Eco-Iwo by Albert Bates (c) Copyright 1990 by The Book Publishing Company, All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Summertown, Tennessee, USA

Global Village 

Institute for Appropriate Technology



184 Schoolhouse Ridge Rd./P.O. Box 90
Summertown TN 38483-0090 USA
TEL: 931-964-4474
Internet: ecovillage at thefarm.org
DX: WB4 LXJ
Fax: 931-964-2200

Global Village is a non-profit organization created in 1974 and chartered as a tax-exempt charity in 1984 for the purpose of researching and disseminating promising new technologies that can benefit humanity in environmentally friendly ways. The philosophy of the Institute is that emerging technologies that link the world together are not ethically neutral, but often have long-term implications for viability of natural systems, human rights and our common future...

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Culture Change, the Sail Transport Network
and an international
plastics ban
protecting the Pacific Gyre while trying to outlaw BPA.

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Transition Initiatives

We have shifted our efforts to the Transition Towns movement. Our county seat at Hohenwald, Tennessee is now the 25th Transition Town in the USA.

We are working with county government, the business community, local charities, and the public to create a resilient and ecologically responsive economic fabric that will endure the turmoil and chaos of The Great Change now underway.

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Where we are planting trees right now:



at the Marda Permaculture Farm, Palestine

providing water, food, fuel, peace and hope to the peoples of the Middle East from the peoples of the Middle East

$20 from you plants 10 trees!

One tree removes 55 pounds of carbon each year, equal to 1100 miles of car travel or 5500 miles in a commercial airliner (assuming 2 passengers out of 200 on the flight).

Carbon Farming and Financial Permaculture
Now Offering: Workshops and Apprenticeships

Taught by the leading experts in sustainable agriculture and carbon sequestration, Darren Doherty, Joel Salatin, Elaine Ingham, Kirk Gadzia, Jeff Poppen, Brad Lancaster & Eric Toensmeier, this 4-week design course put all the pieces together to form a mosaic of ecological design to help rural businesses, farmers and householders produce safe and forward thinking products, fresh organic produce, while putting carbon into the soil and shifting the trajectory of climate change back towards equilibrium. We will still need a strong step towards allowing individual citizens to trade on the international carbon market this Fall in Copenhagen, and national ministries will still need to incentivize permaculture design as the most profitable land management system when global externalities are factored, as has begun to happen in a few countries. Our pilot Carbon Farming program is accessible to all interested change agents through our special website, with open source powerpoints, video, audio, documents and blogs.

GVI's most pressing research questions:

  1. Will the coalition of the FAO, World Bank, the EU, the USA, the IFAP and 14 other nations succeed in convincing the other nations meeting in Copenhagen this December to change the Kyoto Protocols to exploit Agriculture's massive capacity to sequester carbon in soils?
  2. Why are Australia and New Zealand the only countries considering imposing penalties of agriculture for emissions arising from the production of food?
  3. Why has the "Push Back" against soil carbon trading from government research bodies and the US Ag-biz lobby become so aggressive?
  4. Why is there so much attention paid to the fractions of soil carbon when trading requires only the delta of Total Organic Carbon between two points of time?
  5. Why are the many benefits of low input/low cost carbon farming - including improved water usage, reduced salination, better soil structure, less erosion, higher fertility, improved biodiversity, greater resilience - not enough to attract the support of government agencies (whose responsibilities cover these areas) for a polluter-funded soil credit incentive??
  6. Are the standards for measuring soil carbon for scientific purposes sufficient for trading purposes?

Relocalization, Transition, or Financial Permaculture, are different names used to describe a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals are to increase community energy security, strengthen local economies, and to dramatically improve environmental conditions and social equity. Our Financial Permaculture strategy, which is led by Jennifer Dauksha English and draws in experts Catherine Austin Fitts, Franklin Sanders, Phil Cubeta, Carolyn Betts, Bob Waldorp, John Cloud, Jason Gonsky, David Blume, Luke Staengle, Andy Langford, and Liora Adler, is developed in well-considered response to the haphazard environmental, economic, and political of over-reliance on cheap energy, overshoot of the human population, and the tropism towards excess that seems to be a hallmark of homo sapiens neurobiology.

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We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered.

M. King Hubbert, 1983

Book CoverThe Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times

by Albert K. Bates

now available in Kindle from

thegreatchange.com

Institute program areas over the past decades have included research into food and energy applied sciences towards the end of improving food security and reducing climate-altering dependence upon fossil fuels; using improved communications methodologies for demonstrations of alternative economic and social experiments; and multidisciplinary research into mechanisms for narrowing the gap between the developed and developing world without undue negative cultural and environmental impacts.
 
Hand-pedal BicycleFrom our crafting of a trike for an orphan of the 1974 earthquake in San Andrés Itzapa Guatemala has now come Asociación Maya Pedal, building pedal-powered machines, or bicimáquinas.
Our focus is on a convergence of renewable energy, environmental building, sustainable agriculture, biological wastewater systems, community conflict resolution methodologies, holistic community planning, permaculture design, experiential education, natural capital economics, ready access to global information, and a host of emerging modalities for systemic social improvements. We have received numerous awards and frequent recognition for this work, which has always been at the leading edge of systemic social change, but we continue to rely principally on grassroots support in the form of donations to pursue these efforts.

Working in Fundraising? Take a look at our project proposal and reports for Womens Training in Sustainable Community Development in Ecuador

 
The Institute's principal work in the late 1970s related to the transportation sector. Working under a series of contracts with the U.S. Department of Energy, The Institute performed groundbreaking work on concentrating photovoltaic arrays, low cost, long-distance electric and hybrid vehicles, and multi-fuel heat engines. This work led to the inception of the Solar Car Corporation of Melbourne, Florida and Groton Connecticut. SCC went out of business in the late 1990s, a victim, like the Tucker, of being too far ahead of its time. With a capitalization of less than $10 million, SCC lacked the financial ability to combat the conjoined forces of industry and government which quickly arrayed against it, despite a vastly superior product that correctly foresaw fundamental shifts in transportation demands. 
proto-hypercar
A lasting contribution which the Institute made to our transportation future was to take the science of "hypercars" and place it firmly into the public domain. The Institute did this by parading its solar-powered automobile daily through the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, and by publishing its technological innovations in the open literature. Later attempts to patent and sequester the key technologies of solar-powered cars were defeated as a result of this contribution. 
 
As of 2006, we have been participating in the emerging Sail Transport Network, returning coastal trade to wind-power with shipments of cacao, cassava starch, coffee and vanilla bean. Have a boat you want to donate? Contact us!
The Institute's principal work today is in the climate change sector. Working under a series of contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and others, the Institute is performing groundbreaking work on rural development retasking, changing the focus ...
... FROM industrial agriculture that is designed to produce the fastest, cheapest, low value-added, and least nutritious food the world has ever known, and all of the health effects that implies
...TO creating health human ecologies the generate surplus food, fuel, and value-added products while storing both labile and recalcitrant carbon in the soil, mitigating the runaway greenhouse effects now in the pipeline, and preserving and promoting the broad-spectrum speciation that is the intellect of Gaia.
We are accomplishing these mission targets by serving as a active policy development resource and training center, and an experimental laboratory for the Transition Towns, Permaculture, Ecovillage, Bioregional, and Biochar networks.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and GVI President Albert Bates
at the International Biochar Initiative Conference in Boulder, Colorado in September, 2009.

 Other applications coming our of the solar car research included 1 kw solar (dish) Stirling and rotary turbines; direct current-powered compact air conditioning; solar powered electric watercraft; and trough concentrator arrays for solar water heating. 
We sponsor the work of La Caravana Arcoiris y Paz as it travels through the Americas. You can read the latest report from Subcoyote Alberto on our website.
What is new today is a merging of all these disparate threads into a holistic vision for the future.

How fast do bacteria replicate in presence of food? Every 20 minutes. One bacterium in 72 hours with infinite food supply would weigh more than the planet Earth. What stops that from happening? The absense of food. What will stop the human population from overrunning the planet? The absense of food. We are poised at the cusp of a Malthusian correction.

Our goal is to develop and disseminate a method of agriculture that supplies our food in an ethical way, which also means being a positive force in the climate equation, building healthy future soils and promoting biodiversity. We want to heal the planet from the abuses of our careless predecessors.

When some part of a growing plant dies, it drops material high in protein, which is food for the soil decomposers. That food becomes bacterial and fungal biomass. The N is tied up. The C is tied up. Bacterial and fungal bodies are eaten by nematodes and microarthropods which release the nitrates (soluable) and ammonium (gas) fertilizers in their wastes. If you can fix those nutrient flows you can eliminate the need for fertilizer. Healthy organic soil systems do this, and can more than double yields in the first growing season they are applied.

Mother Nature takes soluable nutrients and changes them into biomass. Biological processes decompose the biomass and use metabolic wastes to make soluable nutrients to fuel the next round of the cycle. Humans are Gaia's tool for taking plant waste — free oxygen — and turning it into plant food — CO2. In a healthy system, it all goes around, is not shuffled off to form toxic burdens on the atmosphere or ocean, but merely replenishes its own needs.

This is not rocket science.

With the Peoples Republic of China we have been exploring a legal system of standards for ecovillage design.

It is an inconvenient truth that all proposals or efforts to slow global warming or to move toward sustainability are serious intellectual frauds if they do not advocate reducing populations to sustainable levels at the local, national and global scales.

 

Albert Allen Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado

The USA and China are like two drinking buddies staying at the bar until closing time. They will drain every last drop of petroleum (and other natural resources) that they can get their hands on. What happens next is not even remotely on their minds. Everything they are doing is for the sake of keeping the binge going.

Peak Oil on the Web
Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO)

The Post Carbon Institute – Learning How to Live in a Low Energy World

Speeches by Matthew Simmons

Museletter by Richard Heinberg

The End of Suburbia, a DVD

The Oil Drum: Community Discussion about Peak Oil

Sustainability through Local Self-Sufficiency

Interviews on Peak Oil

Wolf at the Door – A Beginners Guide to Oil Depletion

The Oil Crash

Life After the Oil Crash

Peak Oil Action

Crisis Enerética Spanish language Peak Oil site

Dry Dipstick A Peak Oil Metadirectory

The Earth Society

Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Energy Project for a Post-Petroleum Future

Peak Oil Aware Merchandise

All Bamboo House

 

Did you know that the urban habitat crisis could be solved by allowing people to grow their own houses?

In the 1970s the Institute began research into fast growing plant species that could serve multiple purposes even while providing residential building materials for an expanding world population. Our experimental hybrid poplar and chestnut plantations are now more than 20 years old. Our tree varieties, including Tennessee's own state tree, the Tulip Poplar are able to process wastewater and reclaim severely eroded landscapes. Today we have more than 20 varieties of temperate bamboo growing at our Ecovillage Training Center, and more than 200 varieties under study at the nearby Earth Advocates Research Center for size, growth rates, temperature tolerance and other characteristics. We like bamboo as a cultivatible architecture. Only 500 square meters are needed to grow one house in one year, about the size of a typical U.S. living room. 

Bamboo JoineryTo provide owner-built homes for the 100,000,000 people now without adequate housing, the area needed to grow bamboo for one year is less than the area annually being clearcut in the Caribbean rainforests of Belize, Honduras and Colombia each year!

Biochar from Bamboo

Biochar and organic no-till methods mimic natural ecosystems by helping to close the nutrient cycle. Biochar serves as a "coral reef" in the soil, harboring microbial and fungal communities and storing nutrients and moisture for controlled release. Coupling biochar production with winter hoophouses make its production very economical, especially if the feedstocks are harvested from "waste" products (local sawmill byproducts, oilseed husks and bagasse) or annual non-food yields (bamboo, leaves, wetland reeds and hyacinths).
Improving soil fertility inexpensively will enable farmers to once again produce the food consumed by a local population without fossil-fuel based inputs. As we have seen for the past four centuries, conversion of natural vegetation to cropland reduces soil carbon content by one-half to one-third. However, soil carbon loss can be reversed by agricultural practices that build up the carbon in soils by, for example, reducing the period of bare fallow, planting cover crops, and changing aeration of the soil (such as by no till, ridge till, or keyline planting). Adding biochar to this mix of strategies provides the potential to take the planet from 386 ppmv CO2 to 350, or even 250 ppmv, on timescales short enough to prevent catastrophic tipping points from exterminating life on Earth.

Bambitat, a GVI sponsored organization, is developing unique strategies for lightweight, fast growing bamboo habitats.

Biochar from bamboo has a unique pore structure, making it a perfect soil structure for beneficial aerobic bacteria and fungi, resulting in crop yield gains of as much as 800-percent. It is important to mix the biochar with well-prepared compost inoculated with bacteria from undisturbed (usually nearby forest) local soils.

solar soy dairy In 1983 The Institute financed the creation of a food sciences laboratory which, in cooperation with the USDA, experimented with a number of soyfoods and other ecologically secure ways of feeding the world. In 1985, the food science laboratory was transferred to a community business, the Tempeh Lab, which today is one of the world's largest suppliers of soy fermentation inoculants.
shiitake In the mid-1980s The Institute also created a forest research program to identify ways to give standing forests greater commercial value than saw timber and residential subdevelopments. That effort created another commercial enterprise for the local community, Mushroompeople, which is one of the nation's largest mail order suppliers of specialty mushroom spawn and growing supplies.
We continue our work in food science research, producing a widening variety of tasty, nutritious and dietetic new foods from enzymatic cultures retrieved from distant corners of the Earth. Coming to a store or soup kitchen near you soon may be some of our latest all-organic dairy- and meat- analogs from soy, hemp and other high protein sources. Look for our Ecovillage label.

 

Did you know that water hyacinths can be used to fight AIDS?

Water hyacinths are a nightmare plant for many water management authorities. Untreated wastewater from cities and nutrient runoffs from farms provide ideal growing conditions for hyacinths in rivers and lakes, hindering recreation and navigation, starving fish of oxygen, and blocking water pumps. Hyacinths put out lovely flowers that make them useful for decorating and gardens, but millions of them can kill a freshwater ecosystem. In the early 1990s, the Institute began using the multiplying effects of hyacinths in wastewater reclamation experiments. We found that hyacinths could be harvested and composted and turned intoETC pond garden soil. Then we discovered another use: as substrate for the Reishi mushroom, Ganoderma lucidum. Reishi, which has been ground and taken as a tonic in Chinese medicine for more than 1000 years, contains powerful immune boosters known as ganoderms. Laboratory trials have confirmed that ganoderms are effective in combating viral and bacterial infections by stimulating the production of interleukin 2 in the bloodstream. Reishi is now being used in the treatment of AIDS. At our Ecovillage Training Center in Tennessee we demonstrated the complete cycle, from greywater remediation through water hyacinths to composted mushroom substrate, to cultivation and processing of Reishi and other edible and medicinal mushrooms. All of the waste products are used. These techniques are now being distributed by development organizations in the Americas and Africa to produce clean water, food, medicine, energy, fertile soil, and healthy children.

 

Throughout its history, it has been a goal of the Institute to serve as a living laboratory for developing, incubating, and showcasing new technologies. The Institute provides the scientific and technical expertise that advances new ideas from paper to practice, and builds and tests prototypes in the real world, in combination with other technologies which affect overall performance. Once an idea is proven to work, the Institute takes it to the stage of commercial viability. 
solar arrayToday, the Institute's principal work relates to the creation of a prototype Ecovillage Training Center which offers courses and immersion apprenticeships in permaculture, agriforestry, soyfoods, solar cars, constructed wetlands, biomimetic engineering, natural capital restoration, alternate energy, ecological building, conflict resolution, consensus and community, midwifery, natural nutrition, alternative medicine, healing touch, and many other promising paths to environmental sustainability. 
... more resilient and self-regenerative communities
in harmony with the natural environment. 
 
Plenty's Kids to the Country Program at the Ecovillage Training Center is now in its 14th year in bringing underprivileged children from low income housing and homeless shelters to a summer vacation of horses, hikes and swimming holes. 

Consulting with schools such as Witts University (Johannesburg), Cal Poly Pomona and Berea College (Kentucky), we are designing new "green campus" population centers to steer universities into the transition to sustainability.

The Institute sponsors the Western Hemisphere hub office of the Global Ecovillage Network, guided the formation of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, and is engaging in many other efforts to foster the expansion of the sustainable community movement worldwide. The Institute's program partners include the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, Seoul National University's Sustainable Urban Development program in Korea, Sortavala in Russia, the Green Kibbutz Movement in Israel, Los Angeles EcoVillage, The Tholego Development Project in South Africa, Luna Nueva in Mexico, the Institute for Latin American Permaculture in Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela and Peru, Reserva Sasardi, the Institute for New Frontiers in Cooperation, Builders without Borders, the United Nations Best Practices program (ECOSOC), Context Institute, Plenty International, Permaculture Institute of Peru, Grupo de Apoyo al Sector Rural, Aztlan Centro De Rescate Ecologico, Ecoaldea en Huehuecoyotl, Asociacion Gaia, Ecovillage Network of Canada, Comunidade Tribal Vale Encantado and ABRASCA (Brazil), the emerging ecovillage communities in Unguia and the Sasardi Reserve in Colombia, the Permaculture Institute of Brazil, Fundacion Darien, 7 Generaciones (Uruguay), La Caravana Arcoiris para la Paz, and many more. Global Village Video is a subsidiary production company which produces instructional tapes and dvds on a variety of subjects. 

 
 

Since 1994, we have been weaving together the emerging ecovillage movement, which we view as having the potential to bring about lasting change by seeking, as a central organizing principle, a harmonious balance between human habitat and the natural world. 

Ecovillages are where the low- and medium-tech experiments of the past half-century merge into integrated human communities, at peace with their cultural and bioregional context, and proactively responsive to the profound agricultural, climatological and social challenges of the coming century.

We offer instruction which includes both the technical transfer side of appropriate technology (how-to and hands-on) and the "invisible landscape" of community–the nuts and bolts of creating consensus and nurturing community social health and conviviality, distributing decisionmaking, and creating culturally-protective economic opportunities. We work in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, with further translation to indigenous languages as needed. Our primary goal is to train trainers who will carry on the work in our absence, and to empower these promoters with the tools they need to network with their peers. We support diverse cross-cultural networks of environmental interests.


Donate Now

Donations to the Institute are tax-deductible. In FY 2006, the Institute raised and spent approximately $240,000. 
Its state and federal tax filings and a full disclosure of its financial records are available on line.

Consider a Bequest

Many of us choose to give to charity on a regular basis or to leave a bequest of money or property as a final gift. These kindnesses merge to create power for good in the world. If you would like to consider such a gifting, please examine a paragraph suitable to insert into your testimentary bequests.

    1. Became a founding sponsor of the Sail Transport Network.
    2. Became a fiscal sponsor for Culture Change, host of the Petrocollapse conference series.
    3. Presented "The End of Suburbia" at the UN Committee on Sustainable Development 14th annual meeting.
    4. Brought participants from Mexico, Brazil, Ghana, Venezuela, Palestine, England, Iceland, Costa Rica, Wales, Japan, Australia, India, Nepal, Colombia, and Canada to the USA for training under the auspices of the UNITAR program.
    5. Attended and presented at Peak Oil conferences in Washington DC, Boston, Berea College, Kentucky, Yellow Springs, Ohio and New York City.
    6. Conducted Gaia University events and trainings in the USA, Germany, Netherlands and Italy.
    7. Published a training manual on post-petroleum living.
    8. Inaugurated the Sonnenshein green power Festival in Hohenwald, Tennessee.
    9. Attended the European Permaculture Conference.
    10. Completed our twelfth year as a site for the Kids to the Country summer program.
    11. Launched our Community Subscription Energy cooperative initiative.
    12. Converted four late-model vehicles to run on biofuels.
The governing body of the Institute is a five-person board, consisting of:
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Contact: 
Institute for Appropriate Technology
PO Box 90
Summertown TN 38483
931-964-4474
email: ecovillage at thefarm.org
Indigenous Peoples 


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It shall be the policy of this organization that no discrimination shall exist toward any person, employee, member, or guest in any program, privilege, activity or facility of this organization on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, physical handicap, or national or ethnic origin.

 — Article Six of our charter, November, 1974.

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| The Farm Page
| Intentional Communities
| Global Ecovillage Network