CHALMITA, Mexico State, Mexico – Long before the sun appears over the towering white cliffs all around us, this temporary village comes to life. The guardians of the ceremonial fire are stoking the flames for the temezcal; the kitchen crew is chopping and peeling and stirring; smoke is rising from the women’s tipi. Suddenly the resonant call of the conch rings out over the valley, calling us to the salutation of the sun, and the cry of an eagle pierces the air like a blessing.

We are gathered in this enchanted valley for the Call of the Eagle, the tenth intercontinental gathering of a group of dreamers and doers who are quietly changing the world from the inside out: the Consejo de Visiones – Guardianes de la Tierra (Vision Council – Guardians of the Earth).

Some 500 visitors from as far as Australia and as near as neighboring Chalmita – filmmakers and farmers, psychologists and shamans, artists and teachers, spiky-haired punks and lyrical poets – are learning to live together under the blue skies and bright stars of an itinerant ecovillage conceived more than a decade ago under the banner of the Rainbow Caravan for Peace and the Mexican Bioregional Movement. By the end of the week, this event will have touched the lives of more than 1,000.

This tenth gathering is a very special event for many reasons, chief among them that it is seen as the fulfillment of an Inca prophecy. When the Eagle and the Condor fly together, according to the prophecy, this will signal the dawn of a new era – the Eagle representing the North, and the Condor representing the South. Here in this sacred valley, lying in the shadow of an ancient pyramid amid the fertile Bosque de Agua, a high-energy group of visionaries, artists, and activists from North and South has come full circle.

Fourteen years ago, a now legendary group of them, led by among others Alberto Ruz Buenfil, otherwise known as the Subcoyote – cousin of Fidel Castro and son of the archaeologist who discovered Palenque’s fantastic hidden treasures – set off from this region for an epic journey that was to create the foundation for an intercontinental environmental, spiritual and social movement. After holding the first intercontinental congress of the Vision Council, they headed off in a bus painted like an ear of corn through the Zapatista territory of Chiapas, through the volcanic highlands of Central America and the tropical lowlands of Amazonia all the way to the tip of the continent in Patagonia. Using theater and the arts to plant seeds of hope, peace and sustainability in conflict zones, indigenous villages and crime-ridden barrios, they connected and nurtured social movements throughout the continent.

Their second international event, the Call of the Condor in 2002, brought some 1,300 activists and artists to the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu in Peru to begin the work of consolidating a vision for a transition to a new age. The third, Call of the Hummingbird, was held in Brazil in 2005 and drew more than 1,500.

Now, after 13 years, that caravan has finally come back to its roots, and the seeds they planted here in Mexico and across the continent have come full bloom in an astounding event that is awakening even the most cynical and reserved among us. Tears flow freely in the circles of dance, in the darkness of the temezcal, in the embraces of long-lost friends who have only just met.

But this is far from a feel-good encounter group. In fact, it’s far from anything I’ve experienced. These folks are facing the future with their eyes wide open, painfully aware of the resource and climate crises that loom on the horizon. It’s also not a hand-wringing session. No one here is waiting for government to resolve these pending crises, although government leaders are here to participate in the forums, workshops and demonstrations in areas encompassing ecology, health, spirituality, appropriate technology, and education among many others. Local schoolchildren, too, are brought in to participate in panels teaching self-reliance; local youth participate in forums organizing political and social action preparing for turbulent times in a post-petroleum world. Gaia University is here, sharing a revolutionary model for participatory education, granting diplomas, bachelor’s and master’s degrees while its students are engaged in planetary transformation.

One team is building an oven from mud and bricks, while another is building a solar clock; another group is learning about native herbal healing techniques, while still another is raising the ceremonial tipi that will be the headquarters of a powerful women’s healing circle, and another is discussing strategies for protecting this valley, a strategic but highly vulnerable center for water conservation. Another initiative is gathering momentum to support the Huicholes in a struggle to save their most sacred site, Cerro Quemado in Real de Catorce or Wirikuta, from a transnational mining operation.

Sacred rituals from the world’s great traditions mingle with dance and creations of art and song to raise the energy throughout the week to a level I never thought possible. Activities run from sunup to 3 a.m., but sleep seems superfluous.

The culmination of the event comes after an all-night vigil to greet the dawn; a spectacularly feathered and painted group of Aztec dancers await us around a blazing fire, and a mandala of dance and rhythm and song erupts.

As I sit down to try and put this phenomenon to words, I recall those of Coyote Alberto as we stood together on the last day.

“It’s all so perfect,” I told him. “My only regret is that it’s just impossible to put into words.”

He laughed knowingly – the author of several books about the caravan and its Rainbow Warriors, and now involved in a project to bring the lessons of the caravan home in Mexico City, he has struggled with this problem daily.

“Nobody believes you when you try to explain it,” he said. “They say, ‘You’re just writing what you want it to be.’ There’s no way to explain – you just have to live it.”

Never has a human being lived his words more authentically, more powerfully, more beautifully than the man at the heart of this vision turned reality. I can do no better than to end with some of those words, which Alberto shared with us during the closing ceremony.

“Two hundred years ago these lands were the scene of bloody battles; much blood was shed among our grandfathers and grandmothers to make a step forward in the process of evolution, of growth, toward our liberty as individuals, as a people, and as a nation…. A hundred years ago, again in these lands, much blood was spilled once again among our people, with the same goal, to be able to walk with a bit more liberty, a bit more strength.

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I finally caught up with her at a presentation at a local university, and she was worth the wait.

Laura Montoya of the peacock-feather earring, the disarming smile and the passionate rapid-fire defense of the Pachamama, is a one-woman Earth revolution in action. Over coffee, she sized me up and apparently decided I was worth her time, and she invited me to her home and the new headquarters of eReciclaje in the marginal barrio of Belen, up in the hills on the outskirts of the city.

The trip itself was almost as memorable as the actual visit. Starting from the classic Hotel Nutibara, whose elegant neoclassic lines are meant for others with far greater budgets than mine, I climbed into a bus destined for the outskirts. After nearly half an hour of traffic through the modern world of esthetic salons and shopping malls and residential neighborhoods we began to climb up and up into another world, one in which houses begin with brick and end with sheet metal and black plastic, where women still carry water in jugs and corn in tubs on their heads, where the smoke from cooking fires curls hangs in the air, where you or your neighbor may or may not have electricity or running water.

It was here that eReciclaje located its second project, the first one, an urban permaculture center in the rougher Barrio Triste neighborhood, having been undone by a devastating robbery.

Here, according to Laura, Felipe started over again, building terraces and irrigation ditches and working the land. Here is the regional headquarters for A Limpiar el Mundo or Clean Up The World, an international group working to organize mass cleanup projects, and here the plastic detritus of the neighborhood becomes eco-bricks of the sort David had demonstrated to me earlier.

But first, I had to find it. The neighborhood was a network of streets without names, and a misunderstanding led me to get off the bus in the wrong place. Finally, there she was, smiling, brilliant in her green hindu pants, big white sunglasses and peacock feather. We embraced, long-lost friends who had only met, and she led me up the hill to her “finca” next to the brick factory, where trucks rumbled up and down all day long, carrying away red bits of mountain in their cavernous beds.

Ironic, and someone poetic, that their little eco-brick workshop is right next to a brick factory of quite a different sort.

I thought of what David told me the other night in Sajonia as he tended his little fire. The Center for Ecological Arts is similarly situated in a truck-traffic zone near the cantera (quarry) and trucks rumble past all day long. Here, too, one can look out from this little mountain paradise and see the mountain across the valley being slowly eaten away.

“Some might see this as a negative thing, and sure, it’s sad to see the way they are altering the mountain – I wish they wouldn’t do it,” David had said, thoughtfully. “But this is exactly the mentality we are working to change – so it’s better that we are here, rather than isolating ourselves from it.”

Laura, it turned out, is not so different from me at 25, in love with an activist completely dedicated to his work, taking on the mantel of his cause as her own. Only hers had left the whole operation in her young hands. Suddenly I understood her reluctance to meet with me. She had been simply overwhelmed.

Still, her words flowed crisp and clear like the mountain stream outside the window. She spoke of dreams and visions, of tarot and shamans and sacred medicine, of greening and cleaning the world.

“Everything has a message, if we listen,” she told me.

I listened.

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VALLE DE CAUCA, Colombia – When Alicia Calle, an environmental scientist with Yale’s Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative, first told me of El Hatico Nature Reserve, her face lit up for the first time since I’d met her an hour ago. We’d been talking about the state of the environment in Colombia, a subject with much to lament, given the spread of mining operations, cattle ranching, vast monocultures of sugarcane and African palm and coca, deforestation, water contamination, the same story throughout the Americas.

What is it that gives you hope, I asked her, as I do in every interview. It was then that she pulled out a booklet and started showing me photos of El Hatico.

“Let me be clear: I don’t like cattle farming; I think it’s created terrible environmental problems and social inequalities throughout its development in Latin America. But this is a place I’d really like you to see, a place that’s turned a major problem into a part of the solution.”

I looked at the photograph and thought I was seeing my grandfather’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks: clusters of russet-colored cattle peacefully grazing among shady forests of mature trees. Nothing like the razed expanses that stretched to the horizons, cattle farms I’d seen throughout the Guatemalan Peten, the Argentine Chaco, in rural Mexico and Paraguay.

Cattle farmers have cleared millions of acres of rainforest and tropical dry forest to create fields for cattle, releasing untold tons of carbon into a steadily heating atmosphere, causing a wave of droughts and erosion, eliminating wildlife habitat and degrading the rivers that flow through. An estimated 27 percent of Colombian land is now used for cattle production, and deforestation continues at the aggressive rate of 300,000 hectares a year, according to an article coauthored by Calle and others published this month in the prestigious professional journal Forest Ecology and Management.

El Hatico, a nine-generation family farm that has become an oasis of biodiversity among the sugarcane deserts of the Cauca Valley in Southwest Colombia, chose a different path, and finally, industry and government leaders are beginning to take notice. Now, according to Calle, the El Hatico model is being replicated around the country through a new government program, and other countries are watching to see the results.

That’s how I found myself riding shotgun with Alicia’s sister, Zoraida, making our way through miles of sugarcane fields as she told me a bit of El Hatico’s history.

“We’re at a very exciting moment in the development of this system,” Zoraida was telling me. As a specialist in ecological restoration with CIPAV (Center for the Investigation of Sustainable Agropecuarial Systems), she sees El Hatico and its Intensive Silvopastoral Systems approach to cattle farming as a key component in the rehabilitation of degraded tropical lands. CIPAV has dedicated 19 years to this project, and she has never seen the receptivity that has opened up in the past year.

“Every year we’re receiving visits from two or three Mexican producers and technicians; we’re seeing farmers from Nicaragua, Panama, Brazil, Cuba and Argentina. They want to see how it’s possible to do what they are doing.”

Conventional cattle farming requires the application of 100 to 800 kilograms of urea fertilizer per hectare per year, costly imported fossil fuel-based fertilizers that create runoff into regional streams, degrading water quality and suppressing the fish populations. The tropical forests that once stretched the length and breadth of the Cauca Valley were felled more than a century ago for lumber and many hectares were converted to cattle farms; since then, the more lucrative business of sugar has supplanted most of the cattle, with even greater environmental impacts because of widespread herbicide and pesticide use.

Finally we are leaving the monochromatic landscape of cane and entering a promenade of graceful saman trees. An enormous bird swoops across the road in front of us, as if to welcome us to its world – a garrapatero, or yellow-headed caracara, Zoraida tells me.

A flock of black ibises with their curving red beaks flutters by and lands on the lush grass in the forest at our left. A cluster of white cattle egrets alights amid the roan-colored cattle to our right.

“Oh, look, it’s a cocli,” exclaims Zoraida as a huge and magnificent pair of birds lands in a field along the way. These birds are also nearly extinct in the region. “These birds are almost extinct in the Cauca Valley – but here they have a home.”

We have arrived in El Hatico.

We pull up to an elegant iron gate and Carlos Molina is there to greet us, the eldest brother in a family of six brothers and sisters who tend the heritage of their grandfathers and serve as agroforestry educators, agronomists and entrepreneurs. A tall, handsome man with an easy smile under his broad-brimmed straw hat, he’s delighted to learn of my grandfather, the agroforestry pioneer, and my mother, the organic farmer, and we connect immediately.

My grandfather passed away in April, and since then I have felt his presence with me strongly – especially on this day, as I invited him along for the ride. I think he was pleased with what he saw.

Carlos showed us around the house first, a graceful relic from the late 1700s whose terra cotta tile roof had survived its 230 years with little damage, but some of the beams were beginning to bow, and workmen were carefully disassembling it, replacing the bowed segments and marveling at the integrity of the original structure.
“Look at this giant reed,” Carlos said, shaking his head in wonder at the strength of the caña brava, a local species used to build the roof. “Just as strong as it was 200 years ago.”

The same could be said for this family and its farm, which has held together through two centuries of revolution and armed conflict, drug wars and economic crises and climate crises, an oasis amid the storms.

Soon we were joined by another of the Molina brothers, the equally charismatic Enrique, along with an agronomist and an environmental educator from Costa Rica who had come to tour the farm as well.
“The problem of the defense of the forests is of anguishing seriousness and the most terrible threat to the future of the region,” wrote Enrique and Carlos’ great uncle, Ciro Molina Garcés, in 1937.

By 1942, vast expanses throughout the region had been cleared by logging and cattle operations, as we see in the aerial photos that begin our presentation. By 1986, the landscape had been converted to a patchwork cane farms. Only the dark patch of Hatico remained as forest.

Today El Hatico is a mixed-use farming operation; 32 percent is organic sugar cane; only 5.5 percent is pure hardwood forest, but another nearly 9 percent is native bamboo forest, while 12.7 percent is under what is called SSPI, Intensive Silvopastoral System by its Spanish acronym, and this is the part that is being closely watched by industry leaders.

“When we talk to agricultural producers, they look around and say, oh, this isn’t good. Our fathers and grandfathers taught us you have to cut the trees down,” Carlos said. “But I tell them, look around; see for yourselves. We have 80 percent canopy cover here, and look at the quality and quantity of this grass. And this is with zero chemical inputs. Conservation and production do not compete; they work together.”

In terms of cost, the El Hatico balance sheet comes out shining. Due in part to improved production and in part to a greatly decreased cost in inputs – zero agrochemicals, zero soy supplements for the animals because of the higher nutritional value of their grazing plants, and greatly reduced irrigation costs and the associated electricity bill – El Hatico shows that conservation is good business.

In addition, the Molinas point out, they are providing priceless environmental services: carbon fixation, oxygen production, hydrogen cycle regulation, productive capacity of the soil and conservation of biodiversity.

But what really captured the attention of industry leaders was the production at El Hatico during the drought of 2009-2010, brought on by El Niño, which devastated producers throughout Latin America. In 2009, El Hatico actually had higher production than the year before – a result that was virtually unheard of throughout the industry. “And this was without irrigation,” emphasized Carlos.

Now it was time for the tour. Carlos and Enrique led us out the cast-iron gate and down the shady lane, where a pair of magnificent coclis were grazing in the tall grasses nearby. Enrique spoke of the challenge of transferring the family’s values to each new generation in an era when most young people leave the farm for other opportunities in the cities.

Here at El Hatico, each child on his or her third birthday is placed on a horse for their first horseback ride. The horse continues to be a tool to connect the children with the farm, and on their first communion they are presented with a small mare.

“It creates a sort of an addiction,” Enrique explained, “but a healthy addiction – it sensitizes them to the family heritage. These three elements – equine, human and natural environment – are a supremely beautiful way to provide environmental education for the children.”

Indeed, the tour of the entire farm is a supremely beautiful educational approach for all of us. The next stop is the under the enormous spreading branches of the grandfather saman tree that Carlos and Enrique’s father planted 70 years ago and has become a symbol of the farm.

Much of the resistance to agroforestry for grazing comes from the idea that broadleaf plants are a weed and must be eliminated, Carlos explains. In fact, shade eliminates the most problematic broadleaf plants, and the native plants provide good, high-protein forage – “so the ‘maleza’ becomes a ‘bueneza,’” he jokes, using a play on the Spanish word for weed (maleza = weed, mal = bad, Buen = good).

Back on the lane to the highway, a flock of fulvous whistling ducks takes flight and the visitors grab for their cameras. I realize I’ve seen more birds here at El Hatico than I’ve seen on several birdwatching expeditions during my journey.

I learn many things on this tour; one is that organic sugarcane can be just as profitable as its chemical-assisted counterparts, and can be companion-planted with other crops. Part of the Molinas’ sugarcane work crew was hard at work when we arrived: a flock of hair sheep, grazing on the weeds that grow up between the rows, eliminating the need for herbicides. When they first began experimenting with the sheep as a means to control weeds, they were very careful to use moveable fences to protect the fledgling cane plants from the animals. One day, however, the fence got knocked down, and the pastor observed, to his surprise, that the sheep didn’t touch the cane – only the broadleaf plants around and between the rows.

In the beginning, the neighbors worried that the sheep would escape and create havoc in their fields. Now, Enrique says, they’re getting a different type of phone call from the neighbors, who want to borrow the sheep for weed removal in their own parcels: “’Send in the contractors!’ they say.”

Perhaps more importantly is the Molina’s alternative to the slash-and-burn approach to waste management that predominates throughout the industry. At the end of each growing season, most cane producers burn their fields, leading to air pollution, vast amounts of carbon pouring into the atmosphere, and destruction of healthy soil ecology, requiring more chemical inputs for the next crop.

Instead of burning, the Molinas use their cane waste to produce a ground-protecting mulch that is returned to the soil with each new season. This biomass is laid between rows and protects the soil moisture, drastically cutting down on the need for irrigation, Carlos explains. He picks up a handful of the brown grassy mass in the irrigation ditch and wrings a stream of water from it to demonstrate its capacity to hold water.

“This was the system we used until the 1960s, when they started burning – because that’s what they used in California and Hawaii,” he explained.

Under normal conditions, it costs a cane grower $300,000 per hectare per year to irrigate, Carlos said. The Molinas were able to irrigate their fields for much less.

Nowadays, Carlos says, visitors to the farm leave enthusiastic about making a transition on their own farms. “People no longer see us as romantics,” he says. “They see us as pragmatics.”

The sun sets quickly here in the tropics, and the insects and treefrogs sing a farewell chorus as we reached the old homestead. Carlos and Enrique shared a farewell song with us as well, one that was written for El Hatico by a friend who is a songwriter.

The Molinas shared with us a sumptuous buffet of typical Colombian cuisine, including fresh orange juice and crispy fried plantains from their own farm, and saw us off with hugs and an invitation to come back soon. As we walked to our car, I looked up and saw a cloud passing the moon. Somewhere out there, I thought, Grandpa was smiling.

El Hatico is open for agroecology tours. It’s less than an hour from Cali and is well worth the trip. Contact CIPAV at rnhatico@cipav.org.co for more information. Meanwhile, here’s the virtual tour.

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ASUNCION, Paraguay – I first saw Magui Balbuena at the Social Forum of the Americas – a small woman with a large presence, she was one of the masters of ceremonies at the event. The founder of CONAMURI, the National Council of Rural Workers and Indigenous Women, Magui has been a lifelong agitator for the rights of her country’s landless and impoverished farmers. Her work with campesino groups during the dictatorship landed her in prison and cost the lives of many friends and colleagues, and now she is a leading voice in the international campesino movement against the rapid spread of transgenic crops that has devastated the Paraguayan countryside.

“The campesino movement represents the best of our country,” a Paraguayan journalist friend had told me, and so I tracked down Magui’s phone number and gave her a call.

A friendly voice answered her phone immediately – it was gentle, not quite like the powerful voice I’d heard exhorting the crowds. I told her my mission and asked if she had a little time this week to meet with me.
“Can you come tomorrow morning between 7 and 8?” she asked. “That’s the only time I have available.”
I arrived at CONAMURI’s office at 7:30 and found a hub of activity. Magui was moving at the speed of light, organizing a workshop with youth leaders from all over the country, answering questions and fielding phone calls, one after another.

I looked around at the receiving room, barren of furniture except for two folding chairs. The walls spoke volumes, however, and I took a moment to read the collection of posters commemorating events and causes over the years, a gallery of hope and struggle.

“Soja para hoy; hambre para mañana (Soy for today; hunger for tomorrow),” read one. “Ya es tiempo para soberania alimentaria – con una agricultura reciproca con la Madre Tierra (It’s time for food sovereignty – with an agriculture reciprocal with the Mother Earth)!” read another.

Finally Magui lighted on the other folding chair and gave me a warm smile and her full attention. “We always start our workshops with a mistica,” she said. “Would you like to watch?”

“Claro,” I said. I had no idea what a mistica might be, but I was intrigued.

We chatted for a few moments as the group prepared; I shared with her my origins as the daughter and granddaughter of small farmers from the land of Monsanto, and a longtime opponent of genetically modified crops. She adopted me immediately as a friend and a compañera in the struggle.

Before our interview, though, she shared with me some devastating news. Her beloved 11-year-old grandson, Amaru, had been discovered to have a neurofibroma, a possibly life-threatening neurological condition, and she was waiting for news to know how severe the case was. Her daughter was coming soon to bring him so they could go together to the hospital. A roomful of animated teenagers awaited her presentation in the next room, and her phone kept ringing… but still she’d made time for me.

The workshop began at 8; I realized that she had meant, literally, that the time between 7 and 8 was all she had.
“We’re ready,” one of the compañeras called, and we headed out into the open courtyard. The youth gathered around a circle of youngsters, each one wearing a plastic poncho of a different color and a piece of paper bearing the name of what he or she represented: Earth, Air, Fire, Native Seeds… each with a bowl holding something that represented their chosen element. At the center, dressed in a black plastic poncho, was a peasant grim reaper, covered with the names of the campesinos’ worst nightmares: Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, biodiesel, transgenics, militarization.

Julia Franco, Magui’s comrade-in-arms for many years, led the group of youths in a procession. One by one, the poncho-garbed elements took their place in a procession that wove its way around the courtyard, singing a mournful dirge in Guaraní and forming a circle around Señor Monsanto. Quietly, without missing a beat in their mournful song, they each plucked a label from the Monsanto-branded reaper and gathered around. Señor Monsanto, like Oz’s wicked witch, slowly shrank to the ground and melted away.

After the mistica the youths took off their ponchos and took their seats as Magui took her place in front of the marker board and delivered a fiery analysis of the agro-exportation model that had deforested the countryside and impoverished the many while enriching the few. Her discourse flowed from Spanish to Guarani and back again, but her diagrams made her message clear: the transnational agro-exporting businesses are not their friends. She spoke from bitter experience; her community was one of those displaced by threatened violence from the soy growers in her area, who nearly killed her brother-in-law.

Magui’s biography, “Magui Balbuena: Semilla para una nueva siembra (Seed for a new harvest),” reads like a campesina version of I, Rigoberta Menchu. Told in her own words to Argentine writer Elisabeth Roig, she speaks of her early years, growing up in a family so poor she didn’t own shoes until the age of 13. She speaks of her father’s leadership in an early land occupation movement, risking his life to reclaim the use of communal lands that had been sold by the corrupt Stroessner dictatorship. She speaks of the agricultural reform movement that swept the country in the 1960s and ’70s, a movement she joined as a youth that tried to dignify the lives of small subsistence farmers and secure land rights, and of the brutal repression that followed, with fellow activists seized, tortured and killed in terrible ways.

She spoke of her own imprisonment and her miraculous release, her marriage to a fellow revolutionary and their flight to a slum in Brazil with their new baby and another on the way, of living in exile in miserable conditions in a strange land, nearly dying in childbirth and nearly losing both her children to strange illnesses.
She also spoke of returning to rebuild a devastated movement in the heart of the dictatorship, fighting for a voice in an organization dominated by men, and deciding to team up with her compañeras to continue to struggle for justice in the countryside, but as women. Ten years ago, CONAMURI (Coordinadora National de Mujeres Trabajadores Rurales y Indigenas), her current organization, was formed to solidify that struggle.

Nowadays the dictatorship is but a bitter memory, but its legacy lives on in the millions of landless peasants and indigenous peoples who cluster in shantytowns on the outskirts of the major cities. For Magui and her compañeros, the struggle continues, only the face of the oppressor has changed.

After her presentation for the young people and before her daughter and grandson arrived, we escaped to another space and I was able to ask her about that new, faceless enemy and its impact on the Paraguayan countryside. Her passionate plea poured out like a river for an hour and a half.

(In Magui’s Words: The full interview here)

CERRO ROKE, Paraguay – The red school bus rattled its way down the red dirt road, cutting a path through the grey mist. The driver assured me we had not gone too far; my destination was the last stop on the line. Finally he lurched to a halt.

The bamboo gate was the only clue that I’d arrived at Takuara Renda, Paraguay’s permaculture center. Guillermo Gayo, the bio-architect at the heart of it all, was there to greet me, a welcoming South American double-kiss at the ready.

I learned about Takuara Renda at the Social Forum of the Americas in Asuncion, where Guillermo had transformed a corner of the intensely busy forum into a peaceful retreat with one of his bamboo houses.

It was there that I learned of his unique take on permaculture, built on a foundation of bamboo and his lifelong work as an architect devoted to the field of bioconstruction, a form of construction that emphasizes natural materials and sustainable technologies.

Takuara Rendá, his permaculture reference center, takes its name from the Paraguay’s native language, Guaraní, and means “home of the bamboo.” As an architect and a designer seeking to dignify peoples’ lives while lightening environmental impact, he had gravitated toward bamboo as a rapidly renewable and highly versatile construction material.

He invited me to come out to his permaculture center, about two hours outside of the city of Paraguarí, to see it for myself, and so I did.

What I found there in the lush green woods was something between a zen retreat, a woodsy inventor’s workshop and a hands-on learning center. Here a crew of Paraguayan, Argentine and Brazilian students were busy assembling bamboo creations, from doors to chairs to light fixtures.

What wasn’t as visible was the infinitely slower work of creating an agroforestry reserve from a depleted wasteland.

The restoration, the agroforestry, the garden and the bamboo workshop all work together to create an integrated way of life for Guillermo, who has earned his living teaching bioconstruction with bamboo all over the continent. Guillermo was teaching tools for planetary survival long before he discovered David Holmgren’s guide to permaculture, translated to Spanish, at the home of a Brazilian friend. But reading the book brought many aspects of his thought and practice into a sharper focus, and that focus eventually led him to get his training in permaculture design and to establish Takuara Rendá.

“If you had seen this place 10 years ago, you wouldn’t have believed it,” he was telling the guests from Asuncion who had arrived for a tour of the place. Overworked, overgrazed and burned over and over again, as was the agricultural practice in these parts, the land had reached a point where natural regeneration would be next to impossible. “It was like scar tissue,” he said. “We had to rebuild the soil, and that takes time.”

Looking around now at the lush and incredibly diverse growth – coconut palm and acacia, guayaba and papaya mixed with cactus and pineapple, interspersed with patches of moss and fern – it was hard to imagine.

The land here seems as if it could grow anything. But that was the result of years of clearing away thorny brush, building soil with compost, and nurturing the baby palms and guayabas and papayas with water and nutrients.
“We humans have a great capacity for destruction, but we also have a great capacity for recuperation,” he said.

Later Guillermo took me to harsher, more stubborn places on the land where he is gently coaxing native grasses from the earth, and another place where he is nurturing baby macadamia nut and mango trees amid vegetable plants. The idea is to plant for tomorrow while planting for ten years from now, he explained. The vegetables will feed them until the trees grow large enough to provide fruit and nuts.

But Guillermo the grower switches quickly into Guillermo the inventor as he explains to his students the law of aerodynamics and how it applies to a windmill they are building to pump water, or as they pore over plans for a pendulum-powered woodsaw.

And Guillermo the inventor can just as easily switch into Guillermo the architect, explaining the reason for the curving lines of the roof and walls that frame this building.

“We have to break with rectagonality – the way our structures are created in the city, they are designed to increase productivity. But nature is organized outside of linearity. What we’ve tried to do is create a habitat that is compatible with biology.”

As is typically the case with permaculturists, Guillermo’s own story is at least as interesting as that of his learning center. He was born in Argentina and came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. Like many of his generation, his involvement in social movements drew the attention of the repressive government and he was forced to run for his life or avoid meeting the fate of friends who had been tortured and killed.

He chose to head north into Paraguay. He lived for years in Asuncion, where he shifted to a more spiritual form of resistance – one in which he could continue to work for a more sustainable world, but without risking his life under a different dictatorship. He was teaching the Mayan calendar at a center for alternative thought when he and his friends began to reflect on the indigenous history of these lands, where the Guaraní still lived in harmony with the earth – marginalized and in extremely remote pockets of forest, but surviving in the way of their ancestors.

“The Guaraní didn’t leave huge monuments, but what they left behind was something better… an integrated environment.

“We’ve destroyed a total habitat, and it’s going to be very costly to fix it. But they left nothing out of place.”
After much discussion, Guillermo recalls, “We came to the conclusion we had to ask pardon – of the Earth, of the ancestors, of the indigenous people. To ask pardon you have to offer something – not just to say I’m sorry and that’s it.”

Guillermo’s offering was his practice as a teacher of bioconstruction, working with low-income and indigenous people to help them create comfortable, dignified living spaces; he worked with the Guaraní of Paraguay and with the Maya Kiché of Guatemala to create water reservoirs that would free the women and children from hours of backbreaking water-carrying from faraway water sources.

In 1999 he bought the Takuara Rendá, a demonstration center of sustainable living, where graceful bamboo structures scented of sweetgrass are scattered among the trees.

“We try to make the interior living space as small as possible, and it extends outward into the outdoors,” he explained. “We believe that with less you can live much better.”

My short time at Takuara Rendá seemed to confirm the truth of this statement. I slept in one of these bamboo houses on a bamboo-frame bed padded with a grass eco-mattress; washed dishes in a bamboo-sheltered outdoor sink, with water carefully portioned through a series of recycled plastic bottles in an ingenious conservation system; sat in a bamboo chair at a bamboo table, and drank mate from a bamboo matero with a bamboo straw. I used the clever spiral-shaped bamboo composting toilet, with no ill effects. Manoel, the Brazilian student, helped me fashion my own drinking cup from a section of bamboo.

I breathed in the fresh air; my eyes soaked in the green freshness; and I felt better than I’d felt in weeks.
I reflected on a question Guillermo had asked: “What is health – is it just physical, or is it spiritual? And by spiritual, I’m not talking about a religious system that keeps putting patches on a structure where everything is going wrong.”

My time with Guillermo, with his assistant Milciades and with the Argentine and Brazilian students was all too short. I wandered among the misty woods and strange rock formations, listening to the back-and-forth birdcalls. I ate delicious organic food prepared by the young men on a simple wood stove under a hand-painted sign with the words of Hippocrates that modern medicine seems to have forgotten: “Make your food your medicine, and your medicine your food.”

Back in the city now, I look out at a landscape of squares and straight lines, and I sigh. One day, I’d like to have my own Takuara Rendá. Until then, I have my bamboo drinking cup.

Takuara Rendá accepts volunteers for a minimum period of two weeks and a maximum of three months. During that time, you can learn by doing: principles and practice of bioconstruction, agroforestry, alternative technology and permaculture. For more information, click here.

Here’s a little photo tour of my misty September stay at Takuara Rendá.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

By Tracy L. Barnett

SAN ISIDRO MAZATEPEC, Jalisco, Mexico – It was harvest season when I visited Teopantli Kalpulli, and the colorful native corn was spread out on the ground, drying in the sun. Children played in the grassy schoolyard as Levi Rios stopped from his rounds for a moment to watch them.

Not so many years ago, this young ecovillage leader was learning to read in this same schoolhouse; now a college graduate with several years’ experience in the city as a professional architect, he’s returned to his pastoral roots to help lead his community into a second generation.

Past, present and future meet at Teopantli Kalpulli, an intentional community/ecovillage about an hour south of Guadalajara. These families live close to the earth but still enjoy modern comforts. Conceived in the late 1970s by a small group that included Levi’s parents, Carlos Rios and Beatriz Cardenas, the community has grown to become Mexico’s largest intentional community of its kind.

Teopantli Kalpulli, a Nahuatl phrase which, loosely translated, means “sacred bioregional village,” was an outgrowth of the founders’ search for an earth-centered lifestyle that incorporated the sacred traditions of their ancestors. They were part of a network called the Universal Grand Brotherhood, practitioners of yoga, meditation and vegetarianism.

“They realized that the Americas had their own traditions that are as sacred as those of the East, so they decided to build their community on those traditions,” Levi explained.

The prehispanic kalpullis, he explained, were villages that shared a series of disciplines and cultural practices such as the traditional sowing of corn, the practice of sacred dance and the temezcal – the indigenous Mexican version of the sweat lodge ceremony. Teopantli, Levi said, was one of the first spaces in Mexico that opened its doors to the indigenous leaders to share their teachings, and those teachings were incorporated into the ecovillage structure.

Community members try to grow as much of their own organic food as possible, and they revere the corn and the Mother Earth as their ancestors did.

Teopantli is a paradise for the children, who have the run of the place. Twenty-one families make their homes on these 92 acres, concentrated on 17 acres of homes and common space. The rest of the land is used for cultivation of their traditional maize, for organic gardens and fruit trees, and forest.

The community is designed to hold 55 families, so the community is still accepting new members. Ownership of the land is collective, Levi explained, with members being granted permits to construct their housing.
“What we are doing here is assuring that the earth belongs to the community,” he explained. Another key goal of the community is to ensure that a healthy, cooperative, earth-based lifestyle can be accessible to people regardless of their income level.

The tour began at the center of the community, where a giant ceiba tree, sacred to the Maya and other prehispanic peoples, spreads its leafy branches over a ceremonial circle.

The community itself is laid out along the four cardinal directions, with sacred spaces in each of the four points: In the north, a small pyramid constructed in the way of their prehispanic ancestors; in the east, a sanctuary for yoga and meditation; in the south, a calihuey, the sacred temple of the Huichol ancestors, and in the west, a temezcal. In each of these four spaces, they hold different celebrations throughout the year.

“We learned from the Huichol people to link the planting of the corn with a calendar of activities throughout the year,” Levi said. The planning of activities in different parts of the community is important, he explained, as it “keeps the energy moving” throughout the community.

One of the top priorities as to community enters its next phase, he explained, is to expand the school to create different classrooms for the different age groups. Currently the 14 children who belong to the community all study in a common classroom, but the group is continuing to grow, with an additional two families joining in the past year.

One change the village has seen over time is an increase in the educational level, Levi explained. His parents were fortunate to attend college, he said, but most of the founders did not, and it was always a struggle to earn enough money to support the community.

Part of that herculean effort involved rebuilding the soil, depleted from years of slash-and-burn agriculture and overgrazing, and reforesting what had become deforested pasture.

“If I showed you the photographs from this place when the community first bought the land, you wouldn’t believe it – there wasn’t a tree or a bush to be seen,” he said. “If you’ll notice, the land all around the community is pasture.”

It’s true, I realized – we had entered a lush oasis of hardwood forest and abundant garden spaces.

Nowadays, as the community enters its second generation, Levi was explaining, more members of the community have gone to college and have brought to the community a variety of skills. Nowadays, 90 percent of the residents are able to earn their living from businesses based in the community; 10 percent of them commute to town to do other jobs.

Next was a tour of the prolific permaculture garden. Nine hectares (20 acres) are plowed with the antique tractor and planted as a traditional milpa – corn, beans and squash – in the traditional way of the ancestors.
Levi exchanges vegetables from his garden with other families who produce whole-grain baked goods, honey, soymilk, tofu and a variety of other items.

“Barter is something that’s come about naturally,” he said. “The people have workshops in their homes, and we just exchange.”

On the edges of the common areas are the homes, built by each of the owners themselves. All are built with materials available in the local area; some with adobe, others of brick. We pass one that has been abandoned and the owner has put it up for sale.

“It’s just that life is not easy here,” Levi explained. “You have to be able to make the economy work for you; you have to be able to live isolated from the economic system. If you can develop a professional activity isolated from the city, you can make it work – but it’s not for everybody.”

Few communities like this one have survived for this long, he said. “There are about five like this one in Mexico, but none of them with as many people as we have now in Kalpulli.”

The tour commenced to a comfortably spacious community dining area, where Beatriz and her two children, Yuma and Maya, were enjoying the sun on the patio. Beatriz is Swiss and her husband is Mexican; they are one of the new families in the community.

Maya and Yuma are hard at work coloring, and Levi stops to admire their handiwork – and also that of Beatriz, who, Levi informs me, designed and knitted the beautiful sweater she is wearing, which is made of organic linen.
Beatriz has made a business of selling these sweaters. This one, she says, took about 80 hours to make, and will sell for 700 pesos – a little over $50.

We continue on our way, meeting Celia Rubalcava, who has a soymilk business in her home, and Isaac, who is using a hand-powered mill to shuck the dried corn. His children are playing at his feet, making what looks like elaborate meals from mud.

“Aurima, what are you doing? Making little balls?” Levi queries. Aurima proudly displays her creations.
At the next house, I meet Jose Luis and Angelita Gutierez, who operate a small whole-grain bakery and tofu factory in their home. They showed me around and shared with me a little pinole de maiz – a powder made of cinnamon, brown sugar and toasted ground corn, eaten as a snack or mixed with hot water for a delicious drink.
Next we went on to the temezcal area, where small, domed structures awaited the next sweat lodge ceremony. Some of these ceremonies are open to the public, and others are just for the community.

Finally Levi takes me to his home, a cool brick-and-adobe house with simple, clean lines, a front porch with a hammock and a beautiful altar looking out onto the fields.

He shared with me a bit about his decision to return to the community after eight years in Guadalajara, four years at ITESO, a Jesuit university, and four more working with local architectural firms and construction companies.

“I believe all people have a mission in life – or if they don’t have one, they should! – but for me, growing up in a community has marked me with a special vision of community,” he said. “I wanted to go to the university precisely to broaden this concept of community.”

Rony is now among the leaders of his town’s efforts to rebuild the local community of San Lucas Toliman and the surrounding villages. Any support that can be given either to his organization, or through his organization to the reconstruction effort, will help strengthen the Permaculture community and philosophy in this region, an approach that is firmly rooted in native tradition and ecological practice. For more information on how to help, contact Rony at nativasemilla@hotmail.com or Rebecca Cutter at rebecutter@gmail.com.

Dear friends of Guatemala,

We are sorry we have not informed you about the tragedy that probably by now you have probably heard about. First there was the volcano, Pacaya, and then Tropical Storm Agatha. We have been very busy trying to respond in a coordinated way.

The magnitude of the catastrophe has had more impact than Hurricane Stan in 2005, since it was early in the rainy season and we had 4,000 millimeters of water in 24 hours, which the rugged topography of our land could not handle. Making matters worse is that this is just the beginning of the hurricane season.

At the national level, the storm has left us with more than 400,000 people affected; at least 152 are dead from flooding or landslides, 98 are still missing and147 wounded; 87,000 are in public shelters and uncounted thousands more sheltered with family and friends; and 48,000 homes are damaged or in high-risk areas. The roads have been ruined and that has caused food prices to increase. That, along with the loss of all the crops that had just begun coming up, will soon be manifested in a severe food shortage.

In the Lake Atitlan area, most of the communities were affected. Throughout Guatemala, 19 areas of high risk have been identified, and 9 of them are located here in our department of Sololá. Forty-one emergency shelters in Sololá reported 7,500 homeless this week. In our village of San Lucas Toliman, where IMAP is located, fortunately only 10 people died, but thousands have been left homeless. Eight neighborhoods are still habitable but they are in such high-risk areas it’s not recommended that they return.

Our center at IMAP has been designated as a shelter for the community of Pachitulul, which is one of the 13 communities of the San Lucas Toliman municipality. Pachitulul is also a high-risk area, but this time they were not affected directly. We are now compelled to step forward and participate in the emergency relief effort of the entire San Lucas municipality and coordinating throughout the Lake area by working together with other community groups to fill in for the leadership void that is now presenting itself.

IMAP has been working since 2000 on risk management in this disaster-prone area by generating information and educational materials, and holding workshops that have educated hundreds of people throughout the region. We have promoted reforestation, land and water management and food security by promoting seeds and foods that are more resistant, not only to disease but to these dramatic weather changes we are experiencing.
Fortunately that strong sense of community of the Guatemalan people has come again to the rescue, and thanks to that, the situation is under control. However, their resources are limited and the danger is still very present.

Our effort right now is to encourage that solidarity and at the same time channel all the information and efforts of all the organizations with the idea to coordinate so that we can be more efficient and more resourceful.
Food is present at the shelters but it is scarce. Aid has been delivered but not always the appropriate aid. For example, many of the indigenous women won’t wear Western clothes no matter what, and most of the women’s clothing being donated won’t be used. Milk is being delivered, which is not healthy for most indigenous people, who have a high incidence of lactose intolerance.

Governmental presence is intermittent and not very substantial, limited mostly to moral support. One local NGO was quoted in the Prensa Libre estimating that about 80 percent of all assistance has come from private citizens, not the government.

If you’re interested in more information or in supporting the relief effort in any way, please contact us and we will direct you in the best way. Also, if you want to support IMAP directly so that it can continue doing its work, we would be more than grateful.

We thank you for your solidarity, which has always provided for us.

Sincerely,

Rony Lec
for the Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP)

We’re seated at his kitchen table now, in the home he designed and built, sharing a cup of the freshest coffee I’ve ever tasted. A soft-spoken Kakchiquel Maya with a loose ponytail and a gentle voice, Rony takes a sip of the fragrant brew and settles in to tell me his story.

The light filters in pleasantly from above through a skylight, an artfully placed series of bamboo tubes and the brown, green and white glass cylinders high above us that are set into the adobe walls. Later I learn, to my surprise, that these colorful cylinders are discarded bottles.

A tree trunk with its gracefully gnarled limbs emerges somewhere from the wrought-iron staircase; a lamp woven from bamboo hangs above us. The stone wall and arched door of the sauna in the background, the lush greenery of the garden out back and the savory aroma of home-grown and home-cooked food complete the picture of natural harmony.

I am at home with a permaculturist.

Permaculture, for the uninitiated, is a design system that incorporates everything from agriculture to architecture to community and organizational development into an elegant system that works in harmony with nature.

How permaculture came to this tiny village amid the volcanoes on the shores of Lake Atitlan is a story as winding as the canals Rony designed to slow down the torrential floodwaters here.

Rony was one of the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans whose lives were blown apart by the 36-year civil war. He was just a boy when his father was killed by the army.

“My family was always involved in community development and organizing, and that was the reality in those days; anyone who was working with the community was perceived as a threat.”

His family, in fear for their lives, fled to the United States with the help of the Catholic diocese of New Ulm, Minn., which has a strong presence in this village.

Rony studied at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, earning a degree in cultural anthropology, but always with the idea of coming back home and applying it in a way that would make a difference for his people.
“I never wanted to gain knowledge just to put it in a book on a shelf,” he said. “For me, knowledge has to go beyond theory, it’s something you must put into practice.”

Returning home in 1994, when the conflict had calmed and negotiations were underway, he looked around for a project that could apply what he’d learned about his roots in the Mayan tradition, a tradition interwoven with the rhythms of nature.

“My idea was how to reconstruct and rescue the traditional, ancestral knowledge, and of course much of that had to do with agriculture, because that’s the base of our culture.”

On his own he read far and wide about alternative agricultural practices, and he began to dig into the ancient traditions of his own people. He found his first project on a piece of flood-prone land near the lake, owned by the Catholic Diocese. The land was compacted from many years of cattle grazing, and it flooded, along with the surrounding homes, every rainy season.

Rony asked for the land to try out the ancient system known in ancient Nahuatl as chinampas. The chinampa system is most famously illustrated by the design of ancient Mexico City, which was built by diverting the waters of a swampy lake into canals. Xochimilco, a historic neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, is the last vestige of the old chinampa system.

Here in the Guatemalan highlands, the Kakchiquel Maya had the same concept with a different name, but it fell out of use many years ago with the advent of modern agriculture.

Rony organized a group of subsistence farmers to help him analyze the situation and reclaim the land so that they could farm it, and they spent weeks digging the ditches that would slow down and channelize the rushing waters. But come rainy season, it didn’t work; the canals were clogged with sediment, and the project was swamped.

“Of course, in the anthropology books they tell you about the chinampas, but they don’t tell you how to build them,” he recalls with a laugh.

That’s when he was invited to a conference in the States on traditional agricultural practices, and he decided to make the trip with a dual purpose: to visit the Santa Fe-based center of Permacultura America Latina.

It was there at the “permaculture mansion” of one of the PAL board members that Rony began to realize the potential of permaculture to transform living systems. He explained his plan to PAL founder Ali Sharif, who took a look and quickly diagnosed the problem. The canals he had made were linear and angular – not like anything you’d find in nature. The trick to designing systems that work well is in mimicking nature, Sharif explained, working with nature instead of against it.

The trip was a breakthrough for him, and he ended up making another trip to Australia to study with the legendary Bill Mollison, one of the founders of the permaculture system.

Soon after his trip to Australia, he was joined by Rebecca Cutter, an artist, designer and educator from New York, who had heard about Rony’s group, then called Ija’tz, the Kakchiquel word for seeds. All she knew about the project was that it combined design and organic agriculture in some innovative ways. She came down to volunteer and ended up staying.

The new chinampa design was by all accounts a success. Rebecca took me on a tour and I was able to see the lush forest they had created on this urban tract of about 60 by 150 meters, where there once was only barren, compacted ground. It was raining, so I saw the canal system at work.

“What this does is slow the water down,” Rebecca explained. “Fast water is destructive.”

Runoff from surrounding hillsides carries tons of soil, silt, sand and other debris with it, which formerly ended up in the houses of the people who were flooded each year. Now the water as well as the soil it carries is retained on the land, and at the end of each rainy season when the canals dry up, the farmers empty them of that season’s load of rich soil, sand and silt, piling it up on the sides. In this way, mounds of rich, fertile soil a meter high or more has been built along the meandering canals.

A profusion of tropical plant life, much of it edible, sprouts from those hills. Rebecca shows me the house where they once lived on the site, and a “banana circle,” a permaculture technique involving a circle of banana palms used to treat greywater.

IxChel, Rebecca and Rony’s curly-haired, bright and energetic daughter, accompanies us on the tour, running off to gather wild strawberries and yellow flowers to share with us.

The growers collective who made up Ija’tz eventually decided to focus their energy around the production and commercialization of organic coffee. Rony and Rebecca supported their decision but wanted to continue promoting Permaculture with a focus on the protection of genetic diversity both locally and throughout Mesoamerica. So in 2000, Rony and Rebecca founded the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute, or IMAP, and the two associations continue to collaborate and support each other.

In the decade since its founding, the group has organized local growers to produce seeds and vegetables organically and has helped to create fair trade markets and seed exchanges with farmers and organizations working locally and throughout Guatemala; set up a center that has adapted the permaculture system to a subtropical and indigenous setting; where they’ve taught hundreds of students, both local and international; and responded to the disaster created by Hurricane Stan with low-tech water treatment systems, soil conservation practices, community gardens and other appropriate-technology approaches to disaster relief.

Perhaps their biggest success has been the establishment of a seed bank, housing seeds from thousands of native plants and disseminating them among local growers to keep them in circulation. The seed bank is a concept that has been growing in response to an increased homogenization of agriculture, with corporate growers pressuring local varieties out of existence.

Now, however, it’s time for us to go, and the rain is growing stronger. My tour of IMAP and the seed bank will have to wait for another day.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

ALMOLONGA, Guatemala – Ramón Siquina has depended on insecticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers like everyone else in this green produce basket of the Quetzaltenango province. But nowadays, he’s using fewer of them.

“Fertilizers have helped us a lot, and it was a great advance for us,” he said. “But we’ve been conscious that the state of our soil is deteriorating. We began using lots of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides, which we wouldn’t have to use if the land was still rich like in the times of our forefathers.”

We’re standing on the roof of his cement-block home, a soft mist descending over the green valleys and hills surrounding us. Almalonga, a community of 20,000 on the outskirts of Xela, is unusual in that the forefathers saved the richest soils in the valley for agriculture, and built the homes around the fields and up into the hills. For years the community has produced the huge truckloads of cabbage, squash, corn, lettuce and radishes that feed the city, but it’s getting harder.

“I’ve struggled and struggled with this piece of land; I put all the chemicals possible on it, and it still didn’t produce,” Ramón was saying. “I realized I had to change the way I was growing.”

That’s when he met the folks from Semilla Nueva (meaning “new seed” in Spanish), a new organization formed by a group of high school and college buddies from the Pacific Northwest. They began to talk about farming practices and Rafael shared his problem. Curt Bowen and Trinidad Recinos, two of the group’s founders, suggested compost as an alternative to chemical fertilizer and offered to help him set up a composting vermiculture project, and that’s how we all ended up tonight on Ramón’s roof, with Ramón and Joseph combing through the garbage to examine the progress of the squirming colonies of worms.

“God gives us a way of showing us what we need,” said Ramón. “It’s a small project now, but one day it will be big.”

****

Oregonian Joseph Bornstein was just 18 when he made his first trip to Nicaragua with a couple of buddies from the Ashland High School Class of 2003 in Oregon. They had decided to take a gap year to travel in Central America before beginning college.

“We’d learned a lot about the world from books and from our desks, but we wanted to learn about it for ourselves.”

The friends made their way down to San Juan del Sur, a fishing village near the border with Costa Rica, where they made a friendship that would change their lives. Their friend was Alix Fermin, a fisherman and a father of a delightful 3-year-old.

“He was such a loving, joy-filled person,” recalls Bornstein wistfully. The friends spent some carefree days with the family, learning about the family’s culture and way of life. Three months later, they learned that Alix had died in a fishing accident – a not uncommon occurrence, given the rudimentary nature of the equipment the poor villagers used in those parts.

“We put our heads together to see if there was a way we could provide a long-term form of support for the family, since their breadwinner was no more,” Bornstein said. The friends decided to pool their resources and build a house that the family could rent out so they would always have income. They raised $8,000 and headed south in 2005 to build the home.

In the interim, much had changed. A spike in the petroleum prices had caused the prices of basic necessities to double. “That woke us up to the need for more structural change,” said Bornstein.

That was when Curt Bowen, a college buddy, got into the picture. By that time, Bowen and Bornstein were studying at Whitman College in Washington State and hit on the idea of building a biofuel network in Central America, teaching local farmers. They laid the groundwork for a series of workshops throughout the Americas and made plans to establish resource centers in each community. The idea was to teach organized communities, community leaders, and non-profits processor fabrication and biofuel production. Two professors from Whitman helped them design an independent study course, and a friend in Antigua offered to loan them a Guatemalan chicken bus for the experiment, and they were set.

They converted the bus for biodiesel, and with 400 gallons of the stuff, made their way from Washington State all the way down to Nicaragua, teaching farmers and community members how to convert waste crop materials to fuel and setting up an infrastructure to keep the project going after they left.

The project was a good one, but as their studies progressed, they realized that it didn’t really address a more fundamental issue.

“For biofuels to be done well, you have to start with organic agriculture,” said Curt. Much of the world’s biofuel production is coming from palm oil forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, he pointed out; 89 percent of rainforest deforestations come from biofuel production. Making matters worse is that after the forests are slashed, the peat bogs underlying them are drained and burned to make more biofuels, and the resultant emissions have made Indonesia the third largest producer of greenhouse gases.

A sad and ironic turn of events for a supposedly green technology.

So the friends began to think of ways they could work with local farmers to promote a more sustainable approach to agriculture, and they recruited more friends from Whitman and from Ashland for their next project: Semilla Nueva. They also contacted Trinidad, a Guatemalan palm oil grower they had met on the biodiesel trip who had embraced their project with such an innovative spirit they recruited him to join their project.

One of the first things they did was visit the Ministry of Agriculture, where they were brought into an office with an impressive desk made of tropical wood. Embedded in the design was a small plaque: “Donated by Dow Chemical Co.” Soon they noticed the plush sofa had been donated by Monsanto.

“It turned out that every piece of furniture in that place had been donated by a chemical company,” laughed Curt.

Guatemalan agriculture has been heavily dominated by the chemical industry and utilizes products that were banned in the states a long time ago, resulting in damaging runoff, pesticide poisoning of unprotected workers, depleted soils and other ills, they explained.

Alternative farming practices had been introduced in the country, but there’s little support and follow-through with these projects, Curt said. In a country of more than a corn million farmers, there are 17 government corn specialists available to offer assistance.

There are a number of NGOs currently working in the country on sustainable agriculture projects, but most are isolated from each other and working on specific projects, Semilla Nueva’s goal, with the help of a Dutch organization called Gota Verde (Green Drop), was to fill in the gaps.

“One of the biggest problems in development is not a lack of technology; it’s getting that technology out to the people who need it,” said Curt. “For example, conservation tillage – a practice that’s very easy to use, but nobody’s using it here because nobody’s promoting it.”

Now they’re working on a variety of projects in the surrounding countryside, and one that they’re most excited about is a joint project with a Spanish NGO called Intervida. They will be training promotores, or community-based educators, who are already working for Intervida to spread the word about (health??). Now they’ll also be able to teach sustainable farming techniques, from composting and contour ditches to living barriers and shuffle hoes.

The pair’s faces light up when they talk about “action research,” a strategy for working together with local farmers to experiment their way toward the best practices for each farm. Just as Ramón is measuring the progress of his two differently managed vermiculture bins, local farmers will be experimenting with techniques that allow them to wean their dependence from chemical inputs.

Now with a new associate, Darren Yondorf, and with two more staff members on the way, the group will be fully staffed within two weeks – just in time to receive the first round of volunteers from Yale, Kentucky University, the University of Puget Sound and of course their alma mater Whitman College. The volunteers will be living out on the farms, working with farmers to help them incorporate the new practices and monitor the results.

But the most ambitious part of their project is perhaps the most important, and also the hardest to measure. By working within local farmer associations and helping to build others, they are hoping to build community leadership through sustainable agriculture practices.

“As the promotores become involved in the research, the impact will grow,” said Curt. “We’re trying to promote sustainable agriculture, but we’re trying to build unity in the community as well.”

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