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Sieben Linden Ecovillage

Project Type

Rural, Intentional Communities, Educational

Project Summary

The Ecovillage of Sieben Linden is a social and ecological settlement in north-eastern Germany (former German Democratic Republic, GDR). Although the concept for this Ecovillage came up around 1989, the piece of land for the final settlement was found in 1997. Here we continue to build the Ecovillage of Sieben Linden. At Sieben Linden we aim to provide a model for a future way of life in which work, leisure, economy, ecology, urban and rural culture can find a balance. We are searching for the answers to the pressing issues of our time; looking for human-centred solutions in a place of creativity and learning. This model intends to show how humans can live more responsibly with nature; that human communities need not exploit or destroy nature but can make a positive contribution towards the quality and diversity of the environment. This dream of a "socio-ecological model settlement" is coming true on 82 hectares of land, which comprises of forest (49 hectares), gardens and farmland (25 hectares) and built-up areas (8 hectares).

Project Description

Project Concept:

 

The Ecovillage of Sieben Linden is a social and ecological settlement in the Altmark in the region of Sachsen-Anhalt (former East Germany).

 

The first idea of this Ecovillage came up around 1989. After 4 years, in 1993, a group of people bought a project center together to be more effective in the search for land to settle on and in promoting the project idea to politicians and others. From this place they looked out for land to buy and finally, in 1997, they found the land that we now build the Ecovillage of Sieben Linden on, 25 km south of the project center.

 

Here in Sieben Linden we aim to provide a model for a future way of life, in which work, leisure, economy, ecology, urban and rural culture can find a balance. We are searching for the answers to the pressing issues of our time; looking for human-centred solutions in a place of creativity and learning.

This model intends to show how humans can live more responsibly with nature, that human communities need not exploit or destroy nature but can make a positive contribution towards the quality and diversity of the environment.

 

This dream of a socio-ecological model settlement is coming true near the small village of Poppau in the region Altmark, Germany. At the moment we own 82,5 hectares of land, which comprises forest (47,5 hectares), gardens and farmland (26 hectares) and building area (almost 7 hectares). From the beginning we worked on spreading the idea of sustainable lifestyles and simplicity through an extended seminar program.

 

 

Project Organisation

The Friends of the Ecovillage Association (Freundeskreis Ökodorf e.V.)

This association was founded in 1991 as the first organisation to promote the idea of an Ecovillage. So one of its tasks is to take care of public relations. Part of this is informing the 250 members that live spread out all over germany of the development of the village through a quarterly print newsletter. In between we send out online newsletters that are also available in english language. The bigger part is writing articles for newspapers, sending out people to do talks, taking care of film teams and journalists, doing stalls and representing the Ecovillage of Sieben Linden at events.

Another important task is to open Sieben Linden as a center of knowledge, i.e. organising and offering seminars on a wide range of issues, e.g. ecological building, communication skills, healing, working with horses, raw food, permaculture, etc. as well as hosting groups, school classes, and others.

All members of the community are members of this association, too.

 

The Settlement Co-operative (Siedlungsgenossenschaft Ökodorf e.G.)

This co-operative was already founded in 1993 in order for the Ecovillage inhabitants to be common proprietors of the land and infrastructure of the village.

This organisation is at the top of the decision-making hierarchy. All adult inhabitants of Sieben Linden become member of the co-operative when permanently joining the community by signing shares. Currently, the cooperative has about 70 members who are participating in the development of the project with their own capital and labour.

 

 

Detailed Project Description:

 

As an ecovillage, Sieben Linden works on the four pillars of ecovillages defined by the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), which are Ecology, Social, Economy and Worldview. Not all of these are equally important all the time though, in Sieben Linden a huge focus is put on ecological and social aspects.

 

Ecology

 

With the setup of this ecovillage we try to find answers and show them to a wide audience looking for models.

On this search ecological principles that are also part of permaculture are considered:

 

• To close cycles of material flow

• to avoid producing waste

• to use renewable and locally available ressources

• to create diversity

and others.

 

Our aim of setting up a holistic model by working with the above principles leads us to a huge variety of fields that we work in to find possible solutions.

 

 

Biodiversity

When designing the settlement consideration was given to wild animals and their habitats. For example, we created huge strips of wind shelter hedges with multiple functions and biotopes for frogs, insects, birds and other animals. Also, we enhance the biodiversity of the land by turning the surrounding pine monoculture into a diverse mixed woodland and by gardening organically on land that was formerly farmed conventionally.

 

Water

The precipitation is 400 mm per year around here with very dry spells during the summer. Rainwater is partly used to fill our firewater lake and a pond, partly it just filters into the ground.

Two wells on the land provide us with fresh water in drinking quality. We installed a closed water cycle: we are not connected to the sewerage system of the local municipality but built a reedbed system that filters our water. After this, it is being used in the gardens for watering. The additionally needed water here is freshwater - through using drip-irrigation we want to reduce the amount of freshwater needed.

In addition to this we only have composting toilets on the settlement, using the compost for tree planting. So far urine is not collected seperately.

Due to these features we only use 2/3 of the amount of water that the average german uses and produce much less pollution of water.

 

Energy

We try to use the most direct source of energy (i.e. aiming for the highest input-output-ratio) and avoid fossil fuels where possible.

 

Electricity

For a few years now we have had enough photovoltaic panels installed for us to produce 85 % of the electricity that we consume per year – on average over the year. We are forced to feed this electricity into the grid as we do not have any means of storage so far.

There is no wind- or combined heat- and power-system yet, although we aim to expand our self-sufficiency in electric energy to a system that provides us with our own energy all year round so that we are not dependent on the grid.

 

Heating

We heat our houses by water heated through solar panels in a system that is supported by wood burning stoves. About half of the wood comes from our own forest, the other half (mostly hard wood) is bought from outside, preferably grown and harvested ecologically. The newest house has a seasonal storage which will provide heat almost all year round (10-11 months).

 

Cooking

We cook on natural gas - there is no biogas plant in Sieben Linden as yet, though we would only build a small one for our own needs.

Some groups in Sieben Linden cook on a wooden stove during the winter when it heats the room at the same time - and a solar parabolic cooker is used to heat dishwashing water during the summer where no solar panels are available for hot water. Solardriers are used by some people in the village.

 

Animals

There are several decisions that were made in the course of the project concerning keeping animals in this ecovillage. Some of these are directly linked to the next topic (food production).

So far there are the following farm animals and pets living in Sieben Linden:

6 horses, several cats, some guinea pigs and some fishes.

Some of the horses were given to us because they were ill and would otherwise have been killed, others came here with new inhabitants. The smaller animals came here, were found or collected in an animal sanctuary.

Reasons why we do not have more (farm) animals are diverse, here are some of them:

One is that, as we are aware that the production of animal products takes a lot more space and energy than that of direct plant nutrition, we decided that we want to produce plant-based nutrition in the first place and only keep animals when we have land left to grow their food (the horses live on land that is not usable for other things than meadow, as the soil is too poor - and they graze on land that will in the future be used to build houses on, so they are part of a succession here).

Another reason is that we had a very long process around keeping and killing animals, at the end of which we agreed on only keeping animals that will not be killed here or elsewhere, i.e. to have a kind of animal sanctuary here. This enables a certain self-sufficiency with animal products (eggs, a little milk) and gives kids the opportunity to live with animals, while at the same time respecting the ethical needs of people that want to live in a space where animals are not killed for our pleasure.

Then there are also those people that rather want to live close to wild animals than kept animals.

And an important fact is also that so far there is no one that is very much into keeping for example cows (although to be honest, so far we simply didn't have the land to do so).

 

Food production

Part of this project is that a huge diversity of people lives here together and thus has to find ways how to do so peacefully. For this reason right in the beginning of the project, the community members decided that communal and public spaces would be vegetarian as the lowest common denominator. As cooking in the main kitchen is basically vegan, this enables people of all kinds of food regimes to have meals in the main house, while everyone is free to consume what they want in private kitchens.

 

Of course pretty much 100% of the food we produce, buy and consume is organic.

What we do not produce ourselves, we buy in from local / nearby producers on one hand but also from a wholesalers on the other. So far we hardly sell any produce to people from outside the ecovillage, most is needed by ourselves.

 

We aim for a big part of self-sufficiency in food. For the first ten years we did not have enough land to start an arable system, but we set up 3 hectares of organic vegetable and herb gardens that provide us with 75 % of our vegetable, fruit and herb needs on average of the year. We are working on improving season extension and storage space to further increase this figure.

 

Part of the vegetable garden integrates a fruit tree nursery. The main source of fruit are fruit tree alleys in the area surrounding the ecovillage that have been planted in the former german democratic republic and that are hardly harvested by anyone these days. Here we collect pears, apples, plums, cherries and other treasures.

In total we grow vegetables, herbs and fruit intensively on almost 3 hectares. A third of this is worked on with a small tractor, on another third we work on with horses. Both parts also use a lot of manual labor.

 

Besides these two bigger vegetable schemes there is a garden of about 2.000 m² that works with vegan-organic methods and only manual labor, i.e. integrating a lot of permacultural principles into gardening, like mulching, no dig and closed cycles.

There are also a few self-sufficiency patches by community members.

 

A setback permaculture-wise is that we had to decide where to place the garden land in relation to the building area. So now the garden is on the best land - but this also means that it is quite far away from the communal kitchen. This is okay in so far as we do not only need a small garden for a few people but quite a bit of area for the amount of vegetables that we use in the kitchen.

We expect that the groups that live together will grow some of their own food next to their kitchendoor, once the houses are built and time and energy are set free.

 

The soil is improved by green manure on one hand and by quite a lot of compost on the other. Part of the compost is made of the clover / grass that grows on the building land but: due to us not having a lot of land to grow compost material on plus there being only six horses whose manure is mainly needed to fertilize their meadows, we import manure from nearby sheep or horse farmers to build soil fertility.

Our compost that we produce in the composting toilets is used for planting hedges and fruit trees.

 

Since last year we own about 22 hectares of (conventional) arable land. We only just decided to rent this out to a local organic farmer who converts it to organic for us and uses it till we are set up to farm ourselves. So far we neither have the infrastructure nor the people to do it but we are actively searching for people that want to live with us and are up to setting up an organic agriculture scheme – this will be started on part of the land in 2012.

 

Cooking is being done communally for all that want this service - buffet for breakfast and dinner, a team of cooks that provides lunch for the community and seminar guests.

 

 

Forest managment

To increase stability, to provide habitat for a wider variety of animals and plants, for fire protection reasons and to enhance the local environment we gradually turn the 44 hectares of pine monoculture that we own into a mixed broadleaf woodland which is closer to what would be growing here weren't humans interfering.

This work is being done with the help of a lot of volunteers and with environmental programmes that provide us with plants. As there are not enough seeding broadleaf trees left, we support the development of a more natural woodland by planting. Existing pine trees are used both for firewood and as building material, and it is extracted with horses where possible.

When the newly planted or incoming trees are old enough we will turn more to a coppicing culture, which means cutting off trees that regrow several branches from the trunk and can then be cut every few years.

 

 

 

 

Site development - basic plan

Before any activity started on the newly found land in 1997, a group got funding to do an in-depth analysis of the site conditions (wind, temperatures, flora and fauna, ...) in order to be able to make a good design for the planned village. After this site analysis, a design was made using zone and sector analysis, zoning the building area into different areas of publicity and loudness.

The final design is one that we still stick to, putting the more public areas along the main path up to the center of the village (which is made up of a central square on which the former farm building is situated and where the new seminar center is planned). Around this, a little bit set back, is the semi-public area which is used by people that come as guests but stay longer than just one day. Further into the village, set back from public and semi-public spaces is the more private living area of the community members. Communal areas are close to the village center and in some parts closely intertwined with public and semi-public space.

As the settlement is supposed to be car-free, parking space is situated near the entrance. In order to reduce loud work to certain areas, woodworkshops and other louder trades are also situated on the near end of the village, close to the entrance for easy access of material transport.

 

Site development - placing houses

As this settlement is slowly growing over a wide timespan during which some people leave and a lot of new people come, there is no fix site-development plan. This is because we experience that some things just change over time or that formerly good ideas do not make so much sense anymore after a while (whereas others just stay.). There is a growing understanding for walking the "chaordic path" as a community, being present to the needs of each moment, rather than sticking to a plan.

When it comes to setting up the settlement, we develop general ideas about how and where we build can provide for our needs of privacy and relaxation - and at the same times makes sense to people coming. We work a lot with ideas and patterns of Christopher Alexander, an american architect that did very inspiring work on settlements.

In order to further this knowledge and to integrate the needs of people that want to build with the needs of the settlement, there is a group that accompanies new building initiatives in the process of finding a build site.

 

To save area and to seal as little land as possible, we set ourselves a limit of squaremeters per person for living area. We feel that we have a responsibility to be aware of the amount of land that we use for all kinds of activities, including housing.

The other action that we take is that we stick to strip or point foundations so as to reduce the area that is actually sealed by building a house. This is also due to our wish to use as little energy intensively produced concrete (and other building materials) as possible.

 

Houses and Housing

The central farm building was converted to the central building with the seminar center, communal kitchen, library, infrastructure and our big seminar room. The side complex is used with our organic food shop and a jewellery store, several offices and guest rooms and a bar.

So far we have built seven houses which give a home to 54 people and communal space for about 80 people. We also own a house in the nearby village whose 15 inhabitants are also members of the community. All the other that are not living in a house stay in circus caravans at the moment until we have built enough houses.

 

The first really simple and quick ecological buildings that we set up in 2001 are two modern low-energy houses. These integrate different co-operative structures for communal living (flat sharing, family, couples).

After these two, we decided to stick to strawbale building from now on. For this climate strawbales, wood and earth are great materials to build well insulated housing from local ressources. The German Strawbalebuilding Association was founded in Sieben Linden and we closely cooperate, supporting the spreading of straw-bale-building in Europe with our work. Between 2001-2003 one of the first strawbale houses with planning permission in Germany was built. This was built completely by hand using only regional materials (timber, straw and clay) and recycled materials.

 

As we want to be a model settlement, we experiment with all kinds of different ways of strawbale building, like infill, timberframe, loadbearing, prefabrication of wall elements and more.

 

The different groups that build look with varying intensity for regional, recycled or second hand building material - some houses were built to integrate rejected windows that were falsely produced for another building, others use recycled material for floors, windows and doors, roof tiles, and more. These all have different pros and cons - often the recycled material is not as energy efficient in use as new ones.

 

Housing in Sieben Linden is not built by individuals but by organisations, be it an association that a group of people founds to build together, or our Housing-Co-operative Sieben Linden eG, which built most of the houses so far. Here a group of people becomes a member and puts in their money into the co-operative, with the co-operative employing builders and buying the material. Our aim is to promote communal living - and to avoid that single people own a house which they might want to sell some day.

 

There are still quite a few people living in a circus caravan as we grow faster than we can build housing. Those people living in caravans do this officially, approved by the building authorities. We assured them (and ourselves) that in the long term we will reduce the number of caravans, also because we know that this form of living is not as sustainable as living in a house. We see to it that caravans are built as ecologically as possible (well insulated with natural materials, wind tight, no plastic caravans).

 

Challenges

Transport is a factor where we struggle - although we are commited to the development of the public transport in our region, we are still living in a very rural area and thus always in danger of public transport (bus, as the railway has already stopped operating) being thinned out further. We also have quite a few cars that still run on diesel; most of these cars are shared by all. There are two cars running on plant oil - we know that this is not the most sustainable way to operate and are still searching for alternatives.

 

 

 

social aspects

 

Age diversity

We live together with people of all ages (0 - 80 years) and both integrate a mentally challenged person and an nursing case into our community.

45 children and about 90 adults live in Sieben Linden at the moment, with the number constantly growing. The children are all aged between 0 and 15 years, so we only start to experience what it is like for the youths to live here. The youngest adult member of the community is 24 years old, with the main age group being people between 35 and 55 years.

 

Children

The children go to our forest kindergarden, which was founded very early in the history of the project and takes the children between 2 and 6 years outside into the woods and explores nature with them in all kinds of climates.

The school children go to 6 different schools in the region - while for many years all children went to the free school 25 km away from Sieben Linden, for the last 3 years the children and their parents also chose regular schools which are accessible with local buses and thus mean a lot less (time and money) effort for the parents.

A new local school will be founded during the coming months.

 

Youths

The generation gap between 15 and 25 years is filled somewhat by a large group of volunteers that do a volunteer service for 12 months in Sieben Linden. 7-10 people doing the service plus about 2-4 more young people between 17 and 25 live with the community for a while, work in different areas, learn all kinds of new skills about communication and self-organisation in their communal life on their caravan site.

 

Elderly

There are quite a few people that chose to live in Sieben Linden at a high age. Some of them are parents of community members and live together in a house with others in a family with 3 generations. Others came on their own and are integrated in groups, or live on their own in a caravan, in close contact with the people living around them.

We aim to be integrative (for people that hear badly, for people that are not as mobile anymore,...) and to take good care of our elderly. As we have physiotherapists living here, we are - to a certain degree - able do this on a professional level, when someone is in special need. For the future we hope to set up really good elderly-friendly infrastructure in the houses we build and in the way we organise.

 

Dying

Of course dying is part of living in a community. About 3 years ago the first person died in this community which was a really new experience for all of us in this setting.

We bury our dead on the nearby village cemetary. Here we are fortunately able to hold ceremonies that support us in our way of saying goodbye to loved ones.

 

Living together

The idea of community life in Sieben Linden is to be a “community of communities”. The big Ecovillage community is supposed to divide itself into smaller groups, so-called "neighborhoods", with their own concepts and way of life. This creates the space for people with completely different ideals to co-exist. Our common goal is to question our habits of consumption: challenging the world-wide exploitation of humans, animals and the environment. On top of what we as a community decided upon how we want to achieve this goal, neighbourhoods can find their own answers to this.

When a neighbourhood is founded (by at least 3 adult members of Sieben Linden), they can ask for a piece of land to live and build on.

At the moment, there are five neighbourhoods with different concepts.

The oldest was called “Club99”, has 6 members at the moment and they follow a radical concept trying to show that it is possible to live a simple fulfilled life that reduces ressource consumption by 90% (following a study that was made in the mid-nineties which claims that an inhabitant of Germany would have to reduce his ressource consumption by 90% for his lifestyle to be sustainable) on their piece of land. They are just in the process of finishing their second house which will be inhabited both by members and non-members of the neighbourhood. This house is a good example how we have to deal flexibly with our own ideas and concepts that we come up with. The group split up at the end of 2010 for various reasons.

One other neighbourhood basically got together because their children were roughly similar age and they wanted to move into a house quickly. So their neighbourhood was based on creating living space for the families and flat sharing communities for about 20 people.

A third neighbourhood consists of 8 people of which most live in a house together, and their main issues are healing and spirituality.

Then there is a group which is just in the process of finishing their house which will be home to 14 people. This neighbourhood has a close link to the public center of the village and is situated at the same time in the middle of the housing area. This is a symbol for their connectedness to the idea of the village and its promotion as well as to the community living here. They rather want to show ways of life that are not too far away from so-called average people and their lifestyles.

The fourth and biggest group with 17 people is living in a house that belongs to Sieben Linden but is situated in Poppau, the nearby village (1 km distance). This group is living with 3 generations in one big house that is slowly being renovated.

So far a bit more than half of the inhabitants of Sieben Linden live in a neighbourhood, the others are either living in smaller groups sharing flats or on their own, not associated to a group.

 

Communication

It is our aim to create a new culture together, an important part of which is how we communicate. We wish for everyone living in Sieben Linden to be in a "communication circle" of some sort, both for people to enhance their communication skills as for each person to be part of a social network.

As the first years of doing plenary together became more and more hard for everyone because personal conflicts and daily life issues were so often intermingled in discussions, it became clear that it is neccessary to seperate the the emotional issues from the facts that were to be decided upon in the plenary.

Due to this, we started to work with a method called "Forum" as early as in 1999. This method aims at transparency, openness and trust. It works in stable groups and uses parts of action theatre as well as gestalt therapy, although it is definitely not a substitution for therapy! But it helps to express feelings and thoughts in a safe space and to explore their origin. It also offers space for feedback by the group. This tool basically enables people to see each other with new eyes, for example in a conflict, without aiming at solving the conflict - it only wants to make it visible.

This method is used in some neighbourhoods, there is a forum for those that are not in a neighbourhood, and the whole community works with it when we do "intensive weeks" together.

Some people have been working with non-violent communication for many years, others are mediators and offer their knowledge to help in conflicts. There are many more different models of group interaction (supervision, talking stick, sharings, fish bowl, etc.).

All in all, we devote a lot of time to social processes in our community and slowly we reap the fruit of this ongoing work. There is a high level of awareness in communication with each other, a feedback that we often get by visitors, too.

To create enough room for emotional issues on a communal level, we started to do intensive weeks / weekends many years ago. Here as many people of Sieben Linden as have time meet to share how they are, sometimes about certain issues, sometimes

 

Decision making culture

The decision making model of Sieben Linden underwent several changes during the last 11 years. From consensus decision making in weekly plenaries about everything from new teapots to roads to be built, to monthly assemblies and an extended system of small groups and now to councils.

At the moment we have five councils that have relatively wide freedom of decision for the following areas: settlement co-operative, friends of the ecovillage association, food production, housing, social. All the other areas are either subgroups of the councils or little extra groups that do not decide on much on their own.

Additional to these councils we still meet in general assemblies once a month to discuss the big issues like who wants to be admitted to the community and where to put the next house.

The councils meet every two weeks, all meetings are open to everyone. Every second Tuesday evening all councils meet for half an hour to report to each other and the whole community what they are currently talking about and what decisions need to be made.

Decisions in the councils are to be made by consensus, in the assembly we have a majority vote but with an option to have a veto in case someone really cannot live with a decision that is to be made. In general we ask everyone to give inputs and to inform themselves before a decision is to be made and not in the moment of taking the decision.

 

Education

As a model settlement we offer a wide range of courses and also opportunities for groups to come.

Courses include Permaculture Design Courses, the Ecovillage Design Education (a four week course initiated by Gaia Education providing skills how to set up Ecovillages), Dragon Dreaming, straw bale building, plastering, different communication methods and healing approaches (massage, Shiatsu, systemic therapy,...), wild herbs, communication with horses, music (drumming, choir,...), and many more.

We regularly have school classes, university groups, groups of people doing a volunteer service, etc. here for day trips or whole weeks and offer tours and all kinds of practical experience or theoretical knowledge to them.

There are many opportunities to get to know Sieben Linden and its different aspects in so-called "building weeks", in internships, and in volunteer services for young people - so far there is the "Freiwilliges Oekologisches Jahr" which is a year long program in Germany for young people aged 16 to 26. We might start to offer places in EVS (European Volunteer Service), too - this will then be different time spans (2-12 months) and for people between 18 and 30 years.

 

 

Economy

Part of the economical structure of Sieben Linden is that we are common owners of the land through the Settlement Co-operative. There is quite a bit of solidarity around money, for example when someone cannot pay the shares of the co-operative right away, people lend each other money without interest.

Together we are organised in an Association which provides us with all the food we need. To this association we pay a fixed amount of money per day spent in Sieben Linden. For this money each of us can consume according to their needs. Children below 12 are financed by all of us.

Apart from this, everyone is responsible for their own economy and thus for how to live in Sieben Linden. Quite a few people have a small job with social insurance in the ecovillage (working in the kindergarden, the seminar center, information office,...), only a handfull of people have a job in the surrounding area (youth center, hospital).

A lot of people are selfemployed and earn money inside the ecovillage and outside of it, of course quite a few of these work on the built sites. This is also the main area where we have a lot of guests and also craftsmen coming from other places to help as we do not have enough people skilled in the necessary crafts.

As enterprises there is the seminar-centre, a jewellery-shop, a small publisher, artists, counsellors, organic vegetable-growers, a horse trainer, a fruit tree nursery, a wild herbs delivery, body therapists and craftsmen.

 

 

Worldview

When it comes to spirituality, this is a project where everyone is free to express and / or live it the way they like - or not at all for that matter. There is no "guru" here nor a common belief system, although most of us believe in personal development and some sort of interconnectedness of all life.

We see ourselves as a peace project which takes on responsibility for the future. It is our goal to remind ourselves of what we want the future to be like and to work on making this positive vision become reality. Thus we aim towards being a positive example - for our own children as well as for others. That is why we want to share our experience and our knowledge in our seminar center.

Some of us are organised in political action groups on a local or national level, e.g. we helped found a GMO-free zone in this region, demonstrated against a big turkey hen breeding place nearby, we raise awareness against nuclear power and the waste dumps that are planned in the local area, we take action against climate change and, for the last year, activities against “CCS” (Compressed Carbon Storage – underground storing of CO2 in gas cavernes, a very dangerous technique) have been most pressing to our region.

Other people work in communal politics and the next ones mainly put their energy into setting up the village.

We didn't agree on a common political statement apart from wanting human life to be more ecological sound (which is pretty political in itself) but to us one thing is very clear: there is no room for discrimination in this project.

 

 

Project Needs

We set up this project as a learning space, for us and for others.

As we are still building houses for the next years and doing this is a lot of work, we welcome people to help us out on the build sites, in turning our monocultural forest into a broadleaf-diversity, in preserving the many fruit that we collect on our site and around, in the garden...

In exchange we offer the experience of living in a sustainable project that has many different features and aspects. Most people that come here leave inspired and impressed - be it for the holistic approach with such an emphasis on ecology, for being part of a different way of living together or for other things - and with the wish to come back. We also welcome our guests to offer what they want to share (yoga, singing together, travel experiences, cultural backgrounds,...).

And: we definitely need money to build houses and in this very moment (beginning of 2009) we are looking for sponsors for the seminar center we are planning to start next year!

 

More information:

http://www.siebenlinden.de

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