The links on this page pertain to desert environments, solar living
and
community that we really want to help promote.
RAINWATER HARVESTING
Turn water scarcity into water
abundance! Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, How to
conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable
water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and
community. This book enables you to access your on-site
resources (rainwater, greywater, topsoil, sun, plants,
and more), gives you a diverse array of strategies to
maximize their potential.......
Intentional Community is an
inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing,
residential land trusts, communes, student
co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, and other
projects where people strive together with a
common vision.
This Web site serves the growing communities
movement, providing resources for finding a
community home and creating more community in
your life.
WWOOF stands for WILLING WORKERS ON
ORGANIC FARMS. This website is a for the
USA. How WWOOF works: We compile a list
of hosts that, from time to time, welcome
volunteer help. When you join WWOOF, you get
access to that list of farms, in this case our
searchable database.
The Aims of WWOOF are :
To give you first hand
experience of organic or other
ecologically-sound growing methods
To give you experience of
life in the countryside
To help the organic
movement which is labour intensive and does
not rely on artificial fertilisers,
herbicides or pesticides.
To give people a chance
to meet, talk, learn and exchange views with
others in the organic movement
To provide you with an
opportunity to learn about life in the host
country by living, and working together.
Through seed conservation and community
interaction Native Seeds/SEARCH works to protect
crop biodiversity and to celebrate cultural
diversity. Native Seeds SEARCH is a nonprofit
conservation organization based in Tucson,
Arizona. NS/S works to conserve, distribute and
document the adapted and diverse varieties of
agricultural seed, their wild relatives and the
role these seeds play in cultures of the
American Southwestern and northwest Mexico. Our
mission began in 1983, springing from the nexus
of cultural longing and impending loss of
genetic diversity. Today we safeguard 2000
varieties of arid-land adapted agricultural
crops. Some, like watermelons, were adapted from
seeds brought by early Europeans. Most of our
collection consists of varieties of indigenous
crops developed over centuries or millennia to
suit the needs of their human partners. We
promote the use of these ancient crops and their
wild relatives by distributing seeds to
traditional communities and to gardeners world
wide.
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA)
is an online and grassroots non-profit
public interest organization campaigning for
health, justice, and sustainability. The OCA
deals with crucial issues of food safety,
industrial agriculture, genetic engineering,
children's health, corporate accountability,
Fair Trade, environmental sustainability and
other key topics. We are the only
organization in the US focused exclusively
on promoting the views and interests of the
nation's estimated 50 million organic and
socially responsible consumers.
The OCA represents over 850,000 members,
subscribers and volunteers, including
several thousand businesses in the natural
foods and organic marketplace. Our US and
international policy board is broadly
representative of the organic, family farm,
environmental, and public interest
community.
Sky Island Alliance is a grassroots organization
dedicated to the protection and restoration of the
rich natural heritage of native species and habitats
in the Sky Island region of the southwestern United
States and northwestern Mexico.
We work with volunteers, scientists, land
owners, public officials, and government
agencies to establish protected areas, restore
healthy landscapes, and promote public
appreciation of the region's unique biological
diversity.
The Zeitgeist Movement is not a
political movement. It does not recognize nations,
governments, races, religions, creeds or class. Our
understandings conclude that these are false, outdated
distinctions which are far from positive factors for
true collective human growth and potential. Their basis
is in power division and stratification, not unity and
equality, which is our goal. While it is important to
understand that everything in life is a natural
progression, we must also acknowledge the reality that
the human species has the ability to drastically slow
and paralyze progress, through social structures which
are out of date, dogmatic, and hence out of line with
nature itself. The world you see today, full of war,
corruption, elitism, pollution, poverty, epidemic
disease, human rights abuses, inequality and crime is
the result of this paralysis.
Desert Harvesters is a volunteer-run,
grassroots effort based in Tucson, Arizona, USA. We
strive to promote, celebrate, and enhance, local food
security and production by encouraging the planting of
indigenous, food-bearing shade trees (such as the Velvet
mesquite or Prosopis velutina) in water-harvesting
earthworks, and then educating the public on how to
harvest and process the bounty. In 2003 we were able to
purchase a Meadows Mills #5 hammermill with funds from a
PRO-Neighborhoods grant. The mill is able to quickly
grind mesquite pods into flour, and conveniently provide
people with a fresh and nutritious local food product
(click here for more info on the nutritional breakdown
of mesquite). We’ve put the mill on a trailer so we can
take it to various milling events around southern
Arizona..........
