Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

The SolarVillage of Tamera:
Technical and Ecological Knowledge
for Peace Villages Worldwide
Introduction
Imagine a Solar Village, a research, training and experimental site where ‘tinkerers,
inventors and masterminds‘ of all kinds come together to collaborate in the creation of
the low energy-intensive, low capital-investment, high need technologies of the future.
This is the Tamera independent peace journalist Leila Dregger paints in this poetic essay.
Of course, that’s because she was writing for Module 3 of the EDE. Another writing
application would have been cause to paint a different picture, for Tamera is a multifaceted
global peace village and prototype healing biotope.
Leila Dregger – Tamera Biotope, Portugal
Alentejo, southern Portugal, in August…
Behind a beautiful coastline, brown and grey hills are rolling endlessly.
No rivers. No creeks. No forests. In many villages half of the houses have
turned into ruins. The extensive cork oak plantations – once the pride of the
region – are being replaced by eucalyptus for big paper corporations. Black
hills with thousands of tree skeletons covered with ashes are what remains
after one of the many forest fires.
Watching humus turning into dust and being blown away by warm
winds, one can easily imagine that the Sahara is growing North, that it has
extended over Gibraltar and is slowly entering the Iberian Peninsula. This
land is crying, and its tears are made of dust.
Desertification is not only a Portuguese tragedy. The Peloponnesus,
southern France, southern Italy, Andalusia – regions which used to feed the
whole continent – nowadays import 80% of their food. What will we eat
and drink when southern Europe has turned into a desert? Local strategies
are urgently needed, solutions which can be applied in many places, with the
knowledge and experience for local communities to provide themselves with
the most basic needs and become independent from the big supply systems.
The peace research center Tamera, located in the hottest part of the
Alentejo, has started the SolarVillage project, an experimental village for
the autonomous supply of energy, food, and clean water, using easy-to-build
technologies which can be constructed in regional workshops. Tamera,
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