"EcoFair 2001: Designing for the Next Seven Generations" is an event organized and paid for by the students at Maharishi University of Management located in Fairfield, Iowa. The focus of the weekend is to raise campus and community awareness on Sustainable Living methods. Topics covered will include sustainable agriculture, renewable energy sources, and ecologically sound buildings, including the process and materials used. The event is free of charge, but participants should bring lunch,or plan to eat in our dining hall for up to $7.00 a meal. Our dining hall offers 85% organic and 100% vegetarian meals.The event is open to anyone who is interested in attending. For questions or comments you can contact Jana ffitch or Simone Griffith at (641)472-4525 or (641)919-3873. Our email is ecofair2001@mum.edu.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Schedule of Events: Thursday evening, May 3rd--Student Union Theatre, Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, IA 7:30-9:30 pm: John Jeavons "Grow Biointensive" Sustainable Mini-Farming- A Global Solution to Soil Fertility, Food, Income, and Community In the Smallest Area. John Jeavons is the Director of Ecology Action, an environmental research and educational organization revolutionizing sustainable mini-farming around the world.
Friday May 4th --Student Union Theatre
Permaculture: Designing for Abundance with Douglas Bullock, Lonnie Gamble, Michael Havelka, Al Rutan, Tom Wahl
Doug is one of the top permaculture designers in the US. He has been developing a permaculture farm on Orcas Island for the last 18 years. He has taught and worked on permaculture projects in Iowa, Hawaii, Washington, Costa Rica, Austrailia and New Zealand. He organized the first Permaculture course in the US wit Bill Mollison.
9:45am - An introduction to Permaculture with Doug Bullock
11:00am - Elements of Permaculture Design including: Home Gardens, Orchards, Food Forests, and Edible Landscaping
12:00pm - Lunch
1:30pm - Elements of Permaculture Design continuing with Energy, Building, and Village Design, and Waste and Water in the Environment
2:30pm - EcoVillage Presentation
3:00pm - Walking Tour of Campus: A Vision of The Future
Evening, Student Union Theatre
7:30pm - Permaculture Slide Show with Doug Bullock
Saturday morning, May 5th-- Student Union Theatre
10:00 am - Ecological Building: Better for People, Better for the Environment, and Better for the Pocket Book with Alexis Karolides, Senior Consultant from the nation's leading experts in energy efficient buildings and transportation, The Rocky Mountain Institute.
Saturday afternoon, May 5th-- Student Union
12:15pm-- Bar-B-Q Lunch
Plus hands on demonstrations on:
Presentations :
Tofu making and its history with Alex Green, Food policy in Iowa with Francis Thicke, Prairie in Iowa with Ray Reeves, and Alternative Building with Steve Vessey. And more!
Also! A Film Festival on Permaculture around the world will be taking place throughout the afternoon in the Student Union.
Saturday night, May 5th, Student Union Ballroom
M.U.M."s Annual Eco-Jam Fashion Show featuring clothing made from natural fibers followed by live music and a dance! (time TBA)
Bio's on speakers:
Alexis Karolides
Alexis Karolides is a registered architect who came to Rocky Mountain Institute with six years of experience in commercial, institutional, and industrial architecture. As a senior research associate with RMI’s Green Development Services, her consulting projects have included a prototype energy efficient supermarket for Stop & Shop, a new gymnasium for the US Air Force Academy, spec homes developed by Hines, various environmentally sensitive projects with Aspen Skiing Company, a life-sciences incubator building, and a monastery in Tibet. She has also provided educational seminars and integrated design workshops for communities and institutions such as the New Mexico Department of Energy & Natural Resources, the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Florida Gulf Coast University, the Sear Brown Group, and the city of Pittsburgh. She has been invited to speak at numerous conferences, including the DOE All States Meeting, the Austin Sustainable Communities Initiative Conference, a symposium in Colorado Springs sponsored by the Partnership for Community Design and an annual conference for the National Park Service. Ms. Karolides has also been a guest lecturer at various universities and colleges including Dartmouth College, Florida Gulf Coast University, Rice University, Berea College and the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She frequently provides input for radio, magazine and newspaper articles on topics of energy efficiency, healthy design and environmental sensitivity for commercial and residential building projects.
Ms. Karolides graduated magna cum laude from Carleton College with a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Physics and distinction for research work on solar and alternative energy systems. Following a Richter Fellowship in Germany, where she studied post-war architecture, Ms. Karolides completed a Masters of Architecture Degree at Rice University. She interned at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department where she researched sustainable staff housing, and at the Texas Governor's Energy Office. While in Austin, Texas, she was her firm's sustainability manager, a member of the local AIA Chapter Sustainability Committee and a member of the Austin Sustainable Building Coalition. She was also an adjunct faculty member at Austin Community College in the Building Construction Technology Department.
Douglas Bullock
Since 1982, Douglas Bullock has lived with his extended family, friends, and interns on their Permaculture site on orcas Island. Douglas has facilitated or directly participated in comprehensive Permaculture projects and classes at their site and at sites around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Hawai'i, Costa Rica, California, and Washington.
Having traveled extensively collecting and studying plants, he is familiar with a wide range of climate strategies and crops. His specialties include Permaculture, tree crops, nursery practices, creating small and large scale wetland environments and implementing appropriate technologies. Douglas has also written articles and pamphlets on Permaculture that were featured in the Permaculture Activist and in the International Permaculture Journal.
Lonnie Gamble
Lawrence (Lonnie) A. Gamble, P.E., owner of Surya Nagar Farm, does consulting, equipment furnishing, and installation for renewable energy projects including solar electric, and biomass. He has worked on a wide range of projects, from remote cabins to large grid connected homes, from 100 watts to 30,000 kilowatts (30 megawatts). He has a BS degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and is a registered professional engineer. He teaches solar energy and building with natural materials at La'akea permaculture teaching farm in Hawaii and at the Bullock brothers permaculture farm on Orcas Island in Washington State. He is also developing two small permaculture farms, one on the Big Island in Hawaii and the other in Fairfield, Iowa and an ecovillage of 40 homes in Fairfield Iowa.
He lives in Fairfield, Iowa in a solar powered neighborhood. The neighborhood has become a hotbed of experimentation with natural building systems (straw bale, straw clay, faswall block (80%wood chips, 20% concrete), earth plaster), natural energy systems (solar electric, biomass, solar thermal, wind, geothermal cooling), organic gardening practices (organic hydroponics, french intensive/biodynamic, inexpensive unheated greenhouses, row covers, innovative season extenders, permaculture orchard and garden design, square foot gardening methods, Fukuoka type no-till natural gardening), and water sources (roof catchment, direct solar-powered well pumping).
John Jeavons
John Jeavons is a master gardener, ecologist, and director of Ecology Action, a non-profit tax-exempt organization located in Willits, California. A Yale University graduate, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development and Stanford before joining Ecology Action and devoting a subsequent quarter-century to the development of what is widely regarded as the most highly evolved method of organic gardening ever devised. Background
Formed in 1970 to revolutionize sustainable mini-farming and food production around the world, Ecology Action employs Biointensive gardening, a refined combination of horticultural methods variously used by the Chinese 4,000 years ago; 18th century French Gardeners; Austrian Rudolph Steiner in the 1920's; and British horticulturist Alan Chadwick, who united the biodynamic and French intensive method before introducing it to John Jeavons in the 1960's. Jeavons and Ecology Action further developed the method over several decades of meticulously-recorded research and experimentation. The result is a method of organic gardening capable of providing a family of four with fresh, organically and sustainably-produced vegetables for an entire year in 800 square feet or less (the size of an average tract home's front lawn), while actually building soil rather than depleting it.
Al Rutan
Al Rutan was born in Portland OR. His college work was performed at a Benedictine Abbey in Oregon called Mt Angel, which granted him a BA degree.
He taught high school in eastern Montana for several years before moving to Minnesota to pursue a career in publishing material that focused on alternative energy. His company, Rutan Publishing, was one of three in the nation during the 70ªs that pioneered information on how to convert starch grains to a fermentable substrate for the on-farm production of alcohol fuel. Farmers knew about the moonshine days of Prohibition, but they did not know about the production of ethanol without using sugar which was the practice of the old bootleggers.
The early text from Rutan Publishing that shared this information was Making Alcohol Fuel - Recipe And Procedure by Lance Crombie.
Al Rutanªs work with methane gas production began during his teaching days in Montana in conjunction with a group of cattle ranchers who were exploring ways to slow down the strip mining of coal on the western plains. Strip mining seriously disturbs the water table underneath the range when it cuts deeply into the earth in that arid region.
The research work with methane gas production continued in Minnesota with the publication of Rutan‰Ûªs book in 1979 titled The Doªs & Don'ts Of Methane. And he contributed regularly to a magazine published at Milaca, Minnesota, called Alternative Sources of Energy. The title of his column was Al Rutan, the Methane Man.
In the intervening years he has conducted workshops and demonstrations that focus on what is necessary in order to make harnessing anaerobic fermentation energy efficient. His demonstrations have been featured in TV newscasts on three different occasions in the Minneapolis area. In 1977 at the Minnesota State Fair in St Paul, Channel 5 TV televised him cooking bacon and eggs on a gas hotplate which was fueled by a 300 gallon methane digester just off to one side. Manure for the digester was gathered from the pig pens at the U of M Ag School just outside the Fairgrounds.
Presently, Rutan Research provides information on how to harness anaerobic fermentation efficiently by means of two websites: