BLOG
Stories, articles, and updates from the Ranch community.
After more than 20 years, we have been able to identify some trends that have led to our survival as a business and a community. The following advice is appropriate, and perhaps some of it even necessary, if you expect to live successfully in a communal work and living environment doing land-based work.
You likely grew up with flushing toilets, seeing your poop as something to dispose of, but you might also be one of those who agree that humans can only thrive once we live in harmony with nature. The zero-waste movement is in a sense, a yearning to imitate nature where there is no such thing as waste; one organism's excrement is another's food. Compost toilets turn human "waste" (discarded feces and urine) into soil fertility as humanure (food for micro-organisms and fruit trees) - the actual human waste is everything that cannot decompose: cigarette butts, plastic-sixpack rings, deodorant cans, batteries, the five billion gallons of polluted drinking water we flush down our toilets everyday, and the millions of tons of organic material dumped into the natural environment year after year.
Dairy Kefir is so interesting to me because it embodies stacking functions - like alchemy, it's possible for 1+1 to equal 4. Milk, grains (scoby) and a days time and voila, you have a delicious base product better than the milk you started with. It's now lightly carbonated, stable in the fridge, resistant to microbial incursion, lower in lactose, tangy, creamy, probiotic and great for your gut.
Many of us grow up thinking of home as our safest place. As consumers, we have been led to believe that by the time products make it to the market, they have been thoroughly tested and proven safe. We pick up packaging and read labels before buying, just to know what is in the products. But, what does a label really tell us? What are these manufactured products made with? Where and how was it cultivated, processed, packages and shipped?
Everything seems to have been created by a higher intelligence that has designed this universe in mysterious ways for us to live off. We live in a perfect symbiosis with nature. Everything seems to have a purpose which co-exists with all that is around us yet we don’t have an explanation to all this perfection.
Climate change, after decades of lulling at the bottom of the news cycle, has belatedly made it into the headlines as increasing numbers of people become aware, convinced and concerned about the environmental and social impacts of the Earth’s evolving atmospheric conditions. I frequently think about disrupted weather patterns and what my role in this unfolding story should be.
The rainforests of Central America might not be the first place that you think of when you hear the term “timber frame construction”, but with initiatives in Monteverde and Mastatal, Costa Rica is starting to make a name for itself in the region for this post and beam building technique. We started to build the infrastructure of Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center in the small rural community of Mastatal, Costa Rica in 2001.
Workshops, one of many forms of education, are expensive to organize, risky to run, and an immense amount of work to pull off and host well. They can also be transformational and inspirational for the participants and provide them with an amazing educational experience. We have been offering life-changing courses and classes in a vast array of areas related to sustainability for over 15 years
