Growing a Permanent Society
We are proposing the creation of Global Villages that contain: (1), permanent agriculture, (2) 100% renewable and local energy production, (3), biofuel production, and (4), permafacture. For the permanent agriculture side a good example for our land would...
Does Anyone Know Where I Could Get a 250 Mile Per Gallon Car?
I was looking for a one cylinder diesel engine today for our new Troy-Bilt Horse rototiller. It appears that the Horse model is the simplest, longest-lasting rototiller of all tillers – so we snatched one up. It was made in the 70’s, and it...
Fertile Birthing Period
I’ve been asked a number of times about the progress on the CEB press. The best answer is that we’re in a fertile birthing period. If you went through the presentation in yesterday’s blog – you know that we decided to build our...
Presentation on the Global Village Construction Set
Last week we spoke at the University of Missouri, Columbia. The topic was the Global Village Construction Set: Open Source Engineering for Sustainable Living. I focused on the construction of economies that utilize local resources. I proposed the route...
CEB Infrastructure
In order to build with the Compressed Earth Block press, and in order to produce these machines at Factor e, we need a certain level of infrastructure. Here is what we are doing: Say you want to fabricate CEB presses. Start with a facility: CEB walls...
Oh Well
We have not been blogging much lately, because spring is here and we’re on the land. When spring hits, the sparks start flying with action outside. We’re building Sanctuary, aka Factor e Farm. The last week we’ve been drilling our well...
An Open Letter to Lovers of Centralization
I detect a widespread lack of acknowledgement of the critical issue of scale in human orgnanization. E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work on the subject points clearly that human organization simply breaks down after a certain size is reached, as is stated...
Turn Up the Heat
Vinay just informed me today of a great post on our work on BoingBoing, a Directory of Wonderful Things. Sam found another link about us at the Wired magazine blog. A few days ago, Steve Bosserman wrote a great post on how open source products can make...
Visiting Sam Rose
I’m now in Lansing, Michigan, visiting with Sam Rose. We’re having fiery discussion on putting the P2P Economy into practice, starting with the collaborative open source product development platform. While we’re discussing the CEB press,...
Open Engineering: Better Than Sliced Bread
We are presently struggling with explaining a general open source product development method to others. We are talking about developing a large-scale, parallel effort of world-class, optimal product development to address the needs of the emergent, peer-based,...
