Here I Am - There They Are

What's up trendy travelers? As the spring approaches I have found that things have really started to gain momentum. I suppose the Winter season is the season for relaxation, organization, and planning for the 7 or 8 months in Northwestern Indiana that you can play with the Earth and plants. Wait a minute - did I just put relaxation, organization, and planning in the same sentence? Yes I did. When it comes to us gardeners and sustainable living advocates we act like total squirrels. All year we store things, put things away, and during the winter we finally get them all sorted out and begin planning on that "perfect" garden or permaculture project.

What is permaculture? What are sustainable practices? "Why all the questions, we need answers!" Right? Sustainability (in this case) = "the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance."  Thanks, dictionary.com. Our goal is to help provide people with the training to do small projects to large projects that empower themselves and their communities to be less dependent on complex systems that don't maintain the views and values of community, health, and independence.

Just at the end of 2012 I had the fortune of meeting a small group of people preparing to go public with their sustainability initiative. We eventually sorted a name that suited the bunch and it is The Northwest Indiana Society for Sustainable Living, or NWISSL for the sake of brevity. Our link is: here  I lumped myself in gladly, hoping to preserve some modicum of work life balance, while charging into yet another awesome sojourn into sustainability.  If we build it, the people will come. I really said this jokingly at one of our first brainstorming sessions, but if the breakout of our Facebook group page was any indication, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Upon an accidental late night launch some random Wednesday, we gathered over 100 likes by the weekend! We are now re-purposing a wooden barn into our first building in which we will teach all sorts of different sustainability courses. This means using old tires packed with plastic and garbage (painstakingly squirreled away mind you, because trash is ya know, hard to come by) to create non-load bearing walls that have amazing insulatory quality/thermal mass and tying them into the load bearing structure which is still very much intact. Many other buildings and projects are going to happen over the next year while we develop the space into a functional, beautiful, productive sustainable living community teaching enterprise. Below I have included a shot of the barn, some recycled and donated materials, and in the lower shot one of the other NWISSL members when we were starting on the back wall inside.

 Our topics will range across the spectrum of things that help one create more sustainable, low cost, independent ways of living while encouraging community and learning.  Come with, check the links, and check the pictures, let's learn together!