By Jared Curtis

The idea of being earth friendly has become popular amidst the growing concern of global warming. If what scientists claim is true, we all need to start living green, like Lonnie Gamble, founder of the Abundance EcoVillage in Fairfield and professor of sustainable energy at Maharishi University of Management and Grinnell College. Gamble claims to have known about the decline of Mother Nature for quite some time and is doing something about it.

“I haven’t paid an electric bill in more than 15 years,” said Gamble from his solar powered home at the Surya Nagar Farm, near Fairfield. “I have a wood stove for heat, using less then three loads of wood throughout the entire winter. I use propane for my stove, but I use less than $100 worth the entire year.”

Gamble and a few others live on the Surya Nagar Farm, which uses the same principles as the Abundance EcoVillage. Gamble and his wife, Valerie, run a sustainable energy program during the summer months, called Big Green Summer, where students, live, learn and experience the practical uses of solar, wind and water power during a 10-week course. One of his students, Richard Hunt, traveled from Angoon, Alaska, to learn about sustainable energy and will take the knowledge he gains over the summer back to his town of 450 people.

“A friend of the family was involved with the program, and they were looking for people from this area. It sounded really cool, and when I come back, I’ll help set-up solar panels and run the operation,” Hunt said. “It’s a vacation and job training. I have a kid on the way, so it will be a secure job and hopefully I can take back what I learn and help out other communities.”

The Big Green Summer program focuses on renewable energy, organic agriculture, tree crops, natural building, rainwater systems, living machines, urban design, ecovillages, biofuels, alternative economic and social systems as well as the relationship of all this to the rest of life on earth.

“If people would get serious about this, they would find that it is very cost effective,” Gamble said. “We can cut the energy we use in half, which saves money. Sure the initial cost is up there, but as soon as systems are up and running the cost goes down. With Iowa, it is either sunny or windy, so you’ll always have a source for power.”

In addition to running the program and being the founder of the Abundance EcoVillage, Gamble also practices what he preaches. His house, located in a residential subdivision of the Abundance EcoVillage, is insulated by straw walls and runs on solar and wind power. The solar panels produce energy, which is stored into batteries as DC current. But converters change the DC to AC, which is what comes out of a normal electric meter into a household. The community collects rainwater through a filtration system, which stores usable water in a 10-gallon drum buried beneath the ground.

“When we started, we tried out a lot of different ideas,” Gamble said. “All of the houses have thick insulation, and they all have high windows so you get the maximum amount of sunlight, heating and lighting.”

The Surya Nagar Farm is a model example. It’s an efficient subdivision that is opening people’s eyes. It’s not hippies living in tents as the mainstream media portrays those living off the grid. The residents live normal lives but are more in tune with nature and its power than most. Many of the houses are made of a mixed plaster substance or from refurbished wood or other recycled materials. All of the wood they use comes from a local mill in Jefferson.

“Iowa has some of the best building materials in the world,” Gamble said. “I get the wood from a mill in Jefferson and everybody wins. The wood is half the price. A portion of the money goes to the guy who grows the trees, a portion to the guy who cuts it down and it keeps all the profits in the community.”

The farm has a greenhouse, using techniques to heat it all year long. The houses have transparent materials on the roof that absorb heat from the sun and produce simple solar hot air. The solar panels run on switches, which help them rotate throughout the day to catch as much sunlight as possible. On the overcast day that I visited, the solar panels were still collecting more than 10 percent of their maximum power.

“We’re producing fresh food 365 days a year,” Gamble said. “Although we don’t have the size or amount of greenhouses at the Abundance EcoVillage, we have what we need, which is really what anyone needs.”

Many politicians have toured the ecovillage and visited with Gamble about sustainable energy, including former Gov. Tom Vilsack, Indianola Mayor Jerry Kelley, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie and former Rep. Ed Fallon. Gamble hopes to continue to promote and educate leaders and politicians about sustainable energy.

“Both Mayor Cownie and Mr. Fallon are very concerned about the environment and we have chatted about both problems and solutions,” Gamble said.

But Gamble isn’t the only person worried about the environment. A number of volunteers were working around the clock to get the barracks prepared for the students with the Big Green Summer program.

“A lot of people just stop out and want to know what we are doing,” Gamble said. “So I thought it was important to set this program up and spread the word.”

During the past 15 years, people have been catching on. In 2000, after living there and testing his ideas on the Surya Nagar Farm, Gamble founded the Abundance EcoVillage, located near Fairlfield.

“We hope to have all the houses up and everything complete within a few years,” Gamble said.

The goal of the Abundance EcoVillage is to provide a place where village design, energy, shelter, water, gardening, farming, waste recycling and landscaping are done in a way that is in tune with natural law. The systems they use to obtain services do not destroy or damage the larger systems of the earth that maintain a hospitable environment for life. Instead, they claim the systems are provided in a way that not only sustain, but enhance the ability of the earth to clean the air and water, maintain the balance of gases in the atmosphere and provide a beautiful and safe place to live.
“My specialty is energy,” Gamble said. “But this place takes a lot of different disciplines. So it was important to bring in several different and intelligent people.”

The village is set up to be in harmony with the land. Like the ancient technique of Feng shui, a practice of arranging objects to help achieve goals, the Abundance EcoVillage uses Sthãpatya Veda. Sthãpatya Veda prescribes the proper dimension and placement of buildings in relation to the cosmos, so that the structures, by their dimensions and placement, give a feeling of being at home in the universe, maximizing the positive influences from the cosmos and minimizing the negative ones. Living in the EcoVillage allows one to gain the blessings of natural law through Sthãpatya Veda and to give blessings back to nature through permaculture design, Gamble said.

“When we moved out here, the property we bought was shell, so we were able to add some rooms, etc.,” said Stacey Hurlin, who lives in the ecovillage with her husband, Bill. “We are glad we moved out here. Our quality of life has quadrupled. It’s very quiet out here; we have to open the door to know it’s storming out.”

The ecovillage also fosters interaction between a diversity of residents and provides a voice for diverse lifestyles and points of view.

“Living off the grid didn’t compromise our lifestyles,” Hurlin said. “Somehow the depiction of living off the grid is a bohemian, deprived life. It’s not; we are very comfortable living out here.”

The first house built at the Abundance EcoVillage was completed in December 2002. The second home was completed in January 2005, and the third home was completed in December 2005. Today, there are six houses completed with construction of another seven to eight houses underway. Eventually, there will be 30 houses.

“Living here has major advantages. For example, having a screen porch allows light to reach flowers and vegetables at all times during the day. My flowers bloom all winter long, and it’s always beautiful,” Hurlin said. “You live and learn and realize that it all makes a huge difference.”

The Hurlins are building a bigger home next door to their current residence, giving them more space for their children when they come home to visit or return from college.

“Being an artist, I wanted a studio in our new place, but you need a lot of light,” Hurlin said. “But after looking into it, I realized I would have all the light I need and more.”

The Abundance EcoVillage offers solar and wind generated electricity, two qualities of water and sewer services. The project is broken down into three blocks of seven homes, which are considered a neighborhood. Each neighborhood has solar and wind generation, battery storage and an inverter, a 50,000-gallon underground tank for storing water from rooftops and its own constructed wetland sewage system. This modular design allows utilities to be built as the project develops, rather than all at the beginning. Low-grade water systems (collected in swales/diversion drains and held in ponds) are provided for the entire project rather than each neighborhood. Vehicles are left on the outside, allowing the neighborhoods to have walking paths and large areas of vegetations between the houses. Moving the cars keep toxins away and allows large common areas the neighborhood can share.

“You won’t pay an electric, sewer or water bill while living out here,” Gamble said.

For home design, an integrated, high performance approach is used. All homes are heavily insulated, using the appropriate glazing and earth tubes to temper incoming air in summer and winter. Tubes are placed underground and catch air, which flows underground and cools off and is sent back into the house. A key element in making permaculture-based utilities affordable is to use energy and water wisely. But that doesn’t mean residents are sitting in the dark and using an outhouse. It means paying careful attention to design and the efficiency of systems, technologies and appliances. The first home in the ecovillage, the Walton house, is 3,600 square feet, has five adult occupants and uses less than 100 kilowatts of energy per month. A conventional home of that size uses about 1,000 kilowatts per month to provide the same services.

“The whole objective of the ecovillage is making the best use of nature,” Gamble said. “We are helping not only ourselves but also the community. If we have more power than we need, we return it back to the grid for others.”

The batteries where the energy is stored are located inside small shacks. Vegetation grows on the roof while the batteries charge inside.

“Each house has a direct line,” Gamble said. “When a storm rolls through and the power grid goes down in town, we are not affected.”

Energy use guidelines have been developed to help homeowners select appliances and systems for their homes. The guidelines recommend things like day lighting, high efficiency compact fluorescent and LED lighting, laptop computers, horizontal axis washing machines and control of phantom loads (powerstrips running TVs, DVD players, stereos, etc.). The net result is the same or better services found in a conventional home at 10 to 25 percent of the energy use.

“I hope people look into sustainable energy,” Gamble said. “There are a lot of policies and codes to get through and even though people say it doesn’t work, we know it does because we are living it.”

Agriculture is also an important part of the project. According to Gamble, 85 percent of the food eaten in Iowa comes from somewhere else, and the ecovillage feels it’s important from an environmental, economic and cultural standpoint to grow food locally. Useful and edible plants are growing throughout the ecovillage.

“We have over 400 varieties of edible plants on site,” said Gamble, “as well as 25 different types of grapes.”

There are two greenhouses producing food all year long. Along with providing food to the residents, the greenhouses also help fund projects. One business is Abundance CSA, an organic market garden that provides locally grown vegetables and herbs to more than 25 families around the Fairfield area and a permaculture plant nursery for the Midwest.

“I had the desire to be an organic farmer, but I didn’t have the land,” said Stacy Maurer, who resides at the Abundance EcoVillage and runs the Abundance CSA. “So I jumped at the opportunity to move out here because the land was already here.”

Each week Maurer and other volunteers harvest a variety of vegetation. They fill boxes full of food for which the residents pay a small fee.

“Some people have gardens in their yards,” Maurer said. “Some just pay for the box. But the service attracts a lot of people.”

Along with the solar/wind power and homegrown food, they also have a progressive wastewater and sewage system. Two sources of pressurized water are delivered to each home. The first comes from the roof catchments and is stored in underground tanks, ozonated, filtered and treated with UV light. The second is from two ponds. The sewer and wastewater handling systems allow valuable nutrients to be recycled and safely reused. Black and greywater are separated at each house. Greywater can be used at the lot or can be sent to a greywater processing system that serves the whole project. Toilet wastes, or blackwater, flow into a tank. Liquids flow out of the top of the tank into a constructed wetlands system. The constructed wetlands system consists of a bed of gravel 18 inches deep planted with a variety of aquatic plants (cattail, arrowhead, etc.). The aquatic plants and bacteria living on the surface of the gravel will further process the water and absorb nutrients.

“This type of design is rethinking human endeavors,” Gamble said. “It’s great work for the next generation to learn and apply these design principles.”

The basic lot price is $40,000, but that includes hook-ups for solar, wind and water grids. Houses start at $100 to $200 per square foot and there is a maximum of 1,800 square feet on one floor, leaving plenty of room for neighbors and other builders. House sizes range from 600 to 3,800 square feet. Homeowners can choose to install solar hot water for their own household use. Solar hot water heaters provide 90 to 100 percent of the energy required to heat hot water in the warm months. They even work in the winter to reduce the amount of propane needed for heating water. The ecovillage homes use passive solar design to minimize the amount of heating and cooling needed. Intelligent placement of windows allows the houses to be more energy efficient, and allows the sun to warm the house.

“Everything is very conventional,” Gamble said. “People are surprised when they stop out. They have a different perception in their mind, but once they are here, their thinking changes.” CV

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