Our roots go back to 1970 with a long history of environmental action including watershed protection and land stewardship. Today, Acterra focuses its efforts on the most urgent issue of our time: climate change.
Our roots go back to 1970 with a long history of environmental action including watershed protection and land stewardship. Today, Acterra focuses its efforts on the most urgent issue of our time: climate change.
Looking at the Okamura-Breedlove map, and speculating about the area that it represents, I am aware that I am looking at a picture of home. I’ve been over and around and across and through most of it at one time or another. It’s really a map of coyotes and billy owls, hawks circling in the sky, oak trees, chamise, sun-scorched grass and dripping wet forests. […]
(From Raise the Stakes: The Planet Drum Review #13, Winter 1988) In discussing the greening of cities, one is reminded of the slogan that the French students used in 1968. On their posters they said “all that we want to change is everything,” which comes from that famous ecological dictum, “everything is connected to everything else.” When we pull a thread, we may in fact unwind a […]
Planet Drum has been collecting organic waste from the Bahía market since September. Several of the vendors help by collecting damaged fruit, plantain stalks, and other pieces of organic waste in 25 gallon barrels. To show our gratitude for their assistance, and include locals in the entire process of compost production to fruit tree production, we hosted a tree donation campaign with our market helpers. […]
Planet Drum Foundation purchased land outside the city of Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador to expand the Bioregional Education Projects to include adults and college students. In 2010 Peter Berg wrote A School to Retrieve the Future, an essay describing the newly initiated BSI—the vision behind the Institute and it’s curriculum. (Note: this is no longer available. It is included as archival historical information.) A Call for […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador These are life-altering times across the planet for practically all major aspects of human endeavor. Arching over the shifts that are taking place in social, political, economic, and cultural areas that all of us are experiencing is the urgent need to recognize and accommodate our species’ utter dependence on the viability of Earth’s natural systems. It is a mutual concern shared […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador It is a particularly hard winter of blizzards this year in the Northern Hemisphere and a hot summer marked by forest fires in the Southern, but in Ecuador where sharply defined seasons elsewhere are equatorially ambiguous it is the time of rain at night and, if there is no blanket of gray overcast, baking sun during the day. Downpours range from […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador October’s gray, overcast skies in coastal Ecuador are generally constant and cover over even sunrise and set (caida del sol or “fall of the sun”). This makes for pleasantly cool weather despite melancholy moods. It has been called “the gringo month” even though tourists are mostly absent because of the resemblance to Seattle or London (and perhaps the tendency to stare ahead […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador Bahia de Caraquez is a working lesson in urban livability that collapsing industrial society urgently needs to adopt. For a transition toward a more sustainable future, new techniques and practices alone aren’t enough. By themselves they give off a chilly contrived feeling that rings false and heightens a sense of displacement rather than belonging. There needs to be a spirit and […]