Keep your eye on P2PU come March, as sign-ups for our slew of new and amazing courses is set to begin, not to mention a new-fangled website!

www.p2pu.org

Things are really heating up on campus. And this time the producers of Girls-Gone-Wild have nothing to do with it. Check out this post from eduFire.com about the recent student protests at Berkeley ( http://blog.edufire.com/2009/11/20/dont-think-theres-a-big-problem-with-education-ok-watch-this-video ). They're not protesting a war or international scandal, they're protesting the cost of tuition...

When Ann and I started AlternativeGradSchool.org most folks didn't understand our mission. Hopefully it's clear now. The fire under the ass of academia's ivy walls has finally been lit, but in the scorching glow I can't help feeling a great sadness for the multitudes of Americans who are finally coming to terms with the cost of higher education. 

To the folks waving banners and slam dancing with riot police at the "let's hike tuition by 32%" disco - I say 'party on'.

But we also encourage you to protest peacefully. Abandon the stifling walls of American tuition and start your own alternative grad school!

The first annual P2PU meeting in Berlin was wildly successful. Ann and I will be offering LAND RESTORATION again, but this time as a project based course. Entry into the course will require submitting a proposal to restore a degraded landscape in your community, whether it be urban, agricultural, wild or water. We encourage everyone to keep their eyes on P2PU.org to see whats being offered next! Courses start Jan/Feb 2010!

The results are in! John D Britton put together a chart on sigh-ups for the first phase of P2PU. We had a large number of folks from all around the world sign up for "Land Restoration & Afforestation". Ann and I are very excited to begin this experiment in peer learning on 09/09/09 !

Alison and I were interviewed a few weeks back for an article in Popular Science on the usage of MIT OpenCourseWare in our AlternativeGradSchool project.  Click here to read the article!

This is a morning view of the vegan kitchen through the tropical organic gardens. To chef outdoors, barefoot and soot-covered for dozens of hungry foresters is something I may never get over. Our vegan diet was very simple. The forbidding of tea, coffee, chili, sugar, oil, masala, pasta, or any processed foods left us with only fruits, vegetables, legumes and rice to cook with. To sweeten our food we used palm sap, or jaggery, which was always sabotaged by ants. If I had helpers with enough gusto, we would whack open coconuts, grind out the pulp and squeeze out the milk.. so heavenly.. and insanely laborious to derive. Hours of whacking, grinidng and squeezing would yield just a few silky cups. But it was worth it. Cooking during the height of mango season was also amazing. Mango curry, mango soup, mango salad, mango rice... There were a whole array of incredible fruits, some which I found revolting - like papaya and chicu- and some like jack fruit.. eat it and the sins of the world just washed away.

The brick entities on the right are rocket stoves. Cylindrical wood stoves of incredible efficiency and temperatures. They took a bit of mastering, but once a harmony was achieved, you could make anything on them. They're much safer than the traditional fires the local Tamils cook over. These stoves will be one of the largest propellants for my return to Auroville. I must learn how to build them! 


Our diet in the forest had a profound effect on my cooking philosophy. At first I was offended by the eschewing of spices, sugars and oils. But then I reminded myself to take the challenge and create something of beauty with it. It was an awesome experience!

At 5:30am we awake from a myriad of grass-roofed huts to the poem or song of the week's designated waker-upper. It's the best way to wake up. At 6am we gather for a circle of meditation and focus before "first work". Then volunteers disperse to tend to the newly planted forest, water the organic gardens, then return at 8am for breakfast - local porridge with jaggery (palm sugar) and bowls full of pomegranate, mango and papaya. After breakfast we again disperse for "second work", usually comprising community upkeep - stirring composting toilets, swinging the solar panels, stirring the spirulina pool, chopping wood and fixing bicycles. Appetites don't stay satisfied long in the hot Indian sun, and lunch is eagerly served at noon. To obtain protein on the forest's devotedly vegan diet, we must combine rices with lentils or beans. After lunch we are set free to do as we please. Afternoons are too hot here (100F) for work. Usually skill sharing workshops are held, or folks venture into Auroville or Pondicherry for cold drinks. We meet again for dinner at 6pm. In the evenings most folks lounge in the main hut playing music and games but few manage to stay awake past 8:30pm. The days combined with the heat are exhausting. 

We'd love to describe Sadhana's sustainable infrastructure with you. Let's start with the most glamorous - the toilets! Urine and solid waste are separated for future use within the forest. Business is conducted by squatting over a urinal or a solid waste composter. No porcelain or paper here! There is a wash bucket in between to maintain hygiene. Solid waste must be stirred daily to enhance breakdown. The final compost is used as tree fertilizer and the urine flows into a wetland behind the bathrooms which eventually cleans it and returns it to the water table. Zero waste!


Hand washing stations (barrels of water with biodegradable soap) are scattered around the community site. We also use biodegradable soap when taking the oh-so-luxurious bucket shower. Shower runoff also feeds into the wetland of giant iris and reeds where it is cleaned and restored.


The kitchen is it's own incredible ecosystem and Ali will describe the details in another post. All of the structures onsite were designed by Yorit Rosin, one of the founders, based on traditional Tamil architecture. Most days  there is a crew of local Tamil men replacing grass in the roofs of the giant huts. It's amazing to watch them work with the simplest of tools and materials. 


..To be continued!