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  • Greenheart

    Greenheart is a movement promoting environmentally sustainable principles and practices, personal evolution and social transformation.
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  • Casita Verde

    Situated in a beautiful valley near the village of San Jose in Ibiza, La Casita Verde is a model ecological centre that is operated by volunteers and open to the public on Sundays.
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  • Greenheart Music

    GreenHeartMusic is a music platform based in Ibiza, Spain. Presenting artists of different influences who express their connections to nature through their music.
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  • Guía Verde a Ibiza y Formentera

    A bi-lingual directory to Ibiza and Formentera of local groups, businesses and services that offer or use environmentally friendly practices.
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  • QL Studio › Websites Made Easy

    Quinta Linda is a low-impact living space and website design studio based in Portugal.
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  • Greenheart Resonancia

    An educational and fun programme of practical, stimulating experiences discovering sustainable and respectful habits in order to face the realities of climate change.
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  • Green Ibiza Tours

    Our Green Ibiza Tours provide responsible tourism holidays in Ibiza offering a full programme of eco activities and nature happenings.
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  • Greenheart Traveler

    With the aim of promoting the Greenheart message around the world, travelling members of the rapidly growing Greenheart family will write blogs and add photos of their travels.
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  • Ibiza Gold

    The Greenheart Carob project plans to rejuvenate an important traditional economic activity, as well as motivating many local land owners.
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  • Fundación por el Futuro
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  • Tienda Greenheart

    At the Greenheart Shop you can find out about responsible consumption and ecological happenings in Ibiza. Featuring our very own Greenheart clothing range made from ecological fabrics and with fair trade considerations.

Captain's Blog - February 2010

Beginning February with a timely visit from our dear friends Laura Rose and Emanuel Kuntzelman, the directors of our Fundación por el Futuro in Madrid, we had a cosy lunch meeting at Casita Verde and discussed all our news and views, ready to get into our 2010 act as smoothly as possible. Again they offered their continued support for all our projects and shared their exciting information about the growing Greenheart movement in Chicago, where they have the main office of CCI (Centre for Cultural Interchange). We decided it was high time to make a new joint website portal called 'Greenheart Global', from where the surfer can visit any one of our many projects on either side of the Atlantic and for sure get a better view of our evolving 'Big Picture'.

These days of fast thinking and constant movement are beginning to look like having a good result, especially if we can continue to evolve our external possibilities for a number of symbiotic partnerships.

I am so happy that we began this year with such a good base team here at Casita Verde. Also that the ones who have joined since then, or returned for another experience here have brought with them good company and even more good energy.

This year we intend to shine in as many ways as we can manage. This at least is our goal these days and I have to say that with our latest secret angent Jose onboard, I'm sure we're going to shine as much as we are able. It makes us dream of great things for Ibiza and also believe that they are not only possible but also within our grasp. However, this is only going to happen if we begin to get wise and get our movie up to running speed, flying in front of the change, like modern Greenheart angels. More and more people are coming along who want to guide us through the next door into another level of consiousness, each one in their own way, doing whatever they do best, in a new harmony movie called 'love yourself and that self shall become every one of us'. We are but one being, which has lost sight of itself in the mists of time. If now isn't the moment to see the light and work to get it right, when is it?

In the meantime, as we await the coming winds of change to move the flock forwards, we go on with our work, some more quietly and some squawking all the time as they run around quickly to keep warm on the trail. There have been many meetings lately, as Mr Jose's plan of action (with lots of input from the rest of the team) goes along the well lit road and we begin to see that we have quite a challenge ahead of us. Of course, this doesn't stop Mr Chris, our local 'papagaia' from churning out new ideas all day long like a crazy green parrot. Fortunately, some of the ideas are actually compatible with the rest of the movie, so are politely included in the overall action plan.

Thanks to some earlier work done by Mr Roland Schneider when he was here, I was easily able to connect my main office telephone system to the outer offices in the bottle house and wooden cabin. This has enabled us to virtually have a fully equipped office for each level of activity, all connected by internal and external phones plus internet. (thank you Mr Roland)

Apart from still not admitting to being personally intelligent enough to handle a more complicated program than has so far been attempted, we are now moving towards a difinite goal, that of making our lovely Ibiza into a 'Transition Island'. The concept of Transition Towns, cities, forests, islands etc, has become very popular in the UK, where it was first developed in the town of Totness by a team of locals and led by a guy called Rob Hopkins from Wales. See www.transitiontowns.org for more information).

So, from the idea to make a huge public eco-centre in 2001, to the later concept of involving the whole island in the project and to eventually settling for a samll model eco-centre in Casita Verde (the house where I'm living), we move on to an even more ambitious goal but one which could actually be economically viable. Considering the work of finding the enormous financial investment necessary to make a fully fuctional eco centre and which could actually transform the ideas of thousands of people every year, it could be seen as a much lesser personal risk, if the whole island was involved in making it happen.

First we have to somehow engage the complete population (or as many as possible), in a serious attempt to improve our collective chances of living well into the future, by creating a local caring community, who can be an example for the world to follow. This won't happen over night of course, but with a lot of work from everyone involved, plus some intelligent manoeuvers, I think we have every possibility to make it a reality. At least it can be seen as the bright light at the end of the tunnel and very much worth the efforts we'll need to make in arrivng there. More on that one as the movie unfolds!

And now for a little news round-up on some of the practical goings on within our organisation at the moment:

• We seem to have made the first moves towards founding a kind of Ibiza style 'Carob Club', after our recent involvement with 'El Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Ibiza Y Formentera', a new foundation run by Gabriel Molino and his friend Javier. This should take the whole story a bit faster down the road to bigger production of the Ibiza Gold syrup and subsequent product range, plus having the possibility to get some useful funding for this very interesting and necessary project. (I'm actually going to do a tv interview for the BBC this month in Mallorca, where I'll be invited to speak about how an environmental organisation became involved in Carob production!)
• This year's 'Earthrun' story set to happen on the 25th of April looks like being a bigger and better organised event than the first one we did last year. For a start, we are a much bigger team involved in the production and having done it once already, we more or less know how to steer the local political system in our direction. We also plan to do a special Earthday story this year in San Antonio and only three days before our main event, on the 22nd as always. The local council will organise some other groups to come along, including lots of local school children and will provide all our necessities, so all we have to do is to set up our info boothe and send off a bunch of kids on roller skates to do our advertising. This time the money from the Earthrun event will be donated towards a public awareness campaign involving children and aimed at getting the message out about dealing with our garbage. This also engages with another one of our major programmes for this year, that of 'Ibiza recicla'. This is an island wide campaign we are just setting up together with the 'Fundació Dexailles' and which should involve many other local organisations concerned about their environment. Garbage, everyone's problem, will now become one of the main concerns of our movement for the coming year - how do deal with our own rubbish and how we can help our visitors deal with their part of the problem! Lots to do with this story but as it's one of my personal favourites since the very beginning some 22 years ago, I'm excited to make something special happen and more than willing to give it some of my endless green energy.
• At the same time as we do our yearly Earthrun excercise, we'll also be launching our Greenheart Music Volume 4. Our latest and possibly last plastic style album called 'Into the Light', is actually dedicated to our beloved planet Gaia, so it's more than a convenient coincidence that we present this wonderful compliation at our Earthrun event. This one has been a very long time hatching out (three years) but I'd say it's definitely worth waiting for!
• On the Eco-tourism front, we're presently investigating the possibilities of setting up a number of interesting courses, including accommodation in a variety of established hostals / hotels etc. This is the foundation of a project to make a kind of 'Greenheart Academy' one day in the not too distant future. Again our Mr Jose, plus Tara and Ana Santos, are the main operating team for this invention which should be up and running before the summer if all goes well. After an exciting meeting in the Consell Insular recently, with many representatives from the alternative tourism section, we decided the time was right to get our Eco tourism hat on again and join the newly forming 'alternative tourismn CLUB'. Perhaps after so many years of 'studying the possibilities', we can now forge ahead and make this project a winner!
• As for our Greenheart Resonacia programme, we're just waiting for our dear Amanda Pi to get back on her horse after a three month absence, and we're on the road with the school visits again. This project is by now so intertwined with the 'Earthrun' and 'Ibiza recicla' programme, it's becoming clear that our eco-educational offer for kids could provide the main motor to drive the Transition Island machine. For sure it's going to be an interesting year!

Of course, with so many projects under way, you may wonder if we do anything else but work all the time. Actually, if you see the Captain's blog slide show, you'll see that we do in fact take some time to walk in the nature as well as party a little bit and if we work a lot it's because we enjoy what we do so much, we're happy to do more!

If you want to see some photos from our life with Greenheart Ibiza, click on this link:

http://picasaweb.google.es/chris.greenheart/CaptainsBlogSlideShow