By Nicholas Chambers - November, 2006

            May 1979.  Ecological designer and Living Machine pioneer John Todd meandered through the creek-laced, pinon/junipers and chamisa flats of the new Baca development.  As a geomancer concerned with the story of the land, a sense of “foreboding” overcame him as he pondered the unfolding of this special landscape.  Given a lack of a far-reaching master plan, the land could very well become a commodity, valuable food-producing riparian zones could be built upon, and the present subdivision model could prevail over ecological sanity.  The positive trend for innovative housing might include good solar design and some renewable energy production, but still would be essentially of the same genre as the independent California ranch house.  With huge inefficiencies and losses, energy and food would be imported, and nutrients and water exported, the car being the sole unit of transportation.  “Fragmentation of function will occur,” Todd stated.

High Altitude Solar Adobe Village (HASAV)
As the founder of the New Alchemy Institute and Ocean Arks International, Todd envisioned an agricultural/cultural Village of the Sun as an alternate domestic concept to a human-land symbiosis.  In a letter to Hanne and Maurice Strong, he proposed a type of solar village that would be held in trust with the Earth allowing private ownership only among structures and features.  Twenty-seven years later, Hanne Strong’s Manitou Foundation is now manifesting the first of two High Altitude Solar Adobe Villages as the next priority in their purpose.
            “The foundation’s mission to develop a refuge for the world’s religions has been accomplished. This was our first priority,” declares Manitou’s founder and President Hanne Strong.  “Manitou’s next steps are an essential component in the development of it’s mission: the acceptance of an evolved lifestyle, such as sustainability, food production, seed banking and equally important, affordable housing.”
            Manitou has recently hired a new Director and HASAV Project Manager, Colleen McCabe, as their emphasis has now shifted to put the solar village on the “front burner.”  McCabe brings a fresh, excited energy of manifestation to the table, with past experience in managing the Omega Institute, New York’s premier center for Holistic Studies.   “We want to create a future with a future, spiritually and ecologically,” she says.  “We’re talking about a new social structure for the 21st century: affordable, low-impact, with resulting lessons about shared and private spaces.  The first step is making the choice to live simpler.”      

The Biome
            There are two proposed sites for the HASAV, both of which are within Manitou land holdings.   Once the village is fully established, it will be a living, self-sufficient “Biome” which will have breath, energy flow, and digestion, along with the five kingdoms of life.  The needs of the human inhabitants will be woven into the processes of the natural systems of which it is imbedded. 
The Biome design is complete with water recirculation and treatment systems (Living Machines), a biogas digester (for cooking fuel), a 32 Kw photovoltaic array, and a community center with a theater, library, and school/learning center.  Food production will be dove-tailed into the village complex as Permacultural edible and medicinal landscaping, but also spread out over 15 acres with a bio-intensive greenhouse, bio-intensive gardens under high-tensile fabric screen, aquaculture tanks for fish and other aquatics, and small livestock for meat, eggs, milk, and cheese.  While cottage industries will be present and encouraged, the food produced will probably all be consumed within the village.
Every attempt will be made to reduce the need for personal automobile traffic within the village.  Instead, pedestrian, bike, and equestrian trails would be the main form of local transportation with a daily shuttle that would go into Crestone.  There will be a drop-off point at the edge of the village center and any visitor parking would be far from the village’s activities. 
            The architectural style seems to be reminiscent of the indigenous housing from a planetary scene from Star Wars with cutting-edge earthen (adobe, pumice, soil) vaults, domes, arches, and corridors.  The main spine of the village is laid out with the contour of the land, maximizing solar exposure and capture, while also expressing the natural harmonic proportions in the ratio of the Golden Mean, phi (pronounced fee) or 1:1.618.  This ratio is found everywhere in nature, as well as being present in the pyramids of Egypt, the placement of the planets around the solar system, some proportions of the human body, and most expressively in the spiral of a Nautilus seashell.  The village will emulate that of a higher organism where the community center will serve as the brain, the utility causeway will be the spine of air and water transfer, and the greenhouse will provide digestion and nourishment. 
Individual participants will have a certain degree of expression in developing their residential space, so long as they keep with the village theme, style, and material.  After a environmental impact study is completed, the carrying capacity of the land and village will be identified.  Strong and McCabe are hoping to be breaking ground next spring and expecting the main village to be set up within 4 years.  As for funding, they are focusing on future residents, corporations, federal grants, and “eco-politicians.”  

HASAV:  “Crucible of Change Towards a Non-nuclear and Solar Future”
In the same year John Todd visited the early Baca development his organization of the New Alchemy Institute held an international design conference with some of the world’s most prestigious folks in conservation biology, solar design, agroecology, architecture, sociology, and anthropology.  Their focus was in rethinking “how human communities can be sustained into the future.”  The conference ended up with perceptions of “bioshelters” as not only that which shelters humanity from the elements of Earth, but also provides for their inhabitants like symbiotic organisms.  The late Margaret Mead also contributed to the quandary by asserting that bioshelters, or biomes, should be incorporated into a village model where much of the basic infrastructure, commerce, and community can be shared, “as most people in the world will not be able to afford a private house.”
            The implementation of Manitou’s High Altitude Solar Adobe Village is a huge triumph for us all in Crestone/Baca, Saguache County, Colorado, and indeed the world.  What it means for most of us that might not have a home in the village is that an international thrust of ecological design experts will be behind the spearheading of the issues that inhibit outward progress towards sustainability.  No longer should something like greywater be a closet practice.  Like breeds alike, and once the floodgates are open the politics and economics will follow the people.  The climate for retrofit, adaptation, and redesign is here.  The straw-bale capitol of the world can still become one of the world’s most highly-integrated, bioshelter subdivisions.  From a woman who is familiar with the “sleeping giant” of China, Strong says, “The world is not going to believe that we (Americans) can live simpler unless we start demonstrating it.” 

(sidebar)           
Twenty-Seven Years of Roots for the HASAV
The Biome elements of theme, style, and materials of the HASAV did not just come idly from a lay person’s fanciful renderings or the pages of an inspirational book.  In fact, Manitou has been in consultation with the very best in the fields of architecture, solar design, and sustainable development over the last 27 years.  They first commissioned Architectual Harmonics’ owner/designer Michael Bertin and valley native and solar pioneer Arnold Valdez to do the designs and drawings back in 1990.  Along with a design team “task force,” including Baca residents Paul Motsinger and Will Porter, Bertin and Valdez were flown to India to study some of that country’s village technologies, such as biogas digesters and advanced adobe-block dome construction. 
Bertin’s architectural firm out of Boulder specializes in the Biome Design where the site functions as a living entity unto itself, as the HASAV is a great example.  Valdez, an Associate of Architectual Harmonics, took the skills learned in India to build the mud dome in the La Capilla de Todos chapel in his hometown of San Luis.
            The other significant player in this grand manifestation is one of the world’s leading experts on the environment and sustainable development, Dr. Ashok Koslha.  Khosla was instrumental in developing low-tech mud block presses, among other village technologies, as a part of one of his undertakings of TARA (Technology and Action for Rural development).  Khosla’s mother organization of Development Alternatives hosted Manitou’s task force while in India, and may set up a training center in Crestone/Baca.  Along with John Todd, other contributors to the HASAV and Manitou are no strangers to ecological design: Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institue and the co-founder of Permaculture, Bill Mollison

CONSTRUCTION PHASED DEVELOPMENT PLAN (courtesy Arnold Valdez)

Phase I: Infrastructure Development:
Site Planning, Environmental Impact Study
Site Clearing & access Road to site
Topographical Survey(Aerial)
Wells (2),pump & cistern
Waste water treatment system
Tools & Storage
Partial Photovoltaic and backup generator

Phase II: Office/staff Housing Units
5,000 sq. ft.

Phase III:  Community Buildings (year 2 fundraising):
Community center (5,200 sq.ft.)
Bioshelter/greenhouse (6,600 sq ft)
Causeway(250 ft) 
Boundary walls(300ft.)

Phase IV: Additional Utility Development (year 3 fund raising)
Photovoltaic panels & batteries
Methane digestor, gas distribution

Phase V: Site Development & agriculture:
Agro-development, landscaping, etc.