|
Progress towards the Land-Based Colony (SEE) ---------- by William Gale Recruiting: The February progress report resulted in a potential settler and a potential investor identifying themselves. Kail Anderson has written to chapter presidents asking that they devote a meeting to SEE. This is expected to let many who are not active Website participants know about plans for SEE.
John Wright agreed to take SEE flyers to a meeting of the Northwest
Intentional Community Association. Nexus had suggested this meeting might be
a useful recruiting spot. Flyers were prepared and have been mailed to John.
The meeting is April 12 in Seattle, Washington.
The look at abandoned missile sites turned up a county with no building code which has a marginal job market. With this example as inspiration, site selection was redirected to see if there were counties with no building codes but within an hour's commute of a city with population at least 250,000. Preliminary screening resulted in a number of candidates, and initial inquiries found that four counties around Austin, Texas, have no structural, HVAC, plumbing, or electrical codes. Lee County has no building code at all, Bastrop County and Burnett County have waste disposal codes requiring approval of septic system plans, and Caldwell County has a waste disposal code requiring approval and a minimum of one acre per dwelling. Preliminary contacts with realtors suggested land prices in the $2,000-to-$3,000-per-acre range. After comments, site selection was focused on the area around Austin, Texas. Williamson County, to the north of Austin, and Hays (San Marcos County) both have the Edwards Aquifer running through them. The aquifer was being overdrawn and now building on the recharge zone is subject to regulation by the state, including certified-engineer design of septic systems. This area will not be considered further. Both still have other areas under their own regulation. Williamson County requires its own design for any septic system. Therefore Williamson County and Caldwell County (which requires a minimum of one acre) are not being considered further. Hays County requires approval of waste disposal but has no other building-code requirements. Second contacts with realtors were made, but listings in response were not received.
It seems likely that suitable land can be found in the Austin area. If so, a
contract is possible before the Conclave. This could be considerably sooner
than scheduled, but the time for groundbreaking will remain the same so that
people can count on it in saving and in job hunting.
(Recall that the archives for the fmf-lbc mailing list are available at http://www.millennial.org/mail/talk/fmf-lbc/hyper/.) Dan Hall noted that some people would have considerable costs to leave their current jobs, and suggested the notion of a Point of Departure (POD), which would be a gathering of FMF people in shared housing in a specific geographical area. He, Daniel Vainsencher, and I are continuing discussion of this notion. A discussion of how we will approach the "Eco" part of SEE resulted in identification by Brad Woodard of four main ecological concerns: healthy houses, species and ecology preservation, closed cycles, and sustainability. We can expect to approach these differently, and at different rates. Closed cycles are the most natural for an FMF group to work on most heavily. Nick Gauthier suggested ratite (ostrich, emu, and rhea) farming as a business. Despite this having been a speculative bubble recently, as pointed out by Sam Liebowitz, there is some possibility of it as a business, since the land area required is not large. As with other business ideas, it will wait until people are present at SEE and the interest and skills necessary for businesses can be better judged. There was some discussion of decision-making structures for SEE initiated by Kail Anderson's suggestion of using chapters as the decision-making structures, and Rob Sandelin's suggestion of studying group-process techniques developed at other intentional communities. The plan remains to use as structure the settlement corporation, for which tentative articles and bylaws are on the Website. These articles and bylaws are structured for a small-scale trial of direct democracy. At a small scale, a book chapter written by Sandelin seems to have many useful guides to productive meetings. Sandelin has given permission to reprint this out-of-print chapter, and we expect to reprint it and distribute it to all prospective settlers. A session has been scheduled at the Conclave for prospective settlers, with the expected content to be a review of group-process techniques and an exercise on articulating the goals and values we envision for SEE. Brad Woodard and Eric Hunting called attention to the Earthship Website, and I posted a summary of the site. The Earthship folks have considerable experience in closed-cycle systems at the individual-dwelling level, and they have started communities using the Earthships as dwellings. The potential settlers identified so far are:
If you regard yourself as a potential (and do let me emphasize the "potential") settler or investor, would you please let me know. If you are listed as a potential settler or investor and no longer believe you should be so listed (or if I misread your statement in the first place), please let me know also.
 Home |
