Projects
- Empowering through Action. The SLC and its members are doing something every day to make our world a better place. We actively demonstrate how easy and rewarding it is to live an environmentally conscious life.
Edible Cityscapes
Edible Cityscapes provides fruit trees at a modest cost along with hands on instruction on how to plant and care for them. We'd like to fill the city landscape with edible and useful trees. This is an annual event started in 2009. Our goal is to planting an "urban orchard" of thousands of edible trees in backyrads, front yards, and public open space over the next few years.
Trees are leafy umbrellas on a hot summer day. Trees are habitat for birds and bugs of all kinds. Trees inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen for us all to breathe. Trees are hardy water reservoirs, purifying and transpiring up to 2,000 gallons/day that later falls as rain! Trees make great windbreaks and can even help us reduce energy costs if we place them properly on the land.
- Please keep an eye on our events calendar in early April when we will once again be selling young trees and holding planting workshops. Don't have room to plant in your own yard? Adopt a fruit tree and we will plant it on the SLC Eco-Design Center Campus or at a place in town of your choosing.
- Natural Earth Plaster Workshops
- This summer we are planning a number of earth plaster projects. We will be applying a finish coat to barn interior as well as the exterior, we will also begin the exterior and interior of our eco-nest cabin. We are working with top cob experiementers: The Mullenneaux family, Brad Young and Robert Laport. Email krsieck
gmail [dot] com to find out more information about how to learn more or get involved.
- SLC Fairfield Ecological Design Center
On August 22, 2009 we hosted a successful open house to introduce the public to the new SLC Fairfield Ecological Design Center.This new facility at the corner of 185th and B street is set on 10 acres of previously vacant agricultural land. It boasts a new straw bale main building powered by solar panels and has a rainwater catchment system. This summer it was host to our annual Permaculture Design Certification course and numerous natural building, gardening, and community workshops. Future plans include: raising a 1 kW wind turbine that will ensure our power supply stays constant during the sunless Iowa winter, building two small Econest dorms with Robert Laporte and Maharishi University of Management, and expanding our permaculture gardens and food forest.
- Big Green Summer
Our flagship project, a 10-week summer internship, Big Green Summer provides education and practical experience in imagining, creating, and advocating for beyond-sustainable communities - human settlements that work with natures design to celebrate the abundance of life on earth. Students live in an environment that is a laboratory for what they are learning - high performance buildings built of natural, local materials, utilizing solar and wind power, with organic gardens, rain collection, and community service. Students take part in classroom study as well as participate in hands on projects including: renewable energy, organic agriculture, local food systems, perennial crops, agroforestry, edible landscaping, water and waste systems, building with local, natural materials, and using biofuels. Student learn about the the transformation required by our current social, cultural, and political institutions in order to make the transition to a sustainable economy practical, possible, and desirable.
- Angoon Conservation Initiative
Angoon, Alaska sits on the eastern shore of the Admiralty Island National Monument; a six-hour ferry ride off the cost of Juneau and home to 424 Tlingit tribal members. The community largely depends on subsistence living that includes the gathering of wild resources for food and other local needs. What cannot be gathered locally is shipped from the mainland at a cost that is crushing to the Angoon Tribal community.
On top of transportation costs, tribal members pay 60 cents/kwh (6 - 10 times what the lower 48 states typically pays) for electricity. In 2008 the fire station could not afford heat; pipes froze, and tragedy struck the community when a fire could not be put out. The power to the water company was shut off. It was a chilling glimpse into a future where the price of energy begins to affect the very fabric of community life.
- The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, have offered scholarship money for 2-3 Angoon residents to attend Big Green Summer. The plan is to revitalize the Angoon community through community education, community and school gardens, conservation practices, and the completion of a pilot project in which two to three homes will be taken off the grid with solar and wind power with the assistance of MUM students.
- Analog Forestry
Analog forestry is a system of silviculture management that seeks to establish a tree-dominated ecosystem analogous in architectural structure and ecological function to the original climax or sub-climax vegetation community. It seeks to enhance the well-being of rural communities and their relationship with the natural environment. It encourages economic activity through the use of species that provide marketable products. Analog Forestry provides a promising means of addressing important issues such as forest restoration, soil conservation, carbon sequestration, and community resilience.
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