Big Sur Powerdown
A co-created localized community
Big SurPowerdown is our community cooperating and communicating to address diminishing natural resources and climate change by applying strategies forrelocalizing our resources, reducing fossil fuel dependency and having fun while doing it. Our intent with Big Sur Powerdown is to educate the populace of Big Sur and ourselves about the long-term problems and ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Feb 21, 2008
Updated: Nov 02, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
markroest
markroest
User Info
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| My Groups: | WEversity |
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Areas of Focus
About
I am about designing and providing tools to enable humanity to learn to live in harmony with each other and all our relations. These tools include the scope covered in Design Earth, and those that support our spirituality. They range from windmills to ICTs to knowledge content arranged by what is truly useful for each ecosystem and culture.
Design Earth, which I co-founded with David Alan Foster, is about design of sustainable products, economies, and information systems that facilitate creating and managing them. One freebie as an example: make a venturi from reeds and cloth, with a variable intake opening, and put openings at the top just past where it first gets narrow to pour un-threshed grain in, and at the bottom, a bit downwind of the upper one, for grain to fall into a bag tied onto a rim at the bottom of a short spout, and chaff blows out the front end, where it can be collected and used for mulch or biofuels. No more holding winnowing baskets over your head to shake them in the breeze. The venturi concentrates and accelerates the wind, and the openings (and the ability to control the opening at the upwind end) channel the crop so very little is lost, and much labor (and time) is saved! Every culture that grows grain knows how to weave with reeds and make cloth. This is now hereby in the public domain (per Mark Roest, its inventor). We have lots more ideas, and support inventors and artisans who have innumerable others, including Lawrence Bosch, inventor of the Captive Column structural system <www.captivecolumn.com>, Flashcore Honeycomb, and a hydrogen economy.
oneVillage Foundation, which I advise, is about community-building and sustainable economic development, using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as catalysts, and knowledgebases as critical resources, to enable people to realize their full potential. One focus is on addressing HIV/AIDS as an opportunity (and challenge) for us to maximize our human potential, to defeat it, and to live well in the face of it.
Earth Treasury, which I serve on the Board of, is about creating a global, diverse education curriculum that works for children and the people they want to become; about connecting children and supporting them in creating international businesses, and about ensuring that everyone, including children, is included in the global conversation about what we want our world to be like (and what we need to do to save it).
WorldVistA, which I evangelize, is about bringing the hospital and clinic information management system (also known as an electronic health record system) that runs the Veterans Administration hospitals to the world, as open source, free software, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I support its potential to become a public health information system when GPS and GIS are added, and to become the foundation for outcomes research and a health care knowledgebase that gives primacy to natural health and healing modalities, including classic medical systems such as the Chinese, the Ayurvedic, the Eclectic, Naturopathic and Chiropractic, and Shamanic and Herbal healing in all their indigenous and 'western' forms.
I checked off a lot of fields of interest because I actually am interested in all of them (because they are vital facets of the Whole), and have a vision of how most of them can respond to the opportunities of new paradigms of partnership, non-dualism, and the recognition that the animals and plants are our kin, and about how they can use (ICTs) to realize that potential (and stop global warming and save the world while we are at it).
Namaste'
Thank you, Mark,
Wael and I became friends a few months ago and are conducting right now, a lively conversation on WEversity under the provocative topic I don't believe in Palestine I don't believe in Isreal nor Germany ...
I most certainly want to hear about your idea. The immediate thought which comes to mind with plant used as a building material for this region, is that the climate is too hot for it to be effective, at least as a long term solution... I personally don't have a recollection of a single wood house there, but things may have changed... Having said that, any house will be better than none.
I am looking forwards
Narda