One of the most frequent criticisms leveled against the sustainable agriculture movement is that its proponents want to send farmers back to 19th-century hard labor, with hand weeding and harvesting. Here's an incredibly cool group of eco-minded "farmer-scientists" who aren't in the least afraid of technology -- and in fact believe in "creating industrial processes that are fully in harmony with ecologically responsible living."
The Open Source Ecology team's first, ambitious project is the Global Village Construction Set -- a sort of life-size Erector set of the most essential machines for building a "small civilization with modern-day comforts," including housing and the means for food, energy, and technology production.
The Global Village Construction Set is currently the leading contender in Make magazine's Green Project contest: voting closes Dec 31 at midnight. It's just ahead of two other interesting but far less radical projects, the Upcycle Exchange and FabMo, both of which seek to divert materials from the waste stream and into the craft communities.
Open Source Ecology, by contrast, is about "hacking society" via permaculture principles. "We are proposing high-tech neosubsistence -- or the capacity to live from local resources by use of advanced, appropriate technology, without requiring any compromise on quality of life," writes Marcin Jakubowski, the project leader and "sparkplug," on the group's blog. "It is difficult to get people to think out of the box -- that totally sustainable, regenerative, resilient economies are a choice -- and that we are proposing a solution to implement these technologies."
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-12-29-farmer-scientists-want-to-hack-society
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