Wilder Tribe

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Building A Vision

kaseja and her chainsaw clearing space for forestry work

We are about to have a review of our three month prospective membership at Lost Valley. If we get approved, we'll be here a year more as exploring members. If we're still loving it, and we're still approved after that then we become long term members. kaseja is really loving being here. She'll often say to me, "Marty, can we be here forever?" or "Can we have our kids grow up here?" Yesterday, she did a practice exercise where you envision your life's path and think about what you can do to align yourself with your path. She was so struck with how much is already in alignment with her life's path. She was telling me about it and I said to her "Do you mean you don't have to say 'Someday, can we do this or that?' You mean someday has come?" She said yes and then burst into tears.

Then she asked if I felt the same and I told her to ask me in a year or two after I start building our house. I feel like Lost Valley really has it together around the building community part in terms of the people aspect. But they're real shy around the building aspect. It seems like Emerald Earth is kind of the opposite. I mentioned EE to a woman here named Dianne since she was headed down your that anyway. She said she had already got a request from Emerald Earth for input on how we do consensus. I brought it up to her cuz I thought it would be prime if we could work up some sort of a trade. We could put together a combination consensus and personal growth, personal intercommunication workshop for them. In turn, they could send a party up here to help us build.

I'm on a committee that's putting together a master building plan for Lost Valley. We aim to have the plans complete and approved by next November. I'm really excited about this and that I'm learning CAD. My role is to digitize all of Lost Valley's mapping. Right now, all we have are some scattered blueprints inherited from the previous residents over 15 years ago.

It's still pretty vague what exactly we want to build, but a few things that seem key are co-op housing, a community center, and a kid center/school. Right now, the non-profit owns the land and all the members pay rent. The co-op would allow members to hold equity. And any new development we do, we want to be natural building. I was actually shocked to come here and see that most of the buildings are inefficient old cedar shake cabins. In terms of sustainability, over the past couple of years Lost Valley has been working to insulate these old cabins to make them more energy efficient. The idea is that when the electrical consumption (used to heat the cabins) is optimal, then we can get off the grid. They had a few cob and papercrete experiments here and there in non-living space kind of sheds and things. Some said that was because they couldn't get the county to approve anything else. But that's not the case anymore. There are several people living here besides me who want to see more natural building, but no one's really confident about getting the ball rolling.

Anyway, was it Mike that I was talking to when I was working on the rammed earth foundation at Emerald Earth? I want to get in contact with someone who could give me some guidance on what ze thinks we should do over here to prepare to do some development, how to raise capital and what to get ready. We are about to do some forest thinning and use some of the lumber to sell as income for future building. But we also want to keep some lumber, too. Rick, the land steward here, asked me to think about what we think we'll need in way of lumber. I told him posts and beams cuz I want to make big straw bale structures. I want to get talking with people who are in the know so I can make some intelligent choices.