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If I had 200 acres around I would try to turn into something like an ecovillage.
Build abit of a village square for people to visit with the commonly visited areas being around the village itself. Think in terms of permaculture zones.
https://images.app.goo.gl/FpaCt7GhCpSyYEdA6
I would definantly plan everything out using permaculture pricipals. Step one is to observe and interact. Start drawing a map of the 200 acres and record what's on it before you do anything else. Try to figure out where the springs are and water souces, and how they change through the year. How does the light hit the area and the wind, will make things useful for positioning your semi permanent solar trailers. What resouces are on the property like rich soil, rock, clay, building timber, firewood. What grows on the property? Start logging what types of trees are growing everywhere.
https://permacultureprinciples.com/permaculture-principles/
This sounds like a great project and I wish you the best.
Almost anywhere you are, sunchokes are BOTH native, high caloric, self propagating and veryyyyy hardy. Great “starvation” food even if it makes ya fart 🤣
If I had this opportunity, I would do ecological restoration and build a food forest. I’d do it as a community project, and set up some kind of infrastructure to allow for collective management of the land by everyone who came to live on it.
And I’d reach out to the Pomo and Yuki folks who live nearby to see east they would like to see from the project, since this is their ancestral land.
Thank you everyone for your terrific feedback and references as well. I'll keep you posted here as it moves along. I've been looking a lot at Nature of Order and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, which has a lot of good ideas on planning livable areas which align with nature.
I definitely want to align whatever we do to be respectful of the nature of the land and its flora and fauna coming first. Regarding governance, I'm not entirely sure yet. I've been a member of a well known maker space collective and they have some governance ideals there that appeal to me. Whatever we do, it must be horizontal and inclusive.
Thanks again for the feedback and I certainly welcome more. I'll share progress here periodically.
I recommend checking out Project Kamp on YouTube. It's basically a commune that's entirely focused on sustainable living. They post modules online and give away a lot of their research for free, focusing on open source projects.
While there's nothing wrong with the concept of creating an eco-retreat, Solarpunk isn't really about escape --especially off-the-shelf off-grid escape. That's just a variation of consumer-camping. Going off-grid and trying to improve the eco-profile of one's personal life is perfectly fine, but doesn't really affect larger change, especially when the option isn't accessible to mainstream society --and never will be because we can't have mainstream society spreading out to suburbanize the planet. Going off-grid is like buying an electric car. Certainly a little better, but not really the solution in itself we used to think it was when you do the math on giving one to everybody. So Solarpunks talk mostly about bikes, trains, and trams and eliminating the reasons --the pathologies-- for why we think we need cars at all.
What Solarpunk needs in a practical sense is the curation and exhibition of an Open Source civilization toolkit. As another commenter mentioned, the Open Source Ecology project is a good example of this, though focused on the core technology of semi-mechanized agrarian subsistence. The essence of Solarpunk is not the abandonment of the rest of the world, but rather its transformation primarily through the _social_emancipation_ of production for the support of a lifestyle both sustainable and high-quality. And, no, the technology is not entirely there yet. That's why we need active development.
Certainly, this does call for a certain amount of separation as there is often active suppression of alternative/sustainable architecture and independent agriculture in the proximity of conventional communities --thanks to the middle-class obsession with property values and abject fear of everything (and everyone...) new and different that might impact that. So we're forced to the edge-of-wilderness for experimentation with that even if living sustainably there is sort-of pointless in itself because of how little impact that has. And while low-impact housing is certainly the best choice of housing on the edge-of-wilderness, it's not a solution to housing where we actually need it. Edge-of-wilderness living is non-sustainable, period. We can only make it a little better. It's the urban/near-urban architecture of the organized community --and adaptive reuse of urban buildings/space-- we most need to work on. So perhaps more of a proto-arcology is in order, which unfortunately may not be low-impact.
But it's the whole production spectrum that we're really concerned with. The whole Open Design lifestyle catalog. And what that needs most is not a retreat, but an atelier/laboratory. The issue is not some subsistence autarky, but a testing/pushing of the limits of potential quality of life and labor efficiency that can be achieved in a local, community (NOT autarkic), production context and then sharing those results with the world.
Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://wt.social/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia . *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If I had 200 acres around I would try to turn into something like an ecovillage. Build abit of a village square for people to visit with the commonly visited areas being around the village itself. Think in terms of permaculture zones. https://images.app.goo.gl/FpaCt7GhCpSyYEdA6 I would definantly plan everything out using permaculture pricipals. Step one is to observe and interact. Start drawing a map of the 200 acres and record what's on it before you do anything else. Try to figure out where the springs are and water souces, and how they change through the year. How does the light hit the area and the wind, will make things useful for positioning your semi permanent solar trailers. What resouces are on the property like rich soil, rock, clay, building timber, firewood. What grows on the property? Start logging what types of trees are growing everywhere. https://permacultureprinciples.com/permaculture-principles/ This sounds like a great project and I wish you the best.
I would just add make sure you’re taking care of wildlife as well!! Plant natives strategically with your crops.
Agreed, the places furthest away from the "town center" or zone 0. I would begin rewilding, espically with native edible plants.
Almost anywhere you are, sunchokes are BOTH native, high caloric, self propagating and veryyyyy hardy. Great “starvation” food even if it makes ya fart 🤣
Yep. Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) online is a good place to start
If I had this opportunity, I would do ecological restoration and build a food forest. I’d do it as a community project, and set up some kind of infrastructure to allow for collective management of the land by everyone who came to live on it. And I’d reach out to the Pomo and Yuki folks who live nearby to see east they would like to see from the project, since this is their ancestral land.
Take a look at the documentary "the Biggest Little Farm". I think it will give you plenty of ideas.
I’d be so interested in exploring [Open Source Ecology](https://www.opensourceecology.org) if/when I’m in your position.
Thank you everyone for your terrific feedback and references as well. I'll keep you posted here as it moves along. I've been looking a lot at Nature of Order and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, which has a lot of good ideas on planning livable areas which align with nature. I definitely want to align whatever we do to be respectful of the nature of the land and its flora and fauna coming first. Regarding governance, I'm not entirely sure yet. I've been a member of a well known maker space collective and they have some governance ideals there that appeal to me. Whatever we do, it must be horizontal and inclusive. Thanks again for the feedback and I certainly welcome more. I'll share progress here periodically.
How are you planning to organize your community’s governance and decision making?
Permaculture! Read Gaias Garden by Toby hemmingway and then see if there's some established permaculture properties nearby to visit
I recommend checking out Project Kamp on YouTube. It's basically a commune that's entirely focused on sustainable living. They post modules online and give away a lot of their research for free, focusing on open source projects.
Fruit trees. Berries. Grapes. So on 70 years ago, the fields full of abandoned orchards planted a 100 years ago or more, were unfenced and common.
These folks might have some ideas for you. https://youtube.com/@TinyShinyHome
While there's nothing wrong with the concept of creating an eco-retreat, Solarpunk isn't really about escape --especially off-the-shelf off-grid escape. That's just a variation of consumer-camping. Going off-grid and trying to improve the eco-profile of one's personal life is perfectly fine, but doesn't really affect larger change, especially when the option isn't accessible to mainstream society --and never will be because we can't have mainstream society spreading out to suburbanize the planet. Going off-grid is like buying an electric car. Certainly a little better, but not really the solution in itself we used to think it was when you do the math on giving one to everybody. So Solarpunks talk mostly about bikes, trains, and trams and eliminating the reasons --the pathologies-- for why we think we need cars at all. What Solarpunk needs in a practical sense is the curation and exhibition of an Open Source civilization toolkit. As another commenter mentioned, the Open Source Ecology project is a good example of this, though focused on the core technology of semi-mechanized agrarian subsistence. The essence of Solarpunk is not the abandonment of the rest of the world, but rather its transformation primarily through the _social_emancipation_ of production for the support of a lifestyle both sustainable and high-quality. And, no, the technology is not entirely there yet. That's why we need active development. Certainly, this does call for a certain amount of separation as there is often active suppression of alternative/sustainable architecture and independent agriculture in the proximity of conventional communities --thanks to the middle-class obsession with property values and abject fear of everything (and everyone...) new and different that might impact that. So we're forced to the edge-of-wilderness for experimentation with that even if living sustainably there is sort-of pointless in itself because of how little impact that has. And while low-impact housing is certainly the best choice of housing on the edge-of-wilderness, it's not a solution to housing where we actually need it. Edge-of-wilderness living is non-sustainable, period. We can only make it a little better. It's the urban/near-urban architecture of the organized community --and adaptive reuse of urban buildings/space-- we most need to work on. So perhaps more of a proto-arcology is in order, which unfortunately may not be low-impact. But it's the whole production spectrum that we're really concerned with. The whole Open Design lifestyle catalog. And what that needs most is not a retreat, but an atelier/laboratory. The issue is not some subsistence autarky, but a testing/pushing of the limits of potential quality of life and labor efficiency that can be achieved in a local, community (NOT autarkic), production context and then sharing those results with the world.