The first town we decided to stay at was Esperance, as we had heard many, many good things about how beautiful it was. So here we also hoped we would find our first WWOOF host community for WA, though first we just wanted to spend some time being stationary and getting to know and enjoy the area. We couldn't find any sustainable communities in Esperance, but we did find a really interesting sounding WWOOF host, so it was here we decided that Molly would get back into WWOOFer mode, and I would gain my first WWOOFing experience. Not being a community, and therefore being irrelevant to Molly's research and documentary activities, would also allow us to ease into our work mode and frames-of-mind.
This first WWOOF host was Geoff Tonkin who owns and runs the Permaculture Education & Research Centre (Inc). He had been abroad for three years before returning to Australia and his property about three months ago. As a result his property was a little neglected, but compared to the state a non-permaculture property would be in after three years of no work being done on it, it was looking very healthy in deed.
Geoff is also a state distributor and installer for composting toilets, and as such had one in his house. The house was built of rammed earth, concrete, steel and granite and, as also demonstrated by the toilet, was designed along sustainable building principles that have affected decisions and design features regarding, inter alia, aspect, window placement and design (i.e. passive solar), power sourcing and usage (i.e. wind, solar and 12-volt), and water capture, storage and use. The house is as yet unfinished, with roof insulation and ceiling yet to be started (which made for some cold nights), but the house and the thought that has gone into its design are none-the-less impressive.
The gardens have all been designed around permaculture principles that inform how water will be captured and distributed, where plants will be planted, and which ones to produce what, when. These principles included making sure
that plants always saw enough sun during the day (mature hight/competition considerations), that their root systems wouldn't compete with neighbouring plants, water catchment, mulching and nutrition systems, and use of keyhole garden beds (so that a garden bed never need be trampled on) and swales.
What was particularly interesting however was that already I am being challenged as to what actually constitutes a sustainable technology, or even a technology for that matter. This was exemplified by Geoff (who has also practised aromatherapy and reiki) using Pagan techniques and tools such as dowsing (in his case a pendulum) to help determine plant placement, and having an approximate 1:10 scale Irish Round Tower in his garden to harness paramagnetic/cosmic energy from the sun and to nullify negative energies brought in by underground water streams - all for the betterment of individual plants and greater gardens alike. More on dowsing and Irish Round Towers can be found in Alanna Moore's book 'Stone Age Farming: Eco-agriculture for the 21st century'.
Pictures of this property will be uploaded onto this blog on a later date.
Although interesting, the technologies in use here are however disparate, stand-alone, and do not constitute a formal information system as such. Though there certainly are systems and processes in place that in a holistic sense are interdependent they are manually operated and managed. As for digital technologies used, phone, fax and a laptop used for email (using a dial-up Internet connection) and word processing was all that was present. There was no digital management of significant and/or substantial data, crop management processes, or of domestic/house processes. Technology need and usage (and integration) may however be greater and more sophisticated in intentional communities, the first of which I stay with for one week in Denmark WA on the 27th of June. My quest for a new or modified PhD question continues...
This first WWOOF host was Geoff Tonkin who owns and runs the Permaculture Education & Research Centre (Inc). He had been abroad for three years before returning to Australia and his property about three months ago. As a result his property was a little neglected, but compared to the state a non-permaculture property would be in after three years of no work being done on it, it was looking very healthy in deed.
Geoff is also a state distributor and installer for composting toilets, and as such had one in his house. The house was built of rammed earth, concrete, steel and granite and, as also demonstrated by the toilet, was designed along sustainable building principles that have affected decisions and design features regarding, inter alia, aspect, window placement and design (i.e. passive solar), power sourcing and usage (i.e. wind, solar and 12-volt), and water capture, storage and use. The house is as yet unfinished, with roof insulation and ceiling yet to be started (which made for some cold nights), but the house and the thought that has gone into its design are none-the-less impressive.
The gardens have all been designed around permaculture principles that inform how water will be captured and distributed, where plants will be planted, and which ones to produce what, when. These principles included making sure
that plants always saw enough sun during the day (mature hight/competition considerations), that their root systems wouldn't compete with neighbouring plants, water catchment, mulching and nutrition systems, and use of keyhole garden beds (so that a garden bed never need be trampled on) and swales.
What was particularly interesting however was that already I am being challenged as to what actually constitutes a sustainable technology, or even a technology for that matter. This was exemplified by Geoff (who has also practised aromatherapy and reiki) using Pagan techniques and tools such as dowsing (in his case a pendulum) to help determine plant placement, and having an approximate 1:10 scale Irish Round Tower in his garden to harness paramagnetic/cosmic energy from the sun and to nullify negative energies brought in by underground water streams - all for the betterment of individual plants and greater gardens alike. More on dowsing and Irish Round Towers can be found in Alanna Moore's book 'Stone Age Farming: Eco-agriculture for the 21st century'.
Pictures of this property will be uploaded onto this blog on a later date.
Although interesting, the technologies in use here are however disparate, stand-alone, and do not constitute a formal information system as such. Though there certainly are systems and processes in place that in a holistic sense are interdependent they are manually operated and managed. As for digital technologies used, phone, fax and a laptop used for email (using a dial-up Internet connection) and word processing was all that was present. There was no digital management of significant and/or substantial data, crop management processes, or of domestic/house processes. Technology need and usage (and integration) may however be greater and more sophisticated in intentional communities, the first of which I stay with for one week in Denmark WA on the 27th of June. My quest for a new or modified PhD question continues...
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