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  • Greenheart Ibiza

    The Greenheart initiative is a project farm, supported by the non-profit Fundación por el Futuro, it encourages symbiotic relationships between cultural tradition, information technology and sustainable ecological development.
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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 Travel

    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.

Captain's Blog March 2009

Springtime moves and grooves at Greenheart Ibiza

Here we are still with the 'Ibiza Greenheart' throbbing on full power after the cold winter months and looking forwards to some warm and sunny days on our funny little island.
Apart from my usual birthday party (this year to be celebrated on Sunday the 22nd of march at Casita Verde), there are many more exciting things in store for our growing number of members and followers.

The new membership inscription idea which was put into practice from the 1st of January has been developing very well since the start and although it represents a lot of extra work for our volunteers on Sundays, it should prove to be a very successful move, as we head for even more challenging times in the future. Now that everyone who'd like to eat lunch on Sundays with us at our centre must also first join the association Ibiza Ecologic, we not only have a fast growing official membership but can now begin to imagine all kinds of other benefits: More efficient ways to contact all our supporters and get people to join in more with events, functions and proposals to the local authorities, as well as inform everyone of special offers, courses and current news about our whole movement. (we already have nearly 500 members in total and this should grow to a couple for thousand at least by the end of the summer period, which could be very interesting if we ever need to Lobby the local government about anything and it should certainly come in handy if we need to ask for some subsidies at any time!)

In general, things are moving ahead quickly on all fronts and it's becoming ever more obvious to me as main Coordinator, that I must seek more help from our growing Greenheart community, especially if I want to avoid any serious personal health problems. Since three of our main directors (Ana Digón, Danny Law and Murray Gurner) have now left the island for other 'green pastures', we've been reshuffling the box to arrange a new home team and are in the process of registering the new committee (Junta) with the local authorities. The new directors team includes myself Chris Dews as president, Tara Fredriksson as vice-president, Mike Macleod as general secretary / treasurer, plus Ana Santos and Roland Schneider as vocales. Hopefully, some more of our members and supporters will volunteer to help out with Sunday meetings, general secretarial work and the mountain of other interesting possibilities of joining in with our efforts to make a better world for all.

Together with an English friend of mine - Jonny Lee, we are presently planning a nice event for the 26th of April this year (During the earth Day week). The Earthrun Ibiza project will be a joint venture, involving many children and parents, musicians and performers plus lots of other volunteers who will hopefully be participating in both the preparation and the presentation of the event.

Basically the idea comes from Canada, where many groups are organising a similar event to raise environmental consciousness as well as funding for local ecological organisations (see www.earthrun.org). In the case of the Ibiza event, the funds will be destined to support the Greenheart Resonancia environmental education program started by Ana Digón in 2006 and now continued by Pamela Siefe from Argentina. Naturally we'll be advising everyone how they can join in and get involved, as soon as we've finished the initial planning stages and got the project up on line, so look out on our main website for the details, especially if you live in Ibiza.

Some more news on the Resonancia scene is that the Ibiza town council have recently agreed to sponsor their school visits from this September, so we're hopeful to capture the help of the other island municipalities before long and therefore secure at last a realistic economic participation from the local authorities. So far we've been lucky enough to have a continuous support from our very kind American partners at CCI who have provided most of the financial help on that story. Perhaps this will lead on to a much greater local participation from both the schools and the public, as they see the great benefits of educating their children to live more lightly on the planet.

Speaking of education, this spring time we will begin a new series of Eco-Ability courses (www.casitaverde.com/eco-education.php), starting at the beginning of April and running through until the end of October, with a break for July and August (we don't normally need to give any classes on how to go to the beach or to dance the night away under the stars!). During this period, we hope to build our third eco-toilet at Casita Verde and install some more solar hot water systems, as well as to make some very interesting and more technical advances together with our energy director Roland Schneider and another German technician friend of his called Alex. They should be rolling up at the end of April, ready to build a complete 'used kitchen oil filtering system' and alternative generator station for the centre. We've already been given an almost new Trace converter from our long time friend Alex Marou and some very good second hand solar batteries from my dear brother Paul Dews who has a solar business here on the island. We only need some more solar panels to roll past our noses and we'll be completely independent from fossil fuels for our on-site electrical needs!

This time our eco-toilet building has been designed by Stefan Polatschek, (our architect friend from Austria) and will be built from earth blocks which we will make with a special machine kindly donated a couple of years ago by one of our members Amanda Pi. This time will have a wooden roof and will be made to cater for disabled people with wheelchairs, so will be a bit bigger than the previous two and be far more easy to access. It will also be a design we hope to install for others who wish to join in with improving their personal impact on the environment. (As Mr Ghandi said, 'we should all get used to dealing with our own waste and not just disappear it out of sight, as we do with the conventional WC type installation'). We have already begun to make the base and have some volunteers lined up to help with the block manufacture, as well as had meetings with a professional German carpenter who will help us build the prototype and follow us into any future Greenheart construction business possibilities. (This time we should make a good documentation of the whole event I'd say!)

On the natural health front, one of our new directorsm, Ana Santos, is about to set up a new division of the Greenheart movement (Armonia Ibiza), in a lovely house only ten minutes from Casita Verde, offering an exciting new space for a variety of creative, well-being and educational activities. The activities include Pilates, Yogalates, Yo/Chi Pilates, Bhangralates, African Dance, Bhangra and massage. Our new General secretary Mike Macleod will be joining Ana over there pretty soon, leaving his room at Casita to be converted into a new extension to the outside kitchen, where we'll be able to cope much better with the eco-ability students coming along throughout the coming year.
Mike and Ana have also been working very hard this year preparing the Eco-tourism events beginning at Easter time then repeated May, June and July, so if you'd like to join in with some healthy alternative holiday fun, please have a look at the web-site and find out more (www.greenibizatours.com).

Meanwhile, we're still moving on slowly with our number 4 Greenheart Music compilation - 'Into the Light' and which is dedicated to Gaia, our mother Earth. One of our members Elwyn Lear is doing the cover design for the printed CD version, as well as working on the web-site version which will be up there quite soon I would imagine. Here at Casita Verde, we are presently busy working on some nice songs with Natalie and Dennis from the band 'Soul Force', together with our resident musician and graphic designer Caspian and an old friend of mine Curtis who has been coming to entertain us with his humour and spicy melodies for many years now. Certainly this years dinner parties and Sunday events will be splashed with more funky vibes and some new songs we can all sing along with.

The Ibiza Gold carob syrup story is beginning to move into another groove as we get into the production and branding business and begin legally selling this delicious product to the public. So far, our lovely cook and vice president Tara is making around 10 litres per week down in Carlos de Las Herras marmalade kitchen, but we can already see the potential market out there if we get going with some real publicity etc. Thankfully, our in-house graphic designer Caspian is working almost all the time at the moment on a whole bunch of promotional material and we'll soon have a special web-site dedicated to our famous invention, plus a pamphlet, sales point information and of course the new fancy gold label for the jars of syrup. We are always enjoying the latest carob syrup inventions here at Casita Verde and trying them out on our visitors each Sunday, so basically we're all willingly participating in the development process!

Our on-line version of the Greeneheart Guide continues to grow slowly now that our Pamela is back on the case and we hope to get the majority of the island's green entities inside before the summer time kicks in. However, as many of the possible entries are either too busy or too lazy to send us their details, it is almost always a case of passing by their place to rattle their cages and take some decent photos of their business etc for the site.(We go on regardless!)

Green Media continues to serve more clients with web-site designs and services, even though the main players are now quite physically separated. (Murray the web-master is in Portugal Danny Law is still on the road and Mike Macleod is in Ibiza).
The Greenheart shop is still closed for the winter and will open around Easter time, when there are more people on the island to buy things. However, this we year we hope to have Maria peppermint selling some of her products from the Greenheart shop in the info centre on Sundays at at Casita Verde.

Finally, I had the great pleasure to meet Alberto Fraile from the 'Namaste' magazine last Friday afternoon, as he came by to see the Casita Verde together with Laura Buades from the 'Slow Food' movement. (I say finally because we've been intending to do something with the Namaste magazine for nearly a year now). After doing an interview for the magazine over a tasty lunch and showing them around the centre etc, I delivered them to Ibiza town in time to present their talk on Slow Food and then went off to the Club Diario de Ibiza, to listen to a talk from Joan Antoni Melé from the Triodes ethical bank in Barcelona. I must say I was extremely impressed by his speech and made a point to introduce myself after the presentation. The next day, I had another chance to meet Joan when I gave him a lift from his hotel up to Can Marti near San Juan and was able to talk of many things along the way. In the end, Joan promised to come and stay in Casita Verde for a time along with his wife during the first days of October, when he will repeat his fabulous presentation and get to learn some more about our movement. In the meantime, we have arranged for him to write some stuff for our web-site and also for us to get our money system hooked up to the Triodes bank. Actually, we're planning to make an on-line joining form connected to a new Triodes account (see www.triodos.es), so that apart from putting all the membership quotas in there from the Casita Verde Sunday story, we can assure all our members that we are not investing their donations in the next war!

Ok, well I guess that's about all for now if I ever want to get this blog on-line, so I'll wish you all a happy green spring time and hope to see you one day soon at Casita Verde.

With best green wishes,
Chris Dews, Coordinator