When I said I am going to Goa for one month, people always gave me a shocked and envious reaction. "One month is a long time for a vacation in Goa! So lucky!" Now that I recently got married, I am not going on my usual lonely exploratory travels where I spend a month or two with different NGOs in India. This time it is a India 'darshan' year with my sweet companion. However I do try to continue to at least visit if not volunteer at many different amazing initiatives that are happening everywhere I go. This time I would like to tell you about GAIAMITRA located on the Goa-Maharashtra border. Recently I completed my Permaculture Design Certification from New York, NY. After completing this course and understanding the principles and practices of permaculture, I am convinced that this is one of the best alternatives we have for our future and the health of the environment. I have written other blog posts about what the principles of permaculture are and I have been excited to learn about different people and projects that are trying to adopt and implement these principles. In Goa I had the opportunity to connect with GaiaMitra, a movement of people who are committed towards providing a working alternate model to our current capitalist and economic models of development. The foundation, root or the heart of this movement is care for nature. The core principles of permaculture that have been adopted by the GaiaMitra movement are living ethically with care for the earth and people through efficient designs that minimize consumption and increase ecological health. While I had the opportunity to be with the members of GaiaMitra only for 6 days, they gave me their whole hearted attention, explaining with great patience and detail the project's current work and their vision. Being someone who loves working in teams, I found the GaiaMitra team to be wonderfully diverse, self-motivated, and close-knit, all the qualities a great team needs. What was very striking and encouraging for me was to see extremely committed young Indians working in a self-governed manner for this work. Some of them have committed to giving 10 years to this project. Each member was specialized in their own field such as education, biodiversity mapping, website content management, natural building, visualizing functioning alternate economic models, organizing local farmers, permaculture farming, wholesome cooking etc. The work of GaiaMitra can be divided into two physical sections. For the last 4 years or so they have been working on an 11 acre demonstration plot in Gulduve village in Maharashtra which is very close to the Goa border. The second section is an area called Tilari in Maharashtra consisting of pristine forest land that is owned by several different farmers and covers approximately 3500 acres. The demonstration plot is where they have been experimenting with natural house building, crop and vegetable growing, food processing, and other such techniques. The goal is to create a livelihood system for local farmers to encourage them to retain their lands and to stay back in their villages rather than migrate in search for urban jobs. The situation with farmers in the Tilari region is similar and GaiaMitra is making efforts to convince the several hundred farmers of that area to hold on to their lands instead of selling them to land developers and become a part of the GaiaMitra permaculture project. Approximately half the farmers in the Tilari region have agreed and let us hope the rest of the farmers in the 3500 acres will also accept. The vision for these several thousand acres of land and people in Tilari is several fold which is best understood through this beautiful visual presentation that can be seen here (may be unavailable at the moment). To me this is an extremely exciting project as it combines so many essential aspects of the functioning of society and recreating them to influence true and deep system change. Permaculture is exactly about that...learning , changing, and redesigning the foundation of our entire lifestyle as an individual and species. The aspect of the project that appealed to me the most was the visualization of an alternative economic system that places its value in the health and prosperity of ecological systems. Our current economic systems value profit and endless linear growth through exploitation of natural resources and expansion of the market. But at GaiaMitra they will try to create a system that places the economic standard on the value of a tree which is kept at Rs.10,000. Detailed understanding of this concept can be found on their website or by emailing them, but what is important to understand here is the shift from seeing nature as a resource to be exploited to preserving the health of ecological systems due to their complete benefit to humans. The principles of ethics and nature-rootedness in all human activities provides the environment with intrinsic and instrumental value. GaiaMitra combines the aspects of ecologically sound local livelihoods creation, environmental education and conservation, regenerative economic and ecological synthesis, renewable energy, and social empowerment to name a few. A true synthesis of all these with extremely well designed implementations can lead to radical and sustainable social and ecological change for the better. I hope with all my heart that in the next 10 years the seeds of this project will be sown and the fruits will be enjoyed by many future generations of plants, animals, birds, and humans to come. Gulduve and Tilari are very beautiful places but even more beautiful and amazing are the GaiaMitra members. Join them and share your talents! To know more please visit: http://GaiaMitra.in/wp/contact-us/
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