface of the need.

In the camps, possibly 10 to 40kms from their former homes, people can receive food, tents, health care, water... So there's an attraction to remain? Yes, but people don't seem to: as soon as their lands emerge from the flood waters they're off - partly to make sure someone else doesn't grab their land. There's a really entrenched feudal system of landlords and peasant / landless farmers here. It's hard to know who of these people owned their land, control their own destinies, but from what I've heard it's one of the biggest challenges.

So, cooking: See the cow dung drying in the sun, makes for good cooking fuel, saves money. Stuck in camps people don't have access to their usual source of firewood, so they pay about $1 a day for sticks and roots. This exposes a major problem here - inefficient cooking systems. Local landscapes are denuded, there are literally millions of people cutting and chopping their way through the undergrowth and the canopy, to burn semi dry or just green wood to sizzle up their meals. There's little evidence that anyone has mapped out the implication of this over the next five or ten years: what will happen if this continues, this size of population cooking their way through these few remaining trees?

Especially frustrating when you know that alternatives exist that really work: fuel efficient stoves (at least to slow down the disaster), solar cooking (ovens, parabolic water heaters, oil tank heaters, and more), biogas (cooking from the gas of our poo, or our cows poo, or both).

The humanitarian machine is incredibly fixed into its way of doing things, but it can change. It's taken years but mainstreaming concepts around gender equality and to a lesser extent protection (human rights) is becoming more recognised. Environmental impact is starting to appear as an overarching / "cross-cutting" issue but most people and organisations don't understand the link between energy, environment and human communities so it's given lip-service and spin. In fact, from an environmental perspective our aid operations are catastrophic. Consider the overall pollutants and carbon emissions of the millions of products we import from the far corners of the globe, the tens of thousands of air flights, air lifts, truck days and so on. Do we count this up? No, don't even discuss it! We are, it seems, immune to the carbon magnifying glass. "hey, we're saving lives out here, don't hassle me with that tree hugging shit" is the general impression you'll get if you bring it up.

People in return. It turns out that vast numbers of displaced just moved out to neighbouring districts which remained dry and found work, settled down with families or friends, and were not completely exposed and vulnerable. They managed. The network of family support is enormous, low profile, goes unrecorded and ancient. Supporting all this is the diaspora who send millions of dollars worth of cash each month to their extended family back in the homeland.

The traditional Katcha house, make of local earth and bits of straw. Most of these just melted away when the floods came and inundated the walls. Most brick walls that used mud mortar suffered the same fate, but some survived. The challenge now is to find ways to reinforce these earthen walls. There's lots of work and discussions going on around this, but I'll have to leave it for another post.

I seriously wanted to dive onto that hay cart and carry on our trip by those means. So it would take a few more days, or weeks, but that's OK. Nice to see the wooden wheels still in action, and the hay stacked on carts. Like in Romania, though there they have horses and car tyres.
And their hay is cut grass, this is cut straw and has far less food/nutritional value than hay.
This stuff finds its way into the mud walls (otherwise they wouldn't hold together so well).

What remains, after this trip, is an amazing friendliness and warmth from everyone we met. Despite everything that's stacked up against them: a brooding civil war, the meddling of our Western powers in their affairs, the crippling corruption and the injustices that rule their lives, they are happy to share a cup of tea and discuss ideas.

Roof building time / Tempo para a construção do telhado

2010-09-26T16:43:00.004+01:00

After many moons of preparation - of walls, lime work, wood research and planning - it arrived, a truck load of eucalyptus wood from near Porto, 140km or so away. With this + one experienced carpenter, our main house roof began.

Carlos, the local Hulk, nudges this half tonne
beam and lets the block and tackle
take the rest of the weight.

Day 1, wood arrives and sits like heavy lumps on the ground in front of the house. I expect a day of phone calls for cranes and heavy lifting gear (after having seen João, the stonemason, use his mechanical claw to move stone all around).

These guys are different – they use a block and tackle. A “Garibaldi”. A pulley with gears. They built a super basic frame higher than the first floor, and dragged the first 8m mega-beam up to it, then hoisted it with this simple yet life-changing little device. From the 1^st floor they did the same thing up to the roof, and within an hour the first beam was sitting there, all warped and imperfect, waiting.

It was incredible to see how quickly they worked. By the end of day 2 they had created the skeleton of a roof, made from enormous bits of green wood (let it go dry, it's impossible to work they say).

Manuel, lead carpenter, 40 years experience,
lining up first beam to go on the roof

They work with no plans or drawings. The list of materials they ordered was done standing in the empty house, pionting at corners and spaces in the air, pulling figures from their volumes of experience. “8m beam there, 64 rafters to cover both main roof elements, a truss here, and supporting beam there” and so on. Jorge, Mr Sawmill, was there scribbling notes as Manuel fired out instructions. They ignored me and my irrelevent questions.

When it's time to join the wood together Manuel whips out his electric chainsaw, sharp as a needle, and cuts shapes, based on how the wood sits beside another bit. He may draw a pencil line, he may not. A few whacks with a mallet and chisel to clean it up. And boom, it slots into place like it was meant to be. A couple of massive nails to keep it in place and it's hard to see how that roof isn't going to stay in place for centuries – as long as we keep the water out.

Day 2 or 3. Main uprights going into place. How they figured out what height these should be at I have no idea.
Without drawings they must have done it by eye, or rule of thumb, based on the width of the main beams crossing
the breadth of the building, which are about 8m long. Lenght ways, the building is about 16m long.

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Piecing it together

Carlos, whacking out some indents to house the angled trusses.

Temporary brace for the end of roof... Hoping there's
some kind of longer term plan for that one!

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Ilie understandably worried at this stage.

By day 4 or 5, looking more and more roof like...

What am I doing here?

Nikita in the thick of it. Learning.

First he cuts, then chisels

Then checks

Then slips it into place. Nice

This is the only hip-roof we're going to have on the building (alternative to a straight, gable end).

More massive wood, oak this time
to hold up East side of roof.

And floor beams, almost 6m long, 30x20cm size
for the kids bedrooms floor...
Roof coming over this next.

I have been amazed by the skills and confidence of this guys. I ask them if they have any young 'uns coming up behind them, learning their trades. They laugh, regard me as retarded, and explain that no young person wants to do this sort of thing. "People want to learn to design things on computer, not here for real, where it's hard work, takes years to learn". For sure, this isn't something you could pick up in a year or two. It's an art, a lifetime's work. And not particularly well paid.

"anyway" they add "everyone builds their roofs with cement these days". This is a whole other issue, based on a little common sense and no doubt serious financial gain for a few individuals in charge of the concrete industries. But how could the entire architectural and engineering professions have been sold out so easily?

Here's the story:

Why cement? Because they are “resistant, waterproof, strong, long-lasting, cool in summer, warm in winter” (quotes from local builders, home-owners). As they have only been built in this way for the last 30 to 50 years they don't yet know the results of this national experiment. In the UK, many buildings made with cement have started to deteriorate within a 30 to 50 year time span, due in part to the inevitable cracking of cement floors, foundations and walls – cracks that allow water to come in, and eventually cause damp within the building, rotting of any wooden elements and so on.

But cement in roofs never really took off in the UK – or France, Germany, the US and most other places for that matter. This means we don't really have a precedent to measure it against. It seems mighty popular in Spain and Portugal so this should be the area to watch. Here are some of the down sides I can imagine with cement roofs:

Non-breathability. Cement doesn't let moisture pass through, so it can't “breathe”. A bit like a plastic bag. It keeps the rain out, sure, but it also keeps the moisture in. And if you think about how much moisture we generate in bathrooms, kitchens and just breathing around the house... We would need a fairly sophisticated ventilation system to allow all that water vapour out, without letting in too much cold air.

Money. I have yet to find out how much it costs, per square meter to build a cement roof, but I'm fairly sure it's more expensive than wood. Though that depends what kind of wood you choose. We'll get to that later.

Carbon Factor. We now know that to produce 1Kg of cement you will emit 1Kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Multiply this into the millions and you're talking a fairly major chunk of your national CO2 diet. In fact, buildings in Europe are responsible for around 40% of its emissions. So, you want to cut emissions, why not start there, in the building products themselves ? It really is a no-brainer. Trees are like solar panels: they grow with a happy combination of sunlight and water. Cut them down to make houses and plant more, plant twice as many. Make forestry a part of the building industry. Use local timber, not imported stuff from Scandanavia and you cut emissions further. Learn how to use local wood. Get young people learning about this stuff and you may just reduce carbon emissions. Or just screw the planet and build with cement. It seems there's overwhelming pressure around us is to do just this - so many people make so much money from the status quo. Why change it?

I had better leave it there, lest I rant.

Stone building, all summer

2010-09-20T13:59:00.000+01:00

Since May it has been stone stone stone on the main house. With João Camula, of Granitos Camula, as our stone mason, wall after wall was taken down, rebuilt - using stone on site and a few imported from nearby. We used hydraulic lime and sand as the mortar in every case. Here's how it has progressed on one of these walls, in June.

Picking apart a wall. They carried on taking it down to ground level.

João and Amançio getting the first stones into place for the new wall

View from inside, where the stairs will be built,
one day, from ground to first floor.

Day 2 or 3, new wall coming along. New door decided upon
as well:)

Wall completed, as seen from the
East side of Adega, with new handy shelf thing integrated.

Same wall from above. So here you can see the adega
section from West view. Timber frame and straw bale walls
to follow, hopefully in October.

A wall of straw and clay / Uma parede de palha e argil

2010-09-05T11:56:00.000+01:00

The Alambique - timber frame and windows (from Jon and
Mary in Scotland!). Shuttering below to hold the straw-clay.

August. Summer flying by, progress on main house painstakingly slow. We need to move in, somewhere at least. Focus moves to the alambique, which we'd planned to move into while finishing the main house.

We've been working on the walls, floors, roof, plumbing, drainage, power supply since May. Now we needed a front wall. We have a few choices for wall material: bricks and mortar, earth bricks, timber frame with plasterboard and insulation slabs, and so on.

Nikita as Paulo's carpentry assistant, building the timber frame.
Note the stone wall built below the timber, to keep straw and wood
well away from any water.

We wanted a wall that would retain as much heat as possible inside, during the winter, would not cost too much, would be breathable (allow moisture built up inside to get out). So we chose light earth building whereby straw and clay slip are rammed into formwork (shuttering). Used for centuries in various parts of Europe presumably because it was cheap, used locally available materials and provided good insulation.

The clay takes loads of time to soften up, at least 24 hours. Then it needs whisked, then then the slip decanted into another container.

Paulo, surrounded by clay slip buckets, showing our Galician
friends the right mix of clay to straw, in Donald's old bath.

Federico on clay stone crushing duty

What we didn't realise was the enormous amount of time the whole process would take. Making of clay slip alone is a fair bit of work, which needs constant attention. I found a source of fairly pure clay from a local brick factory in Galicia (10 mintues away). Cheap, certainly (25 euros a tonne).

Irena, Cesar and Jorge working the clay slip into
the straw.

Then you need to have at least 2 people fluffing up the straw in a container of some sort. On bigger projects people have all sorts of equipment to do this, but these are not available here in Portugal, and if they were they would cost a fortune to rent.

Bugui, Galician yoga and meditation teacher, working with
the Zen of Straw

Cristina, recent Galician resident from Italy, adding her labours
to the wall compaction.

Next, moving the straw-clay mix to the shuttering and tamping it down. Here, according to research by Salvatorre Gangitano (Dhanya) who kindly forwarded me his essay on light earth construction, says that if you press it in too hard you loose insulation, and have more of a thermal mass wall. If you leave it too loose, better insulation but the possibility of air gaps, and limited thermal mass.

Once the wall sections are done you can remove the shuttering right away. What you have is a damp walls of clay. Looks nice, it's straight and ready for plastering. But not for months! Here's another disadvantage: it takes up to three months to dry properly. It's been 6 weeks since we built this wall and it's been really hot, so it is almost dry inside. But in colder climates this could be a real problem, mould can occur and delays in the building process can cost a lot.

Irena, great friend from Northern Galicia, and child (still at one with her)
one of the hardest workers on site. Impressive.

Paulo with first 3 straw bales, re-cut. Did we save time? Not sure,
because recutting them and notching the bales around the posts
was also a fair bit of work. But a definate benefit was the lack of
additional moisture. Bales are dry, ready to plaster right away.

After a while we realised it would be quicker to fill the larger sections with dry straw bale, cutting the strings and retying them.

Me, driving ash stakes
through the bales to keep
them stacked in place.

We stacked bales all the way to the top then compressed them down with our van jack, then stufffed straw-clay in the remaining space.

OK. What about thermal performance? Dhanya's research found that the U-value of a 40 cm straw-clay wall can be around 0.239 W/m2K (this refers to the U-value, which is a measure of energy conduction, in watts, per square meter, conducted through a material, for each degree difference on each side).

How does this compare with other types of walls? Well, here's a selection, taken from the Whole House Book:

Wall type U-value
Solid brick (225mm) 2.20
Timber frame with
50mm insulation 0.96
Timber with 100mm
insulation 0.35
Our straw-clay wall
(maybe?) 0.23
Superinsulated house
with 250mm insulation 0.14
Straw bale wall 0.13

The latest UK building codes state that external walls must have a minimum U-value of 0.35 (W/m2K), which means straw clay/ light earth would be considered more than acceptable.

Overall, we are not that impressed so far with straw-clay as a system. It is so labour intensive that this can increase the cost of the job. And it takes a long time... Also, the problem of waiting for it to dry out enough before plastering means that it could delay a construction. A few mice have also moved in...

That said, now the wall is done and almost dry, I think it's going to perform well. But we'll have to see after plastering, and after a winter of rain and cold.

Petrus, building up stone wall in front of the alambique where
we plan to build a wooden structure for a veranda. More on this later.

Roof off

2010-08-01T12:09:00.000+01:00

We thought it would be relatively easy to build, or rebuild the house. Easier than building a new one, obviously, ha! The walls are already in place after all, throw on a new roof and voila! A new house.

First steps to removing the old roof - saving them tiles

Nikita, Petrica and Amançio getting
those oak beams out (which have been
there for over a hundred years).

Oh how wrong we have been. Lesson one: Listen to all those people who say that renovating a ruin is FAR more hassle and money than building new. There is, however, something to be said for using all that ancient stone-mastery that is embodied in the old walls, for avoiding new excavation and mountain-top wrecking to gather new materials.

See what a mess they made??
Nice old timbers we can reclaim though:)

The girls come for inspection...

I'm starting to get my head around all the different components, from the bottom-up as it were. And starting with the most basic elements first: Stone, wood, sand, earth. (Months from now we will get into the techy stuff like electrics, heating, lighting, sewage and biogas, internal carpentry and so on).

There is so much to learn and know about, it's clearly not possible to specialise in them all. Either you have to chose to be a manager/designer or a builder, and if you're a builder you specialise in one of dozens of different fields.

So much has happened since May, when we received our planning permission. I take photos and watch the story unfold, roll up my sleeves and dig and lift and pull with everyone else. By the end of the day I find myself exhausted to the core, more so since sun sets later and it's intoxicatingly hot by midday, but everyday is different, and I am not tied to a desk, I am happy. And I'm learning.

Saffy eyeing up old roof beams from the house. Most
of these are in fairly good condition, useful
framing material for something

Petrica, Ilie and Amançio levelling tops of the walls with limecrete
(1 part Hydraulic lime NHL5 to 2 parts sand). Well watered for a few days morning and night.

How to build stone steps / Como fazer as escadas em pedra

2010-07-30T20:26:00.001+01:00

Driven nuts by uploading pictures one by unbelievably slow one onto this blogging thing, never having the time, etc. has meant I rarely post anything anymore. So here in video format, though it's hardly saved time!!

So here, in pictures that move together our story of chopping up vast chunks of stone that were nicely available right next to where we needed some steps and something done about the eroding hillside.
Fortunate we have been (and grateful we are) to have had Gary over these weeks to teach us the confidence to just go ahead and start, and to understand the main things we have to get right.

A talk about community at Andanças festival

2010-07-28T20:41:00.000+01:00

Plastering weekend at Miriem's house, Galicia, with our
"community" of growers

Honoured, I am, to be asked to talk, to give a talk, at a festival in the North of Portugal called Andanças. An incredible event in its own right, an entirely voluntary event, set in the same community each year in a small village just South of Porto in the North-ish of Portugal.

I had been contacted following a description of a weekend get together and work I had with a bunch of local friends from Galicia and Portugal.

My family, in Scotland. A community of us, that I only really
appreciate when I see them from afar... Kim missing:(

So I will talk about what we are doing in this "community" or group of friends, but I also want to relate to my history of work and life in all those places I have worked until now in humanitarian disasters. A life that seems to have been left behind, swept away by the present, the urgency of now, the next bit of building we have to complete, and so on. But I find it is creeping up on me, this past. It has defined me after all. I travelled and worked as an aid or development worker from the age of 20 till that of 40, with spells of other things here and there. The people and communities I worked with in crisis fill me with a great sense of being, of living. Of being alive and proud to have contributed in a major way. I think I need to start writing about these stories, these moments and these people. Andanças will be a start, albeit a talk.

So here is a summary of the talk I have put together, that I'll give with no photos or electronic slidage and all that. Just talk. I need to work on my Portuguese, and an outline of what to say. Or maybe I'll just think about it and fire from the hip...

Andanças 2010

Palestra on Community

I will talk about a community that shares an international landmark, the river Minho. Here, friends and acquaintances from Southern Galicia and Northern Portugal gather to help each other build our houses, or to create gardens for local schools, or just to talk and plan a future that is less dependent on industrialsed products and globalised trade, and more reliant on local economies. A future where buildings are made from natural, local materials, that require a fraction of the energy to keep warm , where food comes from nearby valleys and is free from toxins and chemicals.

But what drives communities to change, adopt new and unfamiliar techniques? How can we find cohesion in a modern Europe surrounded by the distraction of television, internet, computer games, cheap energy and food in supermarkets that come from lands beyond our horizons.

I will tell of my work in communities affected by war and natural disaster, from the confilcts in Bosnia and Burundi, Eritrea and Liberia; to recovery from tsunami in Aceh and the Maldives. How in these situations, as an aid worker, I found moments of incredible community unity, strengh, determination. Under desperate circumstances such as these, I found people were able to create great changes, achieve unthinkable progress, adopt new practices and skills.

Attempting to unite these two different strands in the knowledge of modern threats and challenges faced by people around the world I will discuss community as I find it now, in my new home in the Vale do Minho, the advantages and challenges of peace and prosperity, and the urgency for us all to find solutions to global climate, energy and ecological crises.

Making lime putty for building

2010-07-23T08:26:00.000+01:00

Guest post by Paulo

(edits where I couldn't resist:)

Today a truck full of bags of quicklime arrived at Casa Felix and we began the process of filling our lime pit to make lime putty. We will use this yoghurt-type stuff to make plaster in a couple of months when (notice I said when not if) the strawbale walls are completed.

For now it needs to be mixed with water and “slaked”. This is where quicklime and water meet, and will bubble and boil and get really hot, and then mellow out. This is where ye old English drinking phrase to 'slake your thirst' comes from. Many of you

who have been to the UK will at some point probably have had a pint or two at an English pub called “The Lime Kiln” – there are hundreds scattered across the country, mainly because every town used to have one as lime was essential for building before cement came along (and ruined everything). And after mixing lime, you really feel like a drink!So what's going on here? Perhaps a quick chemistry lesson is in order.

First of all, limestone or chalk is quarried (in India they even use sea shells, after all limestone is essentially the accumulated corpses of billions of shells). Chemically, limestone is Calcium Carbonate. This material is burned to about 900 degrees C., which drives off carbon dioxide and water (not that there is a lot of water in limestone, but it happens), which creates quicklime – Calcium Oxide.

So we mix this stuff with water, it boils and fizzes, releases its heat and starts to take in the CO2 it lost from the air – when it finally completes this process it will turn back into the limestone it originally came from (or something very similar) – it will become Calcium Carbonate once more.

But this process can take a long time, and starts quickly and violently with the slaking, but then slows down. We keep the lime putty we have made – now like a runny yoghurt –

under a layer of water so that it can't race ahead of us and set before we have put it on our walls. We let it mature like a fine... um... yoghurt... for a couple of months (3 or more is best, but we might need it sooner) and then we can make plaster by mixing it with sand and fibre.

Beware however, quicklime is dangerous stuff to handle. In the old days they used to throw it off the battlements onto invading soldiers climbing up siege ladders in medieval battles, because it will blind you if it gets in your eyes. This is because it is highly reactive when it comes into contact with water – it takes in the H20 and Co2 that was driven off in the burning, and releases the heat it absorbed in that reaction. It get very hot!

Here's a diagram with less chemistry and more pictures for those of you who are more left brain inclined:

We'll use it to plaster the outside of the strawbale walls, where it will then set and turn back into calcium carbonate, giving us a strong, weatherproof, but breatheable protective layer.
OK, so back to the lime pit! The Romanian boys Petrus and Ilie had previously lined an old stone irrigation tank high up on the land with hydraulic lime mortar to seal it and stop any leaks. Paulo then made a cover for it from old roof beams and doors, to stop anyone falling in (although Magnus managed to part way through filling it up).

Magnus and Paulo then began filling the pit with water, ready to add the quicklime (you always add lime to water so it can dilute quickly and not get too hot – the other way around can get very hot and even risk an explosive reaction).

In terms of quantities: we have 1200 kgs of quicklime, and plan to add this to around 3500 kgs of water, giving a total mass of 4500 kgs or 4.5m3, which is the size of the tank. The lime is produced in Portugal and costs around 4.50 euros per 40kg sack (10 cents a kilo!).

Here's a couple of videos of the day's fun. Notice the prophetic moment 10 seconds into the first film where Magnus says “Don't step here because you might fall through” right on the spot where he later stepped and... fell through, when the panel snapped out of an old door and plunged him into the lime pit (with lime in it). Luckily, his ninja reflexes saved him, and he managed to avoid actually touching the lime – got some nasty scrapes on the leg and a banged wrist though. The elfen and safety Elf was not pleased (but managed to keep a straight face). Toast and tea made it better.

“Welcome to the Lime Pit”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnMXBN2zbk

“Slaking the Lime!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm6ZFy3hmjo

or embed:

“More Slaking”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc6uc_pH-as

Embed

“More Slaking from a safe Distance”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVxbucIzic

New terrace building - learning the art of the ancients

2010-07-06T06:39:00.000+01:00

Gary comes from the Northwest of England, the "Black-country" he calls it. He arrived with us after 4,000 km around Europe and North Africa - on his bike. Bicycle, I might add.

Along with some impressive camping gear and an indomitable spirit, Gary brought the skills of dry stane dyking: building walls without mortar.

I'd been trying to figure out how we were going to build our retaining walls for countless tonnes of earth we'd moved from the main house ages ago. And I wanted to build a new terrace for bamboo experimentation...

Back in December last year Aljo helped me build a ramp and a temporary wall, but the Spring rains turned this into a muddy rout, and we lost most of the soil we had surfed down the ramp.

Ali and Thea arrived at the same time (from the Wwoofer volunteer network) and Gary took charge and led an impressive 2 week course-in-practice of the art of walling. Ali became an avid student, jumping up from a hasty lunch to get back onto those stones, "like a 3D puzzle" he delighted. (Later he would have energy for couple of sets of doubles on our newly found village tennis court which has to fill in the slot of an evening surf at the end of a hard day).

Gary is fiercely principled about walls and walling. In fact he says that if you stick to the main Principles your wall will work. Here, from memory, is what I think they are

Princple 1 - every stone needs two good faces :) (:!

No not smiley ones but hey. One face is external, is that which is seen and perhaps brings a smile - or at least deters a grimace with accompanying complaint "Jeez, how foul the frontage of that there stone, how bulbous, out of place". Actually, it seems to be only other wall-makers who actually notice wall quality, stone and face selection (I too have become an obsessive).

The other face we need to think about is the top, which offers itself to the stone above. This should be as flat and horizontal as possible. If both these faces don't cut it, then find another.

Principle 2 - Drive the rain out.

If possible, the external face should be angled so that rain is directed outward, rather than allowed to pour back into the wall. Like tiles on a roof I suppose.

Principle 3 - Two on one, one on Two.

Obvious right? (each stone should rest on at least two others and it in turn is pinned by two others above it). Thus stones are anchored on a couple, and weight of the many bare down upon the one. A more solid base. It might be obvious, but until now we hadn't twigged.

Principle 4 - Follow the line.

Each course has to stick to a determined direction, or line, between two points, but it also has to be slightly leaning inwards to counteract the force of gravity pushing down. Each time you start a new course of stones remember where the front edge of the next course of stones above will sit. So, if you have a stone with a curved front edge, push it out further than you would expect, so that the stone above can "keep the line" above it, otherwise the higher one will have to sit back too far, which has to be recovered later with more difficulty.

I'm sure I've missed out loads, and I didn't even have time to participate in the wall shown here, but I did on the next one...

Overall, it's been incredible to see how we can actually change the space around us, forge whole new faces onto the mountain our land inhabits.

OK, photo upload has gone haywire on this post, so will need to send them to an online album or something.

First eucalyptus roof goes up

2010-06-12T08:03:00.020+01:00

This is the old distillery - the alambique. Jamie thinks it burned down after a heavy drinking session, evidenced by the charred tiles and debris we discovered when clearing it out. Or maybe it was the trail of empties that meander over the land, outwards from the distillery, where the local spirits were concocted.

The point is, it's a ruin, a fine ruin at that: complete dry stane structure (no mortar), deftly integrated to the bedrock protruding along the hillside.

After the Romanians, Galegos and English cleared innumerable tonnes of earth during our Mega May workfest we decided it was time to think about the roof. Manuel has worked with locally grown eucalyptus for over 30 years. He's the only one I have found around this area who is willing to work with this imported species. (Clearly eucalyptus is a problem from many points of view, something I need to research more and write about later, but I like the idea of taking it out of the hillsides, using it in our buildings, planting in native oaks and chestnut in its place).

These are massive beams: 30x20cm x 6m length. The wood is still green / wet, so it's mighty heavy. We moved it onto the land between six of us, with metal bars and ropes and lots of groaning. Nikita managed to avoid this toiling using school as an excuse... shows the scale of pieces.

A temporary stucture was built on scaffolding in the building and the beams manouvered into place. Amazing. Within half an hour these monsteres were fitted in place. Don't worry about the collapsing walls around them, Manuel assured me, you deal with that later...

A day later the whole structure was up: beams, rafters, tile battens, v-lux window from Edinburgh we'd freecycled before we left.

When we first arrived in 2008 it was almost engulfed in brambles, see left.

Monica getting physical with the brambles (before we encountered the strimmer / technosyth)

Kira and the remains of the distillery, and granite posts for pigs and vines and drunks.

Before tiles go on we had to bring the walls up to meet the roof, so Petrush and Ilie (Team Romania) used whatever stone we could find and some hydraulic lime mortar they are good at mixing to get 'er done.

Petrush mastering his rocky skills (OK I put in a rock or two there too!). West wall, before and after.

We hope to move into this place over the summer, while we're working on the main house; I'll need to point the walls with lime to keep wind and rain out and possible internal plaster for warmth. I think we're going to build a mezzanine floor to sleep up and leave junk down. A sink, a stove, a desk, a sofa. The front wall we'll build from timber and straw and clay. Mary and John gave us windows for each side of a door. An extension out front will create a porch area, summer sleeping pad. All for the future....

Watermills thesis summary chapter 1. Resumo do tesis sobre os moinhos, primeiro capítulo

2010-06-08T19:13:00.000+01:00

I finished my thesis on watermills of Monção last July. It's WAY past time to share some of the findings, ideas, issues.

Inspired by Derek and other folks who had helped with research and ideas during my write-up, I really should post more about the vast array of watermills here and the opportunities they represent.

Two of hundreds of watermills around Monção

So here goes, a brief synopsis of my year-long research for thesis, one day a publication in Portuguese I hope. The title pretty much sums up what I was looking at:
"Grindstones to Generators: Opportunities and options for watermills in Northern Portugal"

I guess I'll summarise chapter by chapter, following the flow of the doc., though ditching the dreadful moribund language that is unavoidable in academia. A thesis is supposed to ask a question, then attempt a thorough answer through research of existing literature, then some original research (cos someone else's research hasn't covered it yet), elaborate conclusions and deliver the answer. Simple in theory, a nightmare in reality.

My question was - and remains - this: Can the watermills of Monção and Northern Portugal be restored and used to generate electricity, and to be used again as mill stones, oil presses, etc. in a way that is profitable and viable? I say profitable here to mean that costs are covered, that, like in the past, the energy and finances invested are recovered through the services delivered by the mill itself.

OK, I'm gonna use this post to go through the introduction and first chapter which covers broader context of the study and little bit about the region of Monção in which the study takes place.

So, context: I'm looking at watermills in the knowledge of climate change and imminent global peak oil: the twin fossil fuel crises of our generation. Crises we can chose to ignore, deny or confront through profound changes in our lifestyle. Changes primarily related to less of everything: all that stuff made by the magic that is cheap fossil fuels and pollutes some part of the biosphere. In fact the scale of change, or transition as it is often called, is so vast and fundemental that I wonder if it is even possible. The vast majority of people in rich and poor worlds would certainly not vote for it, nor actively seek this approach. The change that is needed means an end to the economic model on which all rich industrialised societies have been constructed over the last few hundred years. No more growth economics, the launching of low carbon localised agriculture and manufacturing of all goods and energy systems. A reverse of globalisation. The beginning of an era of ecological agriculture that is unknown in the history of mankind - as discussed in this brilliant article.

In short, we're in deep shit and it's seriously unlikely we have the appetite or organisation to pull ourselves out in time. But we can still try, and every little helps. Every new person that is enightened to the destructive state of affairs of our mall-mentality world is another convert. Every ecological building site, every local garden (every school kid in an edible school garden project!) every attempt to produce heat and light from ambient energy is a step towards a viable alternative. Into this struggle against the tide of consumerism and profit, exploitation and pollution we place each of our efforts to live less harmfully.

It's into this context that I want to look at watermills. Once they enjoyed a pivotall role in local communities in Portugal - grinding flour for bread, pressing oil from ancient olives, milling local chestnut and oak for building homes. The former state of local roads meant there was no alternative - communities were self sufficient by necessity, and design followed. Unlike the feudal estates and fiefdoms of Britain - where community owned watermills were destroyed and folks forced to use the "Manor Mills" - people here in Northern Portugal seemed to have owned the land they live on for generations, centuries even (unheard of in Scotland!). Every village with even a tiny stream built as many mills as they could, allowing milling in every community. I've heard tell of rivers choked with fish feeding off the debris falling from these mills. Mannah from heaven - food for ever. (Until they brought in pesticides and fertilizers, and now most rivers are virtually fish-free and barren).

Rio Minho - Galicia (Spain) on the right, Portugal on the left. The Atlantic straight ahead.

First off, an intro into the geographical zone: Monção, a county in the far North of Portugal, sharing a rivery border with Galicia called the river Minho. With rainfall equal to central Scotland (1200 mm/ year) there is plenty water here. Watermills are found aplenty. So many were built in the last few hundred years that by the time I tracked down an old register of watermills (discussed here) I calculated that there used to be one watermill for every 30 people. Having created a database of the 660 odd mils registered in Monção (back in the 1940s) I transfered them to a basic map that I meant as a draft, which I forgot about until it was way too late. So here it is - the location (by parish (freguesia) within the county.

There are three types of watermills here:

First, the azenha, or vertical, low breast-shot wheel meaning that water passes underneath the wheel, but at a slight fall (thanks Nikita for this drawing).

There aren't many of these in Monção, and none I could find intact at all. They used to be located in the last kilometer of the Mouro river, a chunky tributory of the Minho, with an average flow of 4m3 per second.

Second, comes the Rodete, or Tub-mill. The water enters the tub through a slit on the side where the channel is built, and hits a cross of wood that is connected to the axle (which in turn directly drives the grindstone above). There is no bottom to the barrel so water passes through easily. The main advantage of these is that they can work underwater - when the river swells during winter this is useful.

Third, and probably the most plentiful in the county is the horizontal rodizio watermill, which uses a design that is used in Nepal, Palestine, Shetland Islands, Ireland and loads of other places. A design that has worked since about the 3rd Century. Here it is known as the Moinho de Montanha (the mountain mill).

I went to look at so many watermills in this county of , 40 times smaller than South Yorkshire in England, yet with over 663 watermills registered in 1941. That means there used to be one watermill for every 30 people around here. Impressive. But given the state of the roads in the old days not that surprising. Everything had to be produced and processed locally. How communications changes technology...

Next I looked at the history of horizontal watermills (as these make up the vast majority around here). There's some fiery debate raging about where they first emerged, but I sided with the voices that sounded most informed, as articulated in Bethold Moog's seminal work on this subject. Referring to various historians over the centuries he argues that the first watermill was indeed horizontal: obvious really as it's much simpler than the vertical type given the direct axle (no gearing needed from horizontal axle to vertical grinding shaft). He also shows that they most probably first emerged somewhere in China or the Himalayas (Asia Minor wherever that is).

It took centuries before European peasantry got their head around milling. We're told that it was the Romans with their famous engineering team who were responsible for adapting watermill technology and spreading it accross their pillaged nations. They also came up with gearing and vertical watermills.

It's interesting to see from Moog's map of the spread of horizontal watermills around Europe how many areas were left out: most of Northern Europe seem to have opted for vertical mills, while Southern Europe, Scandanavia, Ireland, NW Scotland and her islands went horizontal.

Horizontal watermill distribution around Europe. The shapes represent different types of blade form andwater channel design, which I have on a hand drawn page in anyone is interested.

Other watermill scholars (Lucas, et al, 1953) talk about how the emergence of the feudal system around the 10th and 11th century imposed regulations to prevent home-grinding of corn to ensure the monopoly of the centralised and taxable milling services of the Lords (the Lodge). Typical! And amazing to see how this never happened in Portugal, where every second family had their own mill. It seems this happened all over Southern Europe. Were the local lords too unorganised or just left-leaning liberals? In any case, the vertical watermill with its higher power output clearly went on to become the "workhorse of European industry" until the industrial revolution.

So that's more or less it for the first chapter summary. Next installment looks at how power is generated from water, different types of hydro turbine and which could be most suitable for traditional watermills. I may need some prodding to sit down and actually get it out there...

House build begins with Stone and Hydraulic lime

2010-05-10T22:33:00.022+01:00

Planning permission finally arrived early May. First off we need to take the adega wall down, insert foundation stones, get it square (full 90 degrees) to the main house (so the roof of both buildings fit together properly). João our stonemason was actually the one to point all this out (architect and engineer didn't seem to notice). Here he is, left, with his new toy doing his thing!

Day1: Wall comes down in bits. João stashes the main big stones strategically, then digs ditch for the foundation stones. No cement foundations here - pedras de Porinno (vast granite lumps, from about 30km away).

Day2. Re-align wall so that it sits at a proper right angle to the main house. Tools used: some string and a bit of right angled metal. Foundation blocks in.

Day 3. Wall starts to go up; first 70cm or so. Site for door chosen. First mixes of hydraulic lime (full strength: NHL5. This stands for natural hydraulic lime by the way. It's not actually pure lime, it has a bunch of clay impurities in it, or baked clay basically. Which means we don't need to add pozzolans. Hmmm, lime needs more discussion than this. Soon).

Day 4. More wall goes up. New window bearer chosen (chunk of granite that the window frame will sit on). Lime mortar going off nicely within 24 hours. Sand - lime mix used was more or less 2.5 sand to 1 lime. Nada mais.

These slabs are the foundation stones. João put them in that trench he had dug and that was that. No faffing with cement foundations and all that.

João thinking. About this window. Used to be a door there. And steps will go on the other side. So it can't be too low. Nor too high...

By day 6 João realised we should maybe have taken out all the rubble from inside first... uh oh. No problem he exlaims, we'll dig it out through the doorway. Within 20cm or so we found nothing but bedrock, so we hired a compressor and drilling thing and hammered away for another 4 or 5 days. Slow, grinding work.

Conrad and his Pa Jon (and daughter Lula) visited during all this, and Jon muscled in there with the rest of them - at 70 and still as strong as the next guy!

So up until today we've been digging down: to around 30cm below eventual floor level so we can fit in all that underfloor stuff. And now we have to learn all about floors - and if we want to avoid cement and plastic (DPC) we have to think carefully. So far we're thinking thus: 1. 8cm small river stones for drainage and capilliary break (so water can't come up). Some kind of geotextile that prevents moisture - if it's somehow made it up past the stones - but allows floor to "breathe". 3. Insulation, maybe cork, maybe 6 to 8cm. 4. Limecrete floor with underfloor heating at about 7cm. 5 final cover, lime and broken tiles, like in Roman times. Which sounds good in the Lime Book.

These photos show how much rock we have to get through...

Mainly, we've been learning about hydraulic lime mortars: how they work, how they don't. We've found the best mix when you mix water and lime first, for 5 mins or so, then add the sand, slowly, and water bit by bit till you get the right consistency.

Building for Kiwis

2010-05-09T08:56:00.021+01:00

We planted three kiwis last year to grow over the outdoor table, to provide summer shade and winter fruit. They hardly grew, we gradually forgot about the prospect of fruit, and ended up using any old screen for shading erected over a bamboo frame, supported on both granite and wooden posts dug into the ground . By Spring, at least one of the wooden posts had started to rot - mould and fungi were starting to appear half way up, inevitable given the amount of water in the ground all winter. Also, by this Spring, the kiwis started to grow again, and they have almost reached head-high.

This issue of using wood close to the ground in building is a classic design fault common all over the world. In 1997 I worked with Movimondo in Guatemala where a part of their community development project involved showing locals how the use of around 70cm of stone footing for their homes would extend the life of the wooden walls, saving them the financial burden of rebuilding their homes every five to ten years.

Here in Portugal, and also in Scotland, I know that people generally believe it's sensible to sink a post deep into the ground, often bedded into cement for "extra strength". We are also advised to paint the end of the post in tar, or burn it first to prevent rottage. But Paulo has introduced the idea of using rocks as the principle footing to ensure the posts stay dry and last many times longer. Small metal bars, around 8mm diameter are inserted into the but of the post, and a similar hole drilled into the rock. This merely holds it in place - it is really wobbly and insecure at this stage. Temporary cross bracing to the ground keeps it from falling down.

Once a few posts are erected, a beam joins them together along the top, with simple lap joints with more metal bar to keep it together. This helps to secure the wobble a bit, but it really starts to get more secure when you link up the posts in both directions and add cross bracing. Rafters helped with stability too.

The posts are made from oak chopped from Donald's forest last year, and the central beam is from chestnut coppiced from around our watermill this winter, shown here. We have taken to removing all the bark to prevent the multitudes of bugs and creepy crawlies that live under there chomping away at the sap wood.

So we decided to build a whole new frame partially using the granite posts that we had but mostly from new oak posts. Photos say rest of the story...

Jon - roped in from Scotland, helps shape some new cross bracing for the central posts (that's him in the nifty hat:)

One of Paulo's lap joints

Chisling in for another

The chestnut beam is placed

Paulo's bird's nest view of us 3 trying to get our heads around more cross-bracing

Someone taking it easy (that'll be Charlie)

Bugui, Galician yoga teacher, going with the flow of debarking.

The Power of Community / O Poder da Comunidade

2010-04-30T12:43:00.025+01:00

Translation by Brazilian Ruth - Thanks!
Tradução por Ruth, Brazileira - Obrigado!

Last weekend was our first real hosting of the rede - network - of friends and fellow transitioners: people finding news ways of building, planting and energising.
Fim de semana passado foi nossa primeira vez como anfitriões da rede de amigos e companheiros de transição: pessoas buscando novas maneiras e construir, plantar e se energizarem.

This network or community is a better way of describing it, is mostly from Southern Galicia but is increasingly including us North Portuguesas too. Esta rede ou communidade – uma maneira melhor de descrever-nos – vem em sua maioria da parte sul da Galícia, mas está cada vez mais incluindo os portugueses do norte como nós.

So the call went out: while we wait (forever?) for planning permission, lets build up the Alambique (shown above). We needed to level the floor, point the walls, fix dodgy stones and so on. The people heard the call, and by Friday night waves of people arrived. By Saturday we were up to 23 people! A coincidental visit from English friends Jamie and Sandra drove our numbers higher still. Então fizemos o chamado, enquanto esperamos o alvará para a reforma da casa, por que não restaurarmos o alambique (foto encima). Precisávamos nivelar o chão, rebocar as paredes de pedra e arrumar as que estavam caindo, as pedras não as paredes. O chamado foi recebido e repassado e já na sexta-feira à noite as levas de pessoas começaram a chegar. No sábado já éramos 23 pessoas! Por pura coincidência Jamie e Sandra da Inglaterra vieram nos visitar naquele fim de semana, fazendo os números aumentarem mais ainda.

Brazilian Ruth managed kitchen planning and menus and vegan feasts appeared at all the right times; teas infused from plants and herbs scattered accross the land, salads from everything and just increadible delights. Monica ran the critical flow path stuff: logistics, Nikita managed pizza cooking and oven affairs. The rest of us consumed like giants.
A Ruth, brasileira, cuidou do planejamento da cozinha e dos menus e banquetes veganos apareceram nas horas certas; chás com plantas e ervas crescendo aqui na nossa terra, saladas de tudo e delícias incríveis. Com a ajuda de um super time na cozinha: Cris, Miriam, Frederico e mais voluntários do avental. A Monica cuidou do fluxo crítico das coisas: logísticas, Nikita gerenciou a pizza e o forno. O resto do grupo consumimos como gigantes.

By Saturady afternoon we were in full flow. Ivan, Daniel, António, Juanra, Jamie, Sandra, Frederico and others slogged through hard packed earth to lower the alambique floor another 20 cm at least, nice and level too. Respect also due to Romanian volunteer Petrica who had removed the old distilling structures and cement elements and spray cleaned walls. And also to the Rupert and Alina and many others who, over the past year or so have helped clear that inconquerable mountain of rubble and brambles that have filled the alambique for so long. Sábado à tarde estávamos de vento em polpa. Ivan, Daniel, Antônio, Juanra, Jamie, Sandra, Frederico e outros com a enxada em mãos, cavaram terra batida pra abaixar o nível do chão do alambique pelo menos uns 20cm. Nosso agradecimento também vai ao voluntário romeno Petrica que havia removido as estruturas antigas de destilagem, os elementos de cimento e a sujeira das paredes. E também para Rupert e Alina e tantos outros que ao longo do ultimo ano ajudou a vencer a incrível montanha de entulho e espinheiros que habitaram o alambique por tanto tempo.

Juanra - stone blasting to get it ready for pointing, happening the next day, with a sand-lime-earth mix of 5-2-1.
Juanra – com um jato de água para preparar a pedra para o reboco que aconteceu no dia seguinte com uma misture de areia, cal e terra de 5-2-1.

While this was going on, Miriem, Silvia, Ruta and Noelia took on the three sisters bed. This is the age-old companion planting of maize, beans and squash, taught to the starving Europeans by native Americans to keep them alive in their first years in the New World. Soon enough we found the old stone wall was in semi-collapse. Enquanto isso do outro lado do muro, Miriam, Silvia, Rute e Noelia preparavam a cama para as três irmãs – o jeito muito antigo de fazer uma plantação consorciada com milho, feijão e abóbora, ensinado pelos índios americanos para os Europeus famintos para mantê-los vivos nos seus primeiros morando no Novo Mundo. Não demorou muito para descobrir que o muro antigo de pedra estava a ponto de colapso.

"Lets rebuild this first", Miriem declared, and soon enough we had pursuaded César and Jorge - wall building maestros using traditional knowledge as our teachers. As the alambique team finished with their 5th tonne of earth moving, they joined in. “Vamos reconstruí-lo primeiro”, a corajosa Miriam falou e em um instante persuadimos César e Jorge – mestres em construção de muros usando conhecimentos tradicionais – a nos ensinar. Quando o time do alambique havia terminado de mover sua 5a. tonelada de terra, eles juntaram-se a nós.

Soon enough it was like a team of human ants: some hauling in earth to back up the new stones, others bringing stones that Petrica had moved out of the alambique the week before (a nice coincidence), the rest of us racing against time and each other to build a mighty wall. César all the while advising here and there on stone placement and structure. So impressed was our wall chief with Sandra and Jamie's stone hauling efforts he declared double pizza rations for both ("where are they from these people?" his impression of the English workforce is enhanced forever). In an hour or three, the work of weeks was done! Logo formou-se um time de formigas humanas: alguns carregando terra para segurar as pedras novas, outros trazendo pedras que Petrica havia retirado do alambique na semana anterior (uma feliz coincidência), o resto de nós correndo contra o tempo e contra uns aos outros para terminar o majestoso muro. Com César o tempo todo aconselhando onde colocar as pedras e a estrutura.

O nosso chefe da obra ficou tão impressionado com as habilidades em carregar pedras de Sandra e Jamie que deu-lhes o direito a comer porções de pizza em dobro! “De onde vieram essas pessoas?”, disse César, a sua impressão da força de trabalho dos ingleses ficará mudada para sempre. E em uma hora ou três, o trabalho de semanas ficou pronto!

The finished wall, next day. And Kira joining the Sisters:)

O muro acabado no dia seguinte. E Kira juntando-se às Irmãs J

Miriem - running the wall crew, pounding in earth and smaller rocks behind the facing ones, to make sure it stands forever. Miriam, gerenciando a equipe da muralha, empurrando terra e pedregulhos atrás das pedras da face para certificar-se que o muro ficará de pé para sempre.

Meanwhile, Paulo, Monica, Ruth, Bugui, Christina and many more planted and dug and and prepared beds and gardens. All happening at once it was incredible. Enquanto isso, Paulo, Monica, Ruth, Bugui, Christina e muitos outros plantarm e cavaram e preparam mais camas e jardins. Tudo acontecendo ao mesmo tempo agora.

Mealtimes rocked. The pizza was great. The new table structure - more like a cathedral that a kiwi plant frame - provided a fine setting for good discussions. Our meeting of the "rede" continued over lunches and much was achieved and planned for future projects together. As horas das refeições foram muito fish. A pizza estava ótima. A nova estrutura sobre a mesa – parecendo mais uma catedral do que uma treliça para o kiwi – forneceu um belo cenário para ótimas discusses. A reunião da nossa rede continuou durante os almoços e realizamos muitos planos para projetos futuros juntos.

Kira took on the role of Information Officer - acousting anyone freshly arrived with a notebook and a demand as to which work group they were in (building, gardens or kitchen). Bemused but charmed by this apparition they soon were directed to their respective supervisors. Kira fez o papel de Supervisora de Informação – abordando todos os recém-chegados com um caderno e exigindo que escolhessem em qual grupo iriam trabalhar (construção, jardinagem ou cozinha). Intrigados, porém rendidos ao seu charme, eles rapidamente eram direcionados por Kira aos supervisores responsáveis.

Here she is, giving our more orders and plans for the afternoon at Saturday lunch
(in her version of Porto-Galego of course)
Aqui está ela, no almoço de sábado, dando ordens e informando os planos para a tarde
(em sua versão de Porto-Galego, é claro)

Everyone camped over and hot showers were enjoyed by anyone who had any energy left. Thanks to Paulo for masterful plumbing and connecting both wood-fired and solar heaters:). Solar water-heater shown in pic on left. The smaller solar photovoltaic panel in the foreground powers a small 12v. pump which circulates water around 30m of silicon pipe in a black metal sheet sandwhich.
On the right is an East European wood-fired heating system we bought second hand in Central Portugal. 80 litre capacity of mega hot water. Yes.
Todo mundo acampou e aqueles que ainda tinham alguma energia sobrando puderam aproveitar uma ducha quente. Agradecimentos ao Paulo por fazer o encanamento com maestria e conectar a caldeira a lenha e a solar! A aquecedor solar está na foto à esquerda. O pequeno painél fotovoltáico à frente gera eletricidade para a bomba 12V que circula a água por uma mangueira de silicone de 30 metros dentro de um sanduíche feito por placas de metal pretas. À direita está o nosso sistema de aquecimento de água à lenha da europa do leste que compramos de segunda mão perto de Coimbra. Oitenta litros de capacidade de água super quente. Oh yes.

The best thing about working together like this is the feeling that we're all learning together: how to build, use cob and earth and lime and straw. Not to mention granite and woo; how to apply permaculture design principles - less from books and presentations and more by just doing it. How to heat water, cook food and conserve energy from ambient energies. By the end of a couple of years of these projects - on our land this week but another's next month, we will have collectively absorbed so many new skills and understanding. We'll be a workforce able to transform any building plan, garden, denuded wasteground or deforested landscape. We'll be able to show and teach others, introduce these ideas into schools and sell our products to those who are still tied to the office jobs in town.
A melhor coisa em trabalharmos juntos assim é a sensação que estamos todos aprendendo juntos: como construir, usar cob, terra, cal e palha. Sem mencionar granito e madeira; como aplicar os princípios de permacultura – menos através de livros e aprensentações e mais com a mão na massa. Como aquecer água, cozinhar e conservar energia das próprias energias do ambiente. Ao final de alguns anos de projetos assim – na nossa terra este mês, mas em outra no próximo, haveremos absorvido coletivamente tantas novas abilidades e nova compreensão. Seremos uma força de trabalho capaz de transformas qualquer plano de obra, jardim, terreno baldio ou paisagem desmatada. Poderemos mostrar e ensinar a outros, introduzir essas idéias em escolas e vender nossos produtos para aqueles que ainda estão presos aos seus empregos nos escritórios da cidade.

The Power of Community is of course the name of a film about how Cuba survived peak oil through urban agriculture and so on. But it applies here too. It's a huge difference: going it alone for self-sufficiency, depending on yourself for everything, and drawing on collective forces and energies, which I'm sure are far greater than the sum of the parts. And we don't have to live together either. We have our own lives, our local neighbours, different work for monies, different pastimes. But we share a common passion and it rocks.
O Poder da Comunidade é o nome de um filme sobre como Cuba sobreviveu à falta de petróleo através da agricultura urbana entre outras coisas. Mas isto se aplica à nós também, Há uma grande diferença entre caminhar sozinho em direção à auto-suficiência, dependendo de si para tudo e entre arrebanhar as forças e energias coletivas, que estou certo de serem maiores do que as somas das partes. Também não temos que viver juntos, temos nossas próprias vidas, vizinhos locais, diferentes empregos e passatempos, mas temos uma paixão em comum e isso basta.

Christina and Miriem cobing in the passive fridge kept cool by clay and rock thermal mass - keeping evening cool during the day, plus some evaporative cooling by dropping water over charcoal (made by Donald). The evaporation from the charcoal draws heat from the surrounding area - in this case the fridge shelves. Aqui a Christina e a Miriam estão fazendo o acabamento em taipa da nossa geladeira sem eletricidade (passiva). Ela mantém-se fria pela massa térmica da argila e pedra, que seguram a temperatura baixa mesmo durante o dia, com um pequeno auxílio do resfriamento por evaporaçãon - efeito resultante de molharmos o carvão que fica atrás da geladeira (carvão feito e doado por Donald). Quando a água sai do carvão por evaporação ela ‘rouba’ calor do seu redor, neste caso, das prateleiras da geladeira.

By Sunday afternoon we were all exhausted. Most people took off after lunch, though Tita and Elsa from Arcos arrived then: the reinforcements! Those remaining headed down to the river for some more work, then cooling off time in the spring melt chilly waters. Oh yeh
Ao entardecer no Domindo, todos estávamos exautos. A maior parte das pessoas foram embora após o almoço, mas a Tita e a Elsa dos Arcos chegaram e ajudaram na cozinha: reforço bem-vindo! Aqueles que sobraram foram até o rio para trabalhar mais um pouquinho e depois pular nas águas geladas da primavera. Oh yeah.

Monica's take on the weekend here
O blog de Monica esta aqui - faz falta tradução. Noelia queres tentar?

Horse shit for earthen plasters

2010-04-20T22:19:00.018+01:00

We are stuck in a perpetual holding pattern for planning permission (licença de construção). They (the Authority/ies) believe they must create more layers of complex paperwork and regulations for building, renovating an existing structure. And doing it by ourselves, a self-build? Illegal we are told. We are forced to use contractors and to show how much we pay each of them every step of the way. Enough to drive you to drink and drugs in a spiral of self-degradation.

Instead we have decided to embrace the flow of things and get on with building other things, other places on our land. Of which there are plenty. And we can do this without asking for The Authority's approval.

Which takes us back to the garage. Local builder Machado plastered one half of it last December, with our sand - lime mix of 5:1 (that's 5.5 buckets of sand to one of lime: quicklime or cal viva as it's called here). This is the mix we had used for pointing the main house. It works and I foolishly thought it would be good for plaster too. It has held up OK, but I've since learned you need more fibres to hold it together. (In the old days they used horse hairs and the like).

So this time our mix has fibre: from horse poo. Plenty of little grass "fibres", and quite a few actual hairs that found their way in! Donated kindly by Donald and Eleanor, this poo should really have been allowed to dry out a bit, but we are impatient, hasty (we being me). Paulo, senior techy adviser, had this idea, and we all agreed that it was far better than buying anything plastic or expensive.

So Monica got landed with the illuminating job of crushing up the pleasant offerings...

While The Kids and Me played for days until we learned how to hurl this mix onto the wall till it holds fast - seeming to defy gravity by holding there, then after a while allowing itself to be shoved around into a rough uniform surface. OK, we achieved anything but a smooth finish, but hey this is workshop / toy room (my toys, not Kira's) we're talking about.

Much fun had, photos will say the rest.
Paulo (earth plaster pro) made sure we kept spraying water on it too avoid it curing (drying) too fast. And doing it himself when he saw we were going to forget (OK mostly, this is the case).

Quick lime steam bath and dust cloud. Dodgy stuff to work with: super dangerous for eyes and bare skin. (Which is why Nikita is wearing his...? Staying at a safe distance of course:)

OK here's the magic recipe: 5 parts sand, 1 each of earth, horse poo and lime. Lime being the last one to add to the mixer. Add water in doses with the sand, so it's already saturated. Don't let it go too wet. The earth will improve the consistency. Make sure you break up the little clay balls in the earth (we used a clay-rich soil, about 25% clay content). Break down the horse manure balls a bit so they dissipate in the mix. Cover eyes and hands, and wear a mask when adding the lime. It will react with the water in the mix and get really hot. It seems to be a crazy thing to do, but it's not. It'll be OK. Relax. Walk away from the mixer for a few. Breathe.

Then Paulo and I built these funky shelves - posts made from alder (the reddy one) and ash, from our river land. Placed on rocks with steel pins to avoid contact with water and floor damp. Water infiltrated from the back of garage all winter.

Spraying the wall down with the new jet-pack!

Funny thing is, as it cures, it's going much lighter, changing from a dark tan to a light brown.

Like this detail around the window myself:)

And here is how the wall was before we started. The old earth pointing around the rocks would fall out all over you if you touched these walls. A proper lime pointing job replacing this would have been possible, but really boring, taking way longer, and the kids would have walked off in search of something more engaging. Anyway, we kinda like this warm colour and curvy walls. We are maxed out on stone...

Wood sheds at the garage

2010-04-17T10:44:00.000+01:00

Back in time now, to November or so, but hey, I'm in charge of this particular medium of communication and I can be the master of time, não é?

But also, this garage retro-fit never seems to end. And we're at it still. So, enough said, here's the photo-proof. In fact if I stuck to photo updates I might actually post up more stuff.

Structure goes up with the help of James and Ryan (Tasmanian surfers, exemplary workers, temporarily displaced into our hills:)

Saffy enjoying the view. Note oak posts placed on rocks - with a metal spike into bottom of wood, going through the stone, to locate it. Cross bracing gives it stucture. This way we avoid the wood rotting from prolounged contact with water.

These are old tiles that we saved from the old garage roof - they say these are made on people's thighs. So each one a bit different.

Then Paulo returned and we built this killer wood store. So FINALLY, we can keep our timber dry and sorted into different sizes for easy access (ahhh).

And Aljo helped fence in this bit for firewood...

Total cost: 30 euros for eucylptus rafters, 20 for pine tile batons. Rest from reclaimed wood harvested from various places, old tiles, rocks and plenty of nails 'n screws.

Meanwhile, the chaos of haphazard storage inside the garage, lack of carpentery benches, tool boards, a place for nails and the like has been a thorn in the side since the start. Not to mention water pouring in from the climbing wall at the back - So much to do, but dry wood and a place to dry wetsuits had to be step number one.

Building with earth

2010-02-28T15:22:00.026Z

Earth. That stuff all around us. The skin of our planet, residue of incalcuable eons of rocks, trees, bugs, fungi and a vast array of other living things squishing together to make this medium for life itself.

I've always thought of it as something we use to grow plants in, or on building sites we move it out of the way to make room for "modern" building materials - cement foundations, brick walls, cement-based plasters and the like. But how about actually building our houses with earth?

Mud huts in Africa spring to mind, or cave-like domes to keep the evening coolness over scorching day, in arid Arabian deserts. But what about here in chilly Europe with our incessent rain? Is it even an option?
It seems so: Ken Neal showed us how with his cob-house in the South of England. Amazing: just add straw and stamp it down, and up the walls soared. Ken's a cob-maestro from those parts, and says that this type of building was normal in times past, in Europe since the 12th century... His cob-house shown here on the left, detail below on right.

Cob houses are one of so many ways of building with earth, the mind boggles at how little we knows about it. OK, there is a small but growing number of builders and crafts-people out there who are working with natural building materials. But the mainstream building industry is almost completely unaware of these options. As I happen to live in a modern society I want to know which other earth-building options there are that might be suitable, in our temperate climate.

OK so there's earth-bag building, brought to public recognition by Nader Khalili of the Cal-Earth Institute. These links show it all: basically a way of making domed buildings with circles of earth in bags. Plastered inside and out with more earth, or a bit of lime for more rainy climes.

Rammed earth is another one, used a lot in the South of Portugal. Also used by the CAT in Wales in a big scale for their new "institute for sustainable education". I've heard it is really labour intensive, like cob buildings, so maybe not that suitable for our renovation where we are surrounded in granite rock. The point about rammed earth and the bagged-wall system is that they offer huge thermal mass, like a house built from rock does: cool in summer, warm in winter (as long as you've got a nice stove or something warming it up). This does not mean it has insulative capacities: unless you put something with fibres and air-gaps in it, like straw.

In fact because rock and wood is readily available here, and straw bale too (nearby Ourense in Galicia). We're thinking of using straw for any new extensions, to be covered outside in a lime render, internally with earth plaster. Which bring us to the other application of earth in building: as a plastering material. (In this case, the straw provides mega insulation, the plaster lends some thermal mass, if you slap it on thick enough).

Somehow, over the last 100 years or so of industrialisation, we have seen cement-based plasters taking over the internal plastering show. This great book gives a full summary of all the possibilities available to us, from clay, gypsum, to straw-clay and so on.

From this book, being at CAT, our own experiences and so on, here's a few reasons why I think earth plasters are so much better than cement:

1. Beathability: cement plaster and walls don't breath, so it's like living in a plastic box unless you have a really well built and managed ventilation system. Earth (and lime) walls allow vapours out but stop water coming in. Like gortex.

2. Economics: if you have a clay based earth in your area it's free, thus cheaper than cement.

3. Environment: Manufacturing a tonne of cement produces a tonne of carbon dioxide into our already choked atmosphere. Plus transport, distribution, sprawling factories, mountains carved up to extract the raw material. It burns your hands, stings your eyes, ruins your tools. Nightmare. Earth does none of these things and at the end of it's life an earth house can be turned back into garden.

4. Easy to work with: no need to pay specialist builders when you can do it with your mates and family.

5. Wood rot factor. We have found that any wood elements in our house that had been surrounded in cement plaster or external render was completely rotted. In contrast, where they had left the earth&lime plaster over wooden walls, the wood was still in perfect condition, after maybe a hundred years. I guess it is like putting your foot in a plastic bag to keep it dry, compared to a sock.

So last weekend Miriem asked if we would come and help with some earth plastering in her wee house in the Galician mountains we said "Sure". As discussed above, in theory it makes sense, now we need the experience. Either way, we like the idea of helping out with other natural building projects in this area. In fact there's a kind of network of folk between Galicia and North Portugal that get together fairly regularly to help each other out. So it was that Kira and I volunteered to represent our family, and off we went.

First off, we needed the material. Earth with a high clay content. It so happens that we've got loads of this right around our place in Troporiz, so Miriem, Frederic, Bugui and other Miriem came for some digging.

This is top spot (we found that day). No stones, high clay content (about 30%). Cool colour...

Quick cup of tea, with Madam Kiwi. Shared with Miriem and Frederico

Then onwards to Miriem's hill-top house, where the gathering of the Galician clans had begun.
Miriem decided she wanted an insulating plaster, to warm the place up a bit (or rather, to hold the warmth in a while longer). Earth plaster itself can be pretty straight forward: 30% clay, 70% sand and aggregates, water. Add straw to the mix and it beefs it up, giving it some insulative qualities. How much, I don't know. I suppose it depends on how thick you make your plastering. Adding straw makes it a cob mix (like Ken's house, or our pizza oven).

Miriem's house (on the right)

This kind of cob is usually made by piling straw together with the clay-rich earth and stamping on it, walking, squishing it together, to make sure the components are nicely mixed. As the snow was still fresh on the nearby hills, it was way to chilly to take off our boots and stomp around in a chilly mix. So in rolled the cement mixer, which we brought up from Troporiz.

The mix was more or less like this: 12 buckets of earth (about 35% clay content), 1 box of straw cut small, and 2 buckets of hydrated lime. Miriem decided to add the lime to help the plaster avoid build up of bacteria or fungi, which can happen in humid environments.

Straw cutting crew at work

Then we get it on the walls:) This we did in various ways, forming balls and hurling them at the walls, which they stick to wonderfully, or just applying it like you would any plaster.

Bugui (bearded) and César (with glasses) the leading Galician expert in straw bale and natural materials building, also seriously active with solar ovens, the Spanish strawbale network and permaculture projects.

Kira and Pedro (another Portuguese rep) soaking the stone walls in prep for the plaster.

Then Kira makes plaster lumps for Frederico...

The final picture: 3 walls, first layer of plaster on. I think another "finishing coat", smoother, no added straw, might come next. Some rock left exposed on the edges. Not sure if these won't be like cold panels during the sub-zero winter months, but we'll have to see.

After work and much merry feasting, we decided we seriously needed a hot shower or bath, so we headed for the local thermal springs... (scalding secret spot well worth knowing about!)

A great day all round. Pilar, from Santiago de Compostela was inspired to pen this sonnet which sums it all up in far more eloquent ways than I can muster:

Corrido de los muros

(Ritmo: carabina 30 30)

Caminito a Covelo

Pa´cer el muro de Miriam

El arco iris ilumina

El corazón en la partida

Si un muro quieres revocar

Con los medios a tu alcance

Cal, barro y paja cortada

Constituyen buen aislante

Si arcilla buscas decantar

Y así saber su pureza

Con agua la has de mezclar

Que repose en la cubeta

1º Estribillo

Un gran arco iris en el cielo azul

Una hormigonera en la furgoneta

Un montón de manos y muchos amigos

Revocas el muro con menos pereza

Para darle consistencia

A la mezcla en cuestión

Busca mierda de caballo

Refuerza la solución

Mierda de vaca o caballo

De oveja no es suficiente

De cerdo no es solución

La nuestra no es eficiente

2º Estribillo

Si un nuevo mañana tu quieres construir

Una hormigonera en la furgoneta

Paja, cal y barro bien amasados

Y un montón de manos que apliquen la mezcla

Mucha gente agobiada

Por tremendas hipotecas

Así es como se lo montan

Pa comerte la cabeza

Un cobijo sostenible

Una vida sin dilemas

Mira oye qué estás a tiempo

De salirte del sistema

2º Estribillo

Si un nuevo mañana tu quieres construir

Una hormigonera en la furgoneta

Paja, cal y barro bien amasados

Y un montón de manos que apliquen la mezcla

Cuando trabajes en grupo

Revocando la pared

Recuerda la norma, compadre

Cerrar ojos y boca a la vez

Gafas son agradecidas

Guantes protegen también

Piensa que en boca cerrada

Ni moscas ni barro entran bien

2º Estribillo

Si un nuevo mañana tu quieres construir

Una hormigonera en la furgoneta

Paja, cal y barro bien amasados

Y un montón de manos que apliquen la mezcla

Tras un día de trabajo

Con la luna en creciente

El descanso es merecido

Termas y agua caliente

Pero maldada es la suerte

Que la terma está chapada

Mas recursos no nos faltan

Manos y una gran cizalla

3º Estribillo

Si un grandioso día tu quieres construir

Mete la cizalla en la furgoneta

Un montón de manos y muchas sonrisas

Rompen las cadenas con más firmeza

Qué cosas tiene la vida

Permacultura aplicada

Paja, barro y cal mezcladas

Luna y pelota picada

Ultimos estribillos y conclusión

Si un grandioso día tu quieres construir

Un nuevo mañana, una tarde, una noche

Un buen revoque, un muro, una casa

Mete todas estas cosas en el coche...

Un gran arco iris en los corazones

Las herramientas en la furgoneta

Un montón de manos y muchos amigos

Afrontas los muros con menos pereza

Ecological economics

2010-02-25T21:13:00.004Z

Great talk here by long term Greenpeacer, Rex Weyler. If you have an hour, watch. Interested to know what you think

Google vids don't seem to link across. But try this link:
http://video.google.com.br/videoplay?docid=8161951635313858596&ei=BSt4S8LPK4iOrQLiw8TcBw&q=ecological+economics&hl=pt-BR&client=firefox-a##

In the Stone Room

2010-02-17T23:10:00.019Z

Sometimes wonder what's the point of having a completely independent say-what-I-want site, then never actually use it but to post a few family snaps. Pathetic. So much going on, so many issues, ideas, great thoughts (or fools' illusions), crises local and global to discuss, to share, to link to. And what happens? Nothing.

Is this blog a diary of a few events that I have encountered - or a platform to issue forth my take on the world around us? Clearly the former so far, but I am tempted to paddle into those more hefty questions that surround us every day: new economic paradigms, imminent peak oil, climate chaos (and denial campaigning), bothched agriculture policies, misguided humanitarian aid and recovery programmes, the general head-in-the-sand mindset of our generation, the lack of fresh cream in town, the irrelevance of our kids´ school curricula and the lack of alternatives save us quitting everything we do so we can teach them from home and generally withdraw from the local community. Long breath. These and many more. (That was nice, making a huge long list, with total disregard to grammar, syntax and flow, just because I can). If you're still reading you are part of a tiny droplet of humanity that is, and for this, I salute you.

So I sucumb: The happenings of our life. Here's some stuff from November last year. Which reminds me of another thing (last distraction for this post, honest) :Why be compelled to sticking to the chronological order of things. This happened today, or this month. To hell with that! Loads of stuff happened to us like 8 years ago, or 3. Or last year. When I have an inspiration I'm going to get it out, like it or not.

So where were we? November, a few months back. Hywel visted from England to lend some wisdom on dry stane walling, working with lime and straw building. (Here seen playing with wood too, maybe just because he's not allowed to at home, or too busy on lime courses, but here with our elven friend (Paulo) building a wee woodshed on upper camp.

We went a bit mental with the front gate and, at João's insistence took it to pieces (with his new stone-block-moving toy), expanded the entire entrance way so we drive in and be nice lazy modern shoppers. Principally however I suspect was so João could drive in easier with his truck loads of rock or whatever and not carry it from the road. In any case, we took down the wall, shifted untold tonnes of earth into Vitor's tractor (to top of land, a future workload of Eygptian proportions) then rebuilt the wall under Hywel's all-knowing eye, all dry stane and solid.

Hywel and Paulo were keen to show off their lime skills. Little wonder, it's amazing stuff, which I'll blether about in another post. Our task at hand: pointing. Test the "cal viva" or active, living lime (what do you guys call it again?) which costs a paltry 6 euros for a 40 kg bag. We mixed it with sand: 5.5 sand to 1 of lime. And water. Let it fizzle and pop awhile and boom: we had our first pointing mix. Kira, seeing something new happening (finally!) insists on being in on the scene, grabs a pointing trowel, shoves us out of the way and takes centre stage in front of our new tutor.

The key, Hywel explains, is to maintain moisture for a couple of weeks after application. Not too hard in late autumn, though summertime we'll need a hesion sheet and regular spraying. João - local stonemason, cement disciple - monitored progress closely. He complained (of course) but mostly about our haphazard depths of pointing. He liked the material. I think. Time will tell. Anyway, we like it, so there.

Nikita picked it all up really quickly, as per usual (annoyingly quickly I have to add).

What else? Lots of stone washing. This is a whole new excuse to dress up as a Jedi and wield a purring staff, threatening to soak the enemy to death with a micro touch on the 180 bar trigger; Ungh - melted Jabba, you will make.

Our task: clean earth, lime and cement debris off the walls that have been buried below a concrete render for the past 50 years or so. First, chip the bloody cement off the damn wall (this is a nightmare not really worth telling).

Anyway, fun had by all till it gets really boring. Then you just keep going. Good machine though.

Downstairs sala (more like a dungeon) came up lovely. Actually all we had to do was to wash off centuries of pig shit and cow-hide, then a few more recent decades of more civilised workshop use (by former owner Senhor Felix Rodrigues and his watch-fixing obsession people keep telling me about). Directly upstairs, the main rooms, also stripped of internal plaster, ready for a good wash. Ceiling gone, almost ready for the roof to come off, new one on, and all that house building stuff that seems to be an impossible mirage (delays caused by local planning office taking forever to give permissions, and national roads authorities blah blah).

To end this stony post, some more glimpses of the new-old walls...

Enough of Kira posing. Here's two other fanatics - mushroom fans. Fungi Freaks. Nuts...

Have to admit these parasols tasted pretty good when cooked right. Though you'd need a couple of kilos to satisfy this pair first.

Week in the life of Casa Felix

2010-02-06T10:27:00.026Z

January has been as busy as any other, though we still don't have planning permission so can't actually start work on the house. So we have spent way more time working the soil, which is mostly a gritty, sandy affair, high in acid and not very productive. So this is has become one of our tasks here, one of my obsessions even.

Arguably one of the most important things we have to do globally: figure out how to make soils productive without importing
fertiliser, using herbicides or pesticides
(all of which are made from fossil fuels) .
Here Kira's on our new raised beds, made in the chicken's former home, so we thought it must be fairly well fertilised. More on this design later.

This month Aljo visited. Former skateboarding conquestor, skate pad inventor, mountain bike builder and traveller. It's been a long time since last we connected, and in fact Alj represents the the first of my board-riding mates to visit.

Loads happened. First: moving dirt (see left). Their had to be a better way to move a few tonnes of this stuff from "up" to lower down the land where I want to build a new terrace for planting bamboo.

So we build a ramp to cross three terraces. With chipboard kindly flowed by Maria Fuentes (Galician sawmill).

OK this took a day or so of labour, but I swear it will save time later. Anyway it was quite surfable...

Here the chickens decided they had to give design advice, but just ended up getting in the way.

Next we decided to build a wall to stop catch the falling earth, creating the next terrace at the same time.

Then we went down to our river / watermills area to cut some chestnut and alder trees - for building projects later in the year. We are following local advice on felling trees at the "minguente" or the waning moon of January - when the sap is at rest, it means the wood will be better for all kinds of uses, be less vulnerable to bugs and diseases, will warp less, etc.

These chestnuts were first spotted by Hywel, who is big on coppicing. Cut them, he urged, and they'll grow back. In fact they had proabably emerged from the stump of an old chestut, cut about 15 years ago. I climbed up to tie a rope way up each tree, so Aljo could put tension on the rope, to help the tree fall the right way. The bark comes off easily, newly felled. Aljo's paw showing the girth of this one, only 10 years old. We'll probably use it as a post for a new outdoor kitchen outside the main house.

Then it rained. So we took refuge in this local river-cave.

Back up for air (to the terraces on the hill) we transplanted an olive:

Mulched trees to prevent weed growth (robbing nutrients from their second year of growth. Under the cardboard we chucked in some composted chicken and sawdust manure. Above it, we've now added forest leaves, straw and anything else we find lying around that's organic and soft (no more spiky things, like I foolishy laid around them last year).

Back at the camp, we revisited the slowest-to-build solar heating system in history. We need to build a frame around this panel now to enclose the 4m2 glazed double-doors we were given. More on this sytem later - when we get it finished...

Meanwhile, under strict instructions from Charlie and Lyra (the cats) the chickens are tractoring away on the lower terrace. See how much they have "ploughed" in just over a week. We move the cage every couple of days or so. Potatoes and peas following shortly behind in Feb.

Just as Aljo thought he could take a break, we whisked him away for weekend labours: clearing the local community youth club's tennis court. Yes: a tennis court! (OMG). And yes we can use it, and yes they definitely want people who are any good at the game to come and teach local kids how to play. In fact this local youth club is just kicking off again after a few years absence. I've been asked to be part of it in some way, so hopefully we'll have lots of opportunities to share ideas, games and projects with them, local kids and families soon.

Of course clearing this abandoned court /football pitch meant we had a source of oak and pine leaf litter, from year. Perfect for that tree mulch job:)

Finally we have all become servants to the cats, who need to be moved from house to land every day (we still live off site).
Here Charlie, clearly irritated by our delays growled "Are we leaving yet or What?"

Winter in Scotland

2010-01-20T23:55:00.023Z

Scotland was covered in snow this winter for weeks - weeks! I can never remember this happening.

Anyway, it was nothing short of amazing. But to keep this short lest I never actually post these pictures up, and never get time to catch up with everything else that's going on, I'm going to get on and talk about our igloo.

It all started with some mediocre sledging attemtps, which then turned into massive snowball making sessions. We rolled these lumps together and made the first wall. Never having done anything like this before we just gave it a bash, making each layer lean progressively inwards...

Pretty soon we had a couple of walls heading towards each other. Shawn's pizza oven design helped to understand how a vaulted structure holds together.

Nikita (principle architect and builder) and myself before the roof closed in further.

By this time we'd put hours into this thing, not knowing if it was going to thaw anytime (we needn't have worried. It stayed sub zero and covered in snow on and on).

But as the temperature dropped to -5, then -10 the snow became unworkable. It needs a bit of stickiness to it to work as a binder...

Nice spot for a winter home

Basic entry way done, we had our first guest - John, fresh from living in the Highlands in caves and bothies, was happy to give it a test fire, with a couple of sleeping bags and decent underlays.

John insists he slept like a baby, despite the gaping entry way and meagre tartan door.

So next warmer day Nikita and another crew of enlisted volunteers (shown right)

built a classic crawl through entry way... we then imported some raided straw from the local farm, carpet felt, a donated carpet (thanks Vicky!) built a few candle shelves and we were set up for the night. Cosy one we had too.

after which it became our external party house / meeting point. Wish we'd slept there EVERY night....

Team Traquair clearly taking over here:)

Parting shot, moring of departure.

all pics can go up on to picassa if there's any demand.

How to make soil / Como fazer o solo?

2009-12-22T14:38:00.000Z

How exactly do you get food to grow in depleted or poor quality soils? I've tried with little success in Scotland, Kenya, Liberia and now Portugal. What's the trick?

Now settled in one place for more than a few months, a village where people grow vast quantities of amazing-looking things in their gardens, I have seen a few seasons pass and have listened to their stories about what they do to make it all work. Also, we have Paulo on site much of the time: our very own walking permaculture encyclopedia, who's always keen to see the theories into practice.

Although permaculture design covers far more than the growing of vegies I can't help notice the huge differences between the two systems (local's gardens and permaculture growing). Here are a couple of major ones:

Normal gardeners dig their soil over each year, usually use this opportunity to add in some manure of other fertiliser. Heaps of work, happily avoided in permaculture's no-dig method: just cover the soil with loads of mulch (described below), avoid walking or compressing the soil and ecourage loads of soil life to develop: bacteria, fungi/mycellia, insects, worms, and millions of other mini-actors we barely understand but are responsible for making great soil if they have the right conditions. Digging the soil wrecks their world (and is way too much work too).

Weeding: another reason I always avoided gardening - loads of boring work. Instead, put down sheet mulch (shown below) and the weeds are denied light and can't live. Replace them with plants you want. Easy. OK, supposed to be. I'm sure there is more to it, but it has worked for us so far.

Couple of test sites here.

This is a South facing terrace that bakes in summer. Trying to build up soil there to plant berry bushes and small trees and kiwis to shade the whole area.
Neighbour's dog, Pinnochio (our dog's best friend by far) tramping all over it already the swine. We had just pruned a large bit of the mimosa (acacia) tree planted last year, for nitrogen mulch...

This is the next terrace up, the "chicken terrace". Here we want to build up an edge, to keep water on the terrace a bit longer, but also build up soil quality to grow things in. So we started with cardboard, then some nice looking soil with old manure on top, then forest leafy stuff, then newspaper, well soaked. then straw. We found 35 tiny strawberry plants in the shop and punched holes through the damp mulch bed and popped them in. Oh, we installed some micro irrigation pipe below the cardboard too, to avoid the drudgery of summer manual watering...

Teuru, admiring our handiwork. Next stop: strawberry heaven.

And here is the first garden patch we started this Spring (09). We chunked it full of tomatoes and squash and green peppers. As they started withering into winter, we planted in some lettuces, cauliflower, brocoli, onions and any other winter thing we could find. Where we found weeds we covered them with more cardboard and straw. It seems to go OK, and the soil is imroving a lot, but slugs have chowed through a good share of those new leaves. So next up is how to deal with slugs. Any ideas anyone?

Star of this show: Teuru all the way over from Cook Islands

Paulo in his element with new trainees (James from Tasmania and Teuru)

Copenhagen climate conf: best videos so far

2009-12-18T13:14:00.004Z

They say it's the most important meeting in history, so much at stake, tens of thousands of people there, millions like me here and can't go. How do we keep up with what's going on?? BBC and all the usual media sources provide slim pickings, not much radio or video worth mentioning, or just interview the senior politicians or advisors (eg Nicholas Stern).

However, the Stupid Team (who made Age of Stupid) have the best show ever, covering each day, intereviewing heaps of key people and dealing with the rising tide of climate change sceptics. Why is it that more and more people are starting to believe the rubbish dished out by the climate deniers camp? Anyway, these videos say it all.

1. The Stupid Show

2. Desmond Tutu's speech to the crowd (that guy rocks)

3. President Nasheed of the Maldives (what a President to have?!)

4. Ambassador Lumbumba chair of the G77 group of nations (this one a bit longer and more serious, but his points are classic)

Thesis on watermills to generators

2009-12-16T16:25:00.003Z

I just realised that I can share my thesis with anyone if they are interested. Here is a link to google docs for:

abstract, contents pages, etc.

the introduction

the conclusion

Let me know if these even work... And if you want to see any of the actual chapters - these are just opening and closing sections.

Photo: Senhor and Senhora Gonçalvez, by their functioning grain mill on the river Mouro. Interviewed for the thesis - which also gives a rough idea of how much electricity could be produced from their mill, while maintaining their flour milling service.

Peak Oil - recent reports need translating

2009-11-17T23:21:00.003Z

Some recent publications about when peak oil is likely to change our lives for, pretty much ever, need to be shared, and translated around here into Portuguese and Galego...

Novos relatorios sobre pico de petroleo / devemos traduzir-los...

A report by the UK Energy Research Centre was presented to the APPGPOG in London this month, see here in condensed presentation format.

This study attempts to bring together the findings of over 500 experts' reports from around the world about oil production forecasts - how long we can maintain our current output, and even increase it to meet anticipated increased demand. It finds:

- the rate of decline (of oilfield output) is accelerating. To meet our oil habit in 2030 we would need to replace around two thirds of existing capacity, or, in other words, find a lot of new Saudi Arabia's by then.

- there is a "significant risk of "a peak in conventional oil production" by 2020. Many observers / oil industry geologists believe that peak production was actually July 2008 (at around 85m barrels per day). Regardless, anytime between now and 2020 is far too close for comfort means we need to be preparing communities and adapting technologies, entire infrastructure arrangements if we are to weather this storm.

The International Energy Agency's reassuring predictions is gave in last year's World Energy Outlook are still seriously detached from reality. However, we need to use this report as an useful reference: the voice of energy strategy for most Governments in the world.

Do people, local communities, city councils, regional and state Governments not know what is at stake if global oil production peaks? Surely they will have run the numbers and felt that chill going all over their body as they realize how desperate the situation could get. Especially for food production. Especially for people in developing countries who rely partially (sometimes completely) for our spare cash in aid funds to keep basic services and often food supplies flowing. Spare money for aid will be history. There will be no spare money. Developed economies will crash far harder as people loose jobs around the world, another recession following harder and deeper than the current blip. As their economies contract, it is hardly likely they will increase spending on aid in response to the multiple crises unfolding around the world as global food prices soar.

George Monbiot, as usual sums it all up eloquently in his recent article about peak oil and our food supply. He raises some great points, but rightly comes back to the issue of UK / EU / World food supply, about 90% of which is made, processed and shipped around with oil and gas. Reduce the amount of fuel, and the price will rise.

We need to get ready

Rocket stoves

2009-11-10T22:41:00.007Z

A major development in efficient and way more healthy cooking systems the world over.

This film shows a massive production line of these things which could be great for selling to those that can afford them, or for humanitarian agencies to distribute in emergencies.
But for most communities in low income countries, buying a stove is out of the question. They just wouldn't have that of cash. So it would be better to bring the knowledge of how to make them from local materials, recycled metal from old cans, sand and local earth, etc. Very easy to make in fact.

This next link, shows step by step how it is done. These guys also have films on institutional stoves for camps and schools, etc.

The only problem in this film is that they say you need to make bricks first, in an oven at 900 degrees C. How many people have access to this kind of heat? I suppose anyone baking trees to make charcoal could try a few bricks in there, but the point is it adds a complicating factor, which we should avoid.

Paulo just built one on our land here(photos soon)without any bricks, bust using vermiculite insulation balls on the outside of the chimney (between chimney and outside container). OK, that's available cheaply here in Europe, so what could work in Robertsport, Liberia, for example?

The wood shed

2009-11-08T23:29:00.009Z

Mary is studying architecture in England and likes to draw. And have ideas about building things. One day while trying to avoid any new projects she suggested a new wood store, an extension to the garage - to store the bits of wood we had cut from Donald's place a few weeks earlier. (Here's her dreaming up wood store designs stage left).

I like ideas like these and am suseptible to distractions of this nature at any time. Anyway, we do need somewhere to store wood, bikes and wetsuits when they are drying - out of the rain and out of the sun.

We started clearing the area - which took hours: more mega-brambles, tree roots, rocks. Why does moving rubble have to occupy so much of my life?

Then we realised that it was going to take weeks of labour to bring the level of the ground down a little, to be even, and so that you wouldn't whack your head every time you reached in to the shed on the lower end.

So we capitulated and called in the digger. We needed him anyway to dig a trench between garage and house (so water and power could be laid to garage. Mainly so we could wash our wetsuits at garage, before we dry them, but there are of course lots of other worthy reasons).

While we had him on site, we decided he might as well clear a huge pile of rocks and earth from the bottom of the quarry/climbing wall. Little did we know this would mean trucks upon trucks of rubble being moved out, and hours of costly gear on site. This wood store lark was becoming a monster! In the monster's defense, however, I would add that we have now reduced the huge pile of sticks and stones which once occupied the whole area to the right of the garage (see Nikita standing on this pile about a year ago, when we first started clearing the land)

Moreover, just about where Nikita is standing in that picture, we intend to build a dojo, tea room, training and stretching zone from bamboo and oak. One day.

Tired of waiting for the digger crew, Mary had long since returned to England to get back to school. But before she left we built up the structure on the garage to rest the new roof on. So it's half way there.

So Mary, now you can see we've got the level down and the site is ready. Come back - we'll build a wood/wetsuit store!

Moving mountains

2009-11-05T22:49:00.022Z

Before we build our house we have to take the ruin that's already there to pieces. People have been telling me for years that it's more work -and more expensive - to renovate rather than build a new place. I could never quite believe them, kept thinking it would be different here because we would be doing much of the work, and all that. We are learning slowly but surely that "they" were probably right.

This is one story about just one element of de-construction we have had to do recently so that we can even think about building our house. This is one part of the main building, where we are going to build a new (first) floor, on the existing walls. You can see in the pictures above a part of the old building, and where João, the stonemason and builder is standing on a bit of bedrock that would sit above the level of the new floor. If we left this rock the way it was any rain or water would pour down and into the "new" wall - Not good. Also, we want this to be the rear entrance way to this part of the house, the kids rooms.

So João brings out his big guns: The Compressor + Marcio. Marcio is one of the few people around who is willing and able to spend days on end drilling through rock with an enormous drill that would rattle a normal mans bones to jelly within an hour. He started in the rain, which lasted a day or two, then carried on, hole after hole, hour after hour - with no earmuffs, goggles, gloves or dust-mask - and this work produces terrible granite dust, as fine as dust can be, probably leathal if inhaled in the wrong way. Marcio initially shunned my offer of all these protective bits of kit: what's the point using them now - after all these years, he shrugged. But he liked the ear muffs!

The drilling went of for 3 or 4 days. I can't remember now, it seemed interminable and the noise could be heard clearly miles across the valley. God knows why the whole village didn't come across to complain...

Next up was João with his magic "produto" a modern alternative to dynamite: something to put in the holes freshly dug to almost a meter depth by A-Team candidate Mighty Marcio. Anyway, this product is fiercly expensive (this bit pains me a lot, of course) but is quite impressive. You pour it in liquid, it expands within a few hours and whatever chamber its in splits. In Scotland I've heard they used water and wait for winter for the ice to do the same job. (Hey, cheaper too!).

Next day, the rock was giving up its grip, and had split like a melon. Lots at a time. More drilling, more produto, the process was well under way...

Safffy (our newly adopted family member) and Narissa, another short term adoptee from Australia survey the field of cracks...

By creating space in one corner, we produced a vast amout of material to move around. Rock. THis is most of what I do here: moving rubble. Oh, and dig holes, then move the earth. This time we had Team Rock, joined by local strongman Machado, to level about 20 tonnes of this nicely sized granite blocks down into the Adega room. As if by magic, by 1030 the next morning, most of it had already been moved onto a nearby terrace.

Nikita popped round on his Thursday afternoon he gets off school, and helped João with his water level (nivel de água) - the old Roman way of using water's propensity to always find level, making sure things were on an even plain. In this case, they're measuring approximate spaces where the floor beams will site, within the bedrock. From here we'll measure upwards to include the depth of floor beam + rafters + floor boards (inc. some insulation along the way) to define our final floor level, after which we'll decide exactly where to finish the newly carved stoney path...

Our 350.org action

2009-10-25T20:05:00.007Z

So, 24th October has finally been and gone - the big day for what they are calling the "biggest climate action ever" for 350.org. Together with José and Bugui, and other friends from both sides of the Minho we helped out with a small event at the old bridge between the Portuguese and Galician towns of Valença and Tui, though we failed to attract the hoardes to fill the bridge with balloons mexican waves of people holding up enormous signs about climate change and all that.

Great to be part of such a global action nonetheless: pictures of the thousands of events that took place that day are here, and were beamed to folks somewhere in New York city, we are told. Not exactly sure where our pics are. Must be a glitch in the system...

You may be asking why is everyone on about 350? Bit of an obscure number possibly? Why not say something like "fight climate change" and so on. Maybe, but it makes sense when you read a bit about it. So here is a link about the climate scientist, James Hansen, who first raised the alarm bells, and the science behind 350.

And a short film (take ten minutes out for this one) that explains what climate change is all about without any numbers, graphs or technical stuff. If you don't do anything else, watch this...

The Pizza Oven

2009-10-10T12:53:00.038+01:00

Shawn is a one man bread oven making band. He once saw an old oven in the South of Portugal, was so inspired he figured out how to do it. And started building them for friends and local communities in Germany. Since then, he travels around Europe when his work permits showing people how it all works. We are his most recent beneficiaries, a rare honour!

So we started with the granite base AJ helped us build a while back. If you don't have a waist high base about this height, you'll have to gather a bunch of rock and rubble or earth or whatever to bring the base up, or else you'll be bending down to get anything in and out of the thing.

Photos: Shawn laying oven's base. About 80cm diameter. The stone in the centre is used to anchor a piece of string with a straight stick at the end. You use this to make sure each new layer of bricks, and each individual brick, is in the right place: the string makes sure each brick is the same distance from the middle. This creates a perfect dome shape.

The walls start to curve in... Nikita gets involved. It's actually fairly easy. Shawn showed us how to put little bits of stone of broken tile or whatever on one side of each brick to keep the curve going.

getting the key stones in the right place...

All set. Time to plaster it all with a nice little cob mix and enter Sophia, Heather and Kira to get the first coat on

Shawn gets up early when nobody's looking and pops a door in, then a few hours later and a couple of cob coats later and the fires in.

Then we realise that we should try and capture the heat to warm up some water. Enter Paulo and Huci and the copper pipe. Probably not long enough, but let's see how much water it heats, then we can adjust for future models. The pipe runs down a chimney to a hob beside the oven: somewhere to cook with pans - with some stylish mosaicing by Monica there.

Time to fire it up. Hector and Nikita on cooking duty. With the oven pre-heated a bit pizzas bake in minutes, potatoes do in half an hour. Roast veg in 20. Bread goes in later. The taste - oh - the taste!

We decide it's time for a chimney. Enter Logan and Nikita with another cob mix. We made chimney shaped bricks and stacked them up.

Everyone should have one

Gathering wood to build our house

2009-10-05T14:22:00.027+01:00

Donald at home, with his horse, self-built round house and in his woodland

We need chunky beams to build our roof, and others to hold up our floors. Joists I think they call them. Anyway, we need loads and we don't want to use concrete beams, covered in a concrete floor, which mystifies all our local builder friends: it's what everyone does. Why not, it's resistant, cheap, etc.

Where to begin? There are so many reasons why not: the environmental impact of the evil grey powder, horrible material to work with (wrecks your tools and your hands), doesn't perform well in terms of breathability: it's like wrapping your room in plastic so the vapours inside can't escape. Build your roof with it and you live in a plastic bag. Do we need any more reasons to choose wood?

Anyway, a wooden floor or roof beam can be exposed and look nice, maybe even curved a bit like the tree was. Maybe we can insert long bolts and swing from it. And so on.

So we meet Donald and Eleanor who live near Valença in their very own forest. Donald is a vet, and worked in his local community for 17 years or so. Now he looks after the ranch. Donald said we could take some oak trees from his place if we needed to build a roof.

So in August we decided it was time. August because we've heard so much about cutting trees at the right time considering the movement of sap in the tree. These are called the the "menguinte" and you are supposed to cut most trees only in the menguite de Agosto o Janeiro. It make sense: mid summer or mid-winter with be the stillest time for the sap.

The menguinte refers to the waning phase of the moon. As usual other things were happening and we got on to it a bit late, but we got started.

Within a week we had cut 17 of Donald and Eleanor's fine trees. It was quite hard to make the decision to end their eager lives, but Donald tells us that the roots remain full of energy and burst up through the stumps creating many new shoots. He cuts most of these, leaving say four, which grow quickly and in about 8 years are a good chunky size, useful for posts, fencing or firewood. Oak coppicing in other words.

Meanwhile, everywhere we looked we saw baby oak trees growing in every possible space. This is a truly native species and seems to grow at a tremendous speed. The biggest trees we cut were only 25 years old (counting the rings). In Scotland, a tree this size would sure take twice that long!

We arrived in teams. At first myself and Paulo. Then we picked up Shawn for the bread oven and he joined in. Heather and Sophia joined us the next day as we realised how much work clearing the branches and brash was taking. A few days later we increased the pace bringing out our heavy artillery: Machado (local everything worker), Nikita, Logan and Cyreeta and Mary.

After this onslaught we had whole trees strew across the land. Firewood and brash piles rose in newly illuminates glades. Our desired length for most joists was 6m.
This meant leaving extremely heavy chunks of tree lying around in mostly hard to access bit of woodland. How were we going to move it all?

Machado said we needed a "tractor do monte" (a mountain tractor). We called Pedro and he brought his quite amazing hill moving machine.

Fitted with two massive winches, he puts this scary looking tractor in a strategic position, pulls out chains and ties them around the base of trunks. Then stands back and lets the machine do the work: on remote control! Yes, as if by magic half a dozen of these enormous trees move obediently towards this vision of future mooon-scaping. Mary, Donald, Eleanor and I stood like fascinated villagers who had seen a car for the first time. We got lifts in the wagon and played God with the remote. Within a few hours we'd shifted around 20 tonnes of oak to the road side.

Next day, Pedro brings his techno-truck. Awed by the tractor, we were blown by "The Claw". This is a mechanical arm controlled from a precarious looking cockpit above the back of the truck. It moved with the speed and accuracy of your arm. It had the delicacy too: it could pick up small branches and gently relocate them. Or grab whole car-size lumps of earth that were in the wrong place and lob them, like a gormless cricketer, into the beyond.

Once again, we googled open-mouthed. I wondered how I can have missed all this technology development. I suppose I don't work around modern technology in forestry. My only experience with moving wood was in Romania, where we did it all by horse and cart. Seemed to work pretty well too, and would have done here. But moving all the wood the 20 odd miles to the sawmill would have taken forever by cart. Anyway, this is the space age, and we borrowed kit from the Mars programme and enjoyed the show.

Senhor Jorge, at the sawmill was a bit dismissive, saying most of was "lenha" (firewood). He is used to working with massive trees as wide as his own barrel-like girth. He says the heart wood is the only usuable bit, the white outer wood is vulnerable to rotting, bugs and so on. Wish someone had told us this before. We had been hoping he could cut one edge of it for us, leaving the rest in the round (as floor joists would rest of these beams). I'm still sure he can get a few rafters or joists out if it all, if not major beams. And there's plenty of posts for building sheds and the like (chicken coups come to mind).

New chicks on the block

2009-09-24T23:50:00.008+01:00

This post written by Sophia, when she was recovering from an impaled foot incident involving a 6 inch brass screw...

The continuing urge of self sustaining living has driven us to chickens. Other than being very tasty and productive little things for the non vegans amongst us, they are massively useful when applying permaculture principles. We now have fluffy chicken tractors for the land. The chickens will allow our sun burnt soil to become prosperous veggie patches, fertilized with organic chicken waste, whilst eating up our dinner scraps.

(Note from Editor: actually, thus far they have clawed up any living thing on the soil in the coup, rampaged through the veg gardens when let out to wander and produced nada on the egg front since day one. Still, in principle...)

Applying our best salvaging and scavenging techniques we built a moveable coup so all of the growing terraces can eventually benefit from our new feathered friends. Whilst on a trip to the James Bond river (more of that later) we harvested some wild growing bamboo to build the structure of our coup.

Luckily, this was ideal as it perfectly fit our two design criterions: lightness of the structure and height. This meant we could move it around easily and not look like an aged crone when you’re collecting the eggs (and for Heather, our newest volunteer, to play with the chickens). The bendability of the bamboo allowed for a beautiful arched structure. Although aesthetics aren’t everything by any means, it’s still great to have an organic flowing structure fitting the natural landscape, than a plastic monstrosity!

Getting the structure to stand firmly without braces (which we didn’t have enough resources for), required notches to be taken out of each piece of bamboo to create a tight fit and then excellent knotting skills, learnt from a friendly Italian visitor. (That'll be Ricardo)

The chicken laying house, to go inside the coup, was scavenged from the shell of the house. Old doors and shutters have been cobbled together to allow the chickens to provide us with omelettes once they come of age. But for now, they continue to look cute and be clucked over by Heather, our mother hen.

(Editor again: they are now SO much bigger, a bit more grumpy and less cute, but still chirping away. Oh, and we tripled their enclosure and stopped them rampaging across the gardens, which was a shame because they used to appear in the kitchen for chirps and shade).

Sophia, current author, having built herself in.

Back into the fray

2009-08-25T14:17:00.010+01:00

Finally freed from shackles of a thesis deadline at the end of July we arrived back in Portugal by the first days of August. This time, with Ruth sharing the driving and Hector entertaining Nikita nd Kira in the back of Cora, our van, chockered to the brim with newly acquired stuff - including a couple of ebayed kayaks, dingies and other essential items for a building project.

Since then, August has been a whirl of activity and new arrivals, leaving almost no time to return to this screen to capture some lost moments. Before too much more happens I feel bound to commit something on "paper"

People sharing land and food with us this month so far:

Ruth and Hector (Scotland)
Leen and Meat (Belgium)
Sophia and Heather (England)
Miriem (Galicia / Espagne)
Ricardo, Germana, Michele, Gaia (Italy)
Machado (Portugal)
Paulo (England / Elven Kingdom)
Shawn (USA / Europa)
Huchi (Brazil / London)

August week one:
Ruth embarks on kitchen repairs and upgrades, like linking the sink up to a drainage pipe which we dug across the terrace and left dangling onto the next one. In other words, we just shifted the problem 10m away, so now we need to collect this grey water and build a mini irrigation line from it to the veg bed.

Nikita and Hector start on the solar hot water panel (we'd bought the silicon pipe when back in Scotland - about one third the cost of local copper). I'll post more about this when it's up and running, but basically it's a 4 square meter panel: a sandwich of silicon pipe tied on with wire between 4 sheets of metal, painted black on the exposed surface. We'll need a 12v pump (run of a small solar photovoltaic panel) to move the water between the panel and the hot water tank. It's based on a Solartwin system, invented in Scotland (yeh!) and proposed here by Simon Sharpe, who runs his own renewable energy company out here.

Week two
Sophia and Heather arrive and join the house clearing gang as we pull down any remaining walls, internal plaster and ceilings.

We discovered various new bamboo fields and decided it was time to raid them for our emerging village. Handy for light weight ceilings or roofs, but only over a limited span.

More soon

Peak Oil - one year on

2009-07-10T01:09:00.004+01:00

Excellent post here by prolific Peak Oil researcher, writer and educator, Richard Heinberg.

This is a must-read post, and issue in general

Survey on watermills

2009-06-21T15:56:00.007+01:00

I have started the social research bit of my watermills renovation thesis. If you have a watermill and have a few minutes to answer some questions, have a look here.

Of course mostly I have to go and ask people this stuff directly, which takes hours, days. Weeks in fact: to locate the owners, find out what time/where they are. Introduce the issue, me, the survey, what, why. for whom and so on... As I made so many changes to the survey (Monica being the master editor) I didn't have time to translate into Portuguese, so I have to explain each question with my fairly basic grasp of the language. It has seemed to work, albeit with several promptings in some cases.

This couple in the picture are in their 70s, still working away on the land, and running one of the remaining grinding mills in the region. What quality of flour! What simplicity of technology!

Such interesting results. Most owners are over 65 years old, live on the land, have let their watermills go to ruin because there's no longer a market for milled corn or wheat. Nor much of local production of these products, except to fatten the pigs. In fact, we usually ended up talking about the demise of local agriculture, how there are so few subsidies or support from the state. Agriculture in general is, they think, at the bottom of the Government's priority list.

Most people hadn't heard of climate change - at least in terms of dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions; urgent need to reduce emissions or global climate will go haywire and all that. Instead they were familiar with local changes over the course of their lifetime, "it used to be much colder in winters", or, "now there's a changable climate - it's sunny in winter, can be pouring in July" and so on.

I also had a bunch of questions on peak oil. Despite the huge oil price rises last year, almost none of those interviewed had heard that global oil production could soon fail to meet global demand, leading to price instablity, economic and social chaos, etc.

This seems odd, given the potential severity of the situation. Probably the highest profile report so far on this was by Robert Hirsch, for the US Department of Energy (DoE) back in 2005 or so. The DoE apparantly shelved his report when it first came out because of his fairly alarming conclusions. His report can be seen here.

Further, the impact of peak oil on agricluture and food production is seriously disturbing. Surely any rural community should be worried, and getting ready for less fuel-hungry food systems. Richard Heinberg, probably the best known author and speaker on peak oil, describes our current food supply predicament in his usual eloquent and concise manner in this article.

But all this was a kind of background context to the watermill questions. It forms part of my thesis introduction into watermill renovation, so I thought I should add it to my survey. Anyway, upshot of survey is:

almsot all interviewed showed interest in mill renovation
didn't know you could generate electricity or hot water from the mills
would be interested in knowing more about the options
don't have much money to invest
would be interested in partial investment if Govt / EU / whatever funds could help
are interested in using mills as part of a new eco-tourism watermill trail (cheap shelter, cleared river access routes for mountain biking or walking).

More later

Skateboarding in Afghanistan

2009-06-17T00:30:00.002+01:00

Great post here on new skateboarding training project in Afghanistan.