What does a resilient community look like?

Imagine living in a completely self-sustainable, self-reliant community that grows all of its own food, provides its own electricity, and pumps its own water.

What are the economics of such a community?  Think about what it would mean for instance if you had no bills for electricity, water or gas, and spent next to nothing on groceries because all of your food could be procured from a community farm or garden right outside of your back door?

How much would it cost to develop such a community?  How much would people pay to be a part of it?  What would a homeowner’s agreement or a CID even look like? Are resilient communities like this even possible or are they just a passing fad?

While it probably doesn’t look like much at the moment, the pictures below represent what I hope will be a really cool experiment to provide some answers to those questions and more.

The background…

Several months ago, we purchased a wee bit of prime Panama tierra (one hectare, or about 2 ½ acres) in a stunningly beautiful part of the country as part of a demonstration project – an initial “proof of concept” on one the most important aspects of resilient living – self sustainable food production.

What you’re looking at is the first raised organic vegetable bed we constructed. (Okay, I’ll be honest, the “we” part is a bit misleading… A friend and partner in this little endeavor who’s a permaculture expert actually built it, but I lent moral support with a couple “attaboy” emails… Just doing my part. )

In any case, raised vegetable beds are fairly new even to the permaculture/organic farming world, but the concept is sound: Plants at ground level compete with other plants, thus you can spend a lot of time hunched over weeding.  Raised beds avoid a lot of the weeding hassle while also making mulching, composting, pruning and harvesting that much easier.

It’s hard to tell from the photos, but the vision is to construct an entire hillside of these organic vegetable beds approximately 50-60 feet in length and that closely follow the contours of the property.   The entire project will be irrigated with a solar-powered well being drilled right now.

The first bed here was constructed using the cuttings of plantation teak and corotu posts that local woodworkers couldn’t use. The first phase will include four planters… The two you see above, another below that will be wider for watermelon, cantaloupe or other vining/running plants and then a fourth herb circle.  The planters are spaced about 4 feet apart to utilize as much space as possible for growing, while leaving room for wheelbarrows and other farm implements and making it easy to walk down each row and forage from both sides.

So far, 24 different varieties of seeds have been planted, and we’re already starting to see some arugula and Swiss chard.  It looks like we’ve got an orange tree springing up as well.

If you want to get an idea of what we’re aiming for, here’s a fantastic urban farm concept in Australia that makes use of intensively efficient land use that will blow your mind.

As I’ve written before, the climate here in Panama is an ideal year-round climate for growing, so I’m very optimistic that before long we’ll have more food than we know what to do with.  As our permaculture expert wrote to me in an email last week, with just a 40 foot bed, “that’s mucho food gordito.”

But that’s just the start… In addition to the food production aspect, Trey and I are also exploring what resilient housing might look like in such a community.  If communities of the future will be built around self-sustainable food production, what will homes of the future look like?  In other words, what are the possibilities and practicalities for completely off-grid living?

Fortunately, folks way smarter and more visionary than us are already exploring those questions.   In fact, while it’s too early to get into details, we’ve had some interesting discussions with some sustainable housing experts at a U.S. university who are interested in helping us look for answers.

Interestingly, we’re not the only ones in Panama thinking about such concepts either.  Not far from our little farm is a family who just completed their own off-grid beach house utilizing solar power and passive cooling.  They are in the process of constructing their own organic farm as I write.

And to get a sense of what resilient communities might look like on a much larger scale, check out the Kalu Yala jungle project – a visionary tropical frontier settlement in the middle of the Panama jungle that is being established as perhaps the world’s first resilient town.

Why is all of this happening now? As John Robb points out, resilient communities are the logical answer to an increasingly unstable global system.  The concept introduces organic stability into the smallest viable subset of social systems – the community, and allows them to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being vulnerable to its disruptions.

Here’s the point: The concepts of resiliency and self-sustainability are no longer confined just to hippie communes, “preppers” or survivalists.  The ideas behind resilient communities and resilient living are very rapidly going mainstream.

We’ll be writing much more about this in the months to come, so stay tuned to this space…