S.O.S. - The time has come to ‘Save Our Selves’
Looking at all the challenges we now face in this super complicated and crazy world we have created so far, one can’t help but wonder why we don’t make more effort to get along with each other. As a Global Community of human beings, striving to have a happy and useful experience on our still beautiful planet Earth, it’s really quite obvious to most people who are already ‘awake’, that we can do very much better than we are doing at the moment. I’d also like to think that most of us realise that we have a shared responsibility to find genuinely regenerative solutions to the problems that will eventually affect every living creature (including the so-called ‘Elite class’), in our rapidly devolving ‘universal laboratory experiment’.
As you are also most probably aware, there is big talk about finally releasing some previously ‘highly classified information’ about documented visits from other planets, new technologies for making energy, as well as direct contact with other worlds in our universe.
Who knows what kind of experiment we are a part of, but one thing is for sure, we should collectively still have some control of our global future. However, if we are serious about fixing the forever growing list of disputes, then first we must learn to love ourselves, love each other and have a maximum amount of love and respect for our communal life support system. How can our world possibly function correctly if this is not the case?
We have everything to win and nothing to lose!
Casita Verde Ibiza
Personally, I am so happy to have the privilege of living in such a remarkable paradise like Casita Verde Ibiza, and also living the life of a millionaire, (but without the burden of managing the millions).
Although it’s been a long journey to this point in the history of our model ecology centre, I wouldn’t really want to change too many details of our story, as it has taught me so many lessons which have helped me to survive the journey and actually learn how to thrive.
This brings me to the next subject:
After being closed for Sunday lunch since July 2019, we have been trying out various ideas and thinking more about how we could operate the centre, including a certain offer of educational activities, without causing us too much disturbance.
For this reason, we have already started our ‘cool time’ study programme of offering various types of visits to the Casita Verde, and are actually intending to improve our services for bicycle visits, in order to help grow this type of active and educational tourism. The cycle visits so far have been very successful and we feel confident to continue with the project.
This year, I celebrated my 70th birthday, and have more or less achieved what I came to do here, minus a couple of details. I still have some energy to do occasional events, do weekly guided visits during the ‘cooler season’ and go to interesting meetings etc, plus continue to be well connected with the island’s eco community.
Exactly what we’ll decide to do isn’t certain yet, but we hope that by the end of this year, we’ll have invented a good plan and can begin to move towards our chosen objectives.
For example, we really need to work more on the Carob project and see if we can help to return the island Carob industry to a viable proposition. After the euphoria of the drastic rise in the value of Carob last year due to world-wide demand for Locust bean gum (made from the seeds of the carob bean and used as a healthy natural thickener for many products in the food industry), we are now faced with a reduction in value of more than 60% compared with last year’s price.
Apparently, as a result of the higher price of this commodity last year, many food manufacturers have started to use cheaper alternatives, which has been the root cause of this significant drop in value. At only 32-34 cents per kilo, many farmers are again ignoring the ’black gold of Ibiza’, leaving most of it to stay on the trees or fall on the floor, as there is hardly any profit in picking it up, (unless you have animals to feed on your farm that is!)
The Casita Verde ‘Carob Cola’ cocktail mixture, which contains more than 48 percent of our lovely carob syrup, (now made by Frutos Secos de Ibiza), mixed with lemon and orange juice, plus fresh ecological liquid ginger extract, maybe just what we need to add a lot of value to both carob beans and to use up the thousands of citrus fruits which are left to rot on the trees and on the ground all around the island. Ginger can be grown locally on ecological farms (all year around if you have a greenhouse), so I see no problem with moving on with this environmentally valuable and potentially profitable business project.
Casita Verde Granada
After a ten day rental car and country hotel tour around some beautiful places in the Pyrenees district of Northern Spain, we took a fast train down to visit our Cuban friends Rey Aldana and his younger brother Puli in Casita Verde Granada, also to check how things were evolving down there since our last visit in August 2022.
The guys were taking a little holiday at the time, so there were no volunteers in sight, but everything looked much more organised this year and they have made some excellent improvements to the installations there. They also work one day a week as volunteers in a local eco-vegetable garden in the village next door, so they come home with a lot of very good quality products to eat fresh, as well to conserve for the winter.
As we have our lovely little caravan parked at the centre and had the use of a car to drive around in, we were able to check out how the local community was managing with the extreme temperatures and drought conditions. (At least they still have some lakes to gather water!). As far as we could see, everything seemed quite normal for that time of the year, give or take a few degrees of heat.
You’ll see some pictures from our holidays in the photo montage, so you can get an idea how we spent our time. As always, we picked up litter along the trails and talked to lots of people who work in, or are participating in the rural tourism industry, including Tourism agencies, Natural Park rangers, remote bar owners and other visitors to the area.
(At least it appears that the people who live there and who visit there are more tidy than the folks down in the South of Spain, or in some parts of Ibiza). Again, I’m always aware that the cleanliness of a village or town depends very much on the education and cleaning programmes provided by the local council and eco NGO’s!
It seems that our plan to escape from the heat of Ibiza and ‘Get away from the crowds’ for the last two weeks of August during Georgina’s holidays, didn’t really work quite as well as planned, since many other people had the same idea. Like the best beaches in Ibiza, all the available places to take a cool dip in the rivers were overcrowded, so we had to go further off the beaten track to find a quiet place. (Maybe next year we’ll go to Galicia and Asturias, where for sure it’s cooler, less occupied, and where they are also famous for their food!)
Anyway, we had a great time as usual and made the very best of our summer holidays!
Ibiza limpia
Even though we’ve been quite inactive with respect to external cleaning projects this year, we did manage to join the many other groups of volunteers celebrating the annual ‘World Clean-up Day’ event on the 16th of September, and cleaned up around 10 km of country roads around the Casita Verde centre. We also met some new friends who are involved in cleaning up their own piece of Ibiza and who came along to help us for the morning, so we hope to organise some more cleaning events together with them during the winter months, when the island should be quieter.
Casita Verde Ibiza has a total of 13 environmental associations registered in the Balearic islands and has every opportunity to handle funding for study projects relating to a more or less 360 degree spectrum of regenerative (not for profit) experiments, which can then be turned into business adventures for anyone who would like to join in the positive evolution of our little group of islands here in the Mediterranean sea.
One thing is for sure, as long as I am alive and well, we will no doubt think up many more feasible projects to do here on the island, so we just need to find some interesting and serious ‘business people’ to make them happen. (Hopefully with some suitable help from the administration (Local, Regional, National and European).
Obviously, with all the work on the new Greenheart Guide website, (see www.greenheart-guide.com), plus a lot of maintenance to keep the centre in good working condition, we haven’t had too much opportunity to do more things this year. Hopefully, now that most projects are under control, we’ll be happy to work with some other environmentally friendly activities outside Casita Verde.
One of our main problems is that, at Casita Verde centre in Ibiza, we seem to have everything we need on site, so in order to find the energy to go out into that other world, we must have a very good motive. Here, life is never boring and apart from having lots of projects and maintenance to do at home, we usually have a constant flow of visitors to entertain us most days of the week.
In addition, we don’t feel that we have in any way damaged our effect on the global community by cancelling both our Facebook account, plus our Instagram account during the last year. To be honest, I’d say we have successfully removed a huge burden of extra (and in many cases irrelevant communications) from our daily list of things to attend to!
Also, we have no interest in feeding the beast that will finally eat us alive if we allow it to.
As I always say, ‘If for example, you don’t like the way a particular company operates, then don’t continue to support them by consuming their products!’
It was time to realise that in our case, ‘Less is More’, and in order to do things well, it’s obviously much more logical to do less things and do them better.
For my part, I no longer need to be ‘Adrenalised’ every day of the week, so I have slowed down my pace by a huge amount. As everything still works fine here, thanks to our small but very diligent management team, I recognise that as long as I am alive and healthy, the best thing I can do with my time is to pass on information to small groups of special people. Some of them may also wish to help us with the more physical activities, as well as learn a lot of new tricks they will most likely need, in order to live well in our rapidly deteriorating planetary ecosystem.
Please keep an eye on the blog posts and education sections on our main website at www.casitaverde.com to stay up-to-date with our latest offers of educational volunteering programs, or new projects that you may be interested to work in (even at a distance).
Of course, if you would like to visit our centre for a guided tour, or want to know how you can be a more eco-conscious citizen, please get in touch by email, sending your request to info@casitaverde.com, or calling our main office on 608838190 (English and Spanish)
With warm greetings from Casita Verde,
Chris Dews – coordinator