"I think if we could get Earth in a living and stable state, not a constantly degrading and dying state caused by our actions, then we have won some right to go to the stars. But at present I don't think we'd be welcome anywhere else in the universe. You wouldn't welcome anybody who'd laid waste to their house and wanted to live in yours, I'm sure."
Bill Mollison
This has been one of those dreams which, instead of fading away gracefully with time and age and 'sense', got progressively stronger and more insistent, so its eventual realisation became not just completely irresistible, but utterly inevitable.
The dream? Living a self-sufficient, "green" and eco-friendly lifestyle, designing and building our own autonomous house from natural, benign, locally-sourced, renewable and/or recyclable materials, growing all our own organic food according to permaculture principles, generating our energy from renewable and sustainable resources, caring for the environment by working with nature rather than against it, and all amongst a community of like-minded people.
It often felt like something with a life of its own. Yet simultaneously it felt like a deeper undercurrent of wisdom pushing me out of dreaming into action: being the change, walking the talk, living an existence in full conscious awareness of the unity of all life and the presence of life in everything. It's a way of perceiving which has sustained humans in a respectful, vibrant, healthy relationship with nature (which we're inescapably part of whether we see ourselves that way or not), somewhere on the planet at least, for thousands of years. A wiser way than this brief modern flirtation with a hopelessly objectified, fragmented, mechanistic and lifeless conception of existence which is leading to so much death and destruction in the biosphere and is simply unsustainable.
The way of the heart, rather than the head.
How were we to find 'our' place though? The piece of land and community where we'd be able to do this? The answer eluded me for a long time until, in late 2008, the land found us instead and the dream somehow tumbled into reality. I'm still amazed at how it happened the way it did, but now we – that's me and my 3 2 children – have taken on responsibility for Quinta do Vale, 2 hectares of beautiful mountainside in the Serra do Açor (Mountains of the Goshawk) in Central Portugal. We'll be guided by permaculture principles, nature itself, the many others who are doing similar things, both in Central Portugal and elsewhere around the world, and the warm and generous people of the area.
This site records our progress: our triumphs, our disasters, what we feel about it, what we do about it. As well as being our virtual scrapbook, repository of working ideas (I can't lose them if I put them here!), and a means of letting everyone we know stay in touch with what we're up to, in time I hope it will become a useful information resource. And if you share our dream, we hope it might inspire and encourage you to turn yours into reality too.
This site, like our project, is a work in progress. At the moment one or two pages have little to say for themselves, but that'll soon change. Please check back for updates.
Traduzir esta páginaEspero para fornecer uma versão Português deste site, quando ele é mais completo, e quando eu puder escrever melhor Português. Por agora, o link acima irá dar-lhe uma traduçâo do Google.