The Alternate Energy and Environment Center (AEEC) was begun in 1975 by a group of students and faculty at Ramapo College in response to the energy crisis of the 1970's. It's goal was to provide a student-built environmental education facility that demonstrated alternative methods of producing and using resources, particularly energy, food, and shelter, that were not heavily based on depleting and polluting sources of fossil fuels.

It was hoped that the technologies and methods developed would provide some insight into how to provide people with the necessities of life, food, shelter, heat, electricity and water that would be ecologically sustainable [able to be provided in the long-term without depleting the life-support systems such as pure air, water, soil, microorganisms and biodiversity of life that are essential for our long-term survival]. At the same time, the AEEC also sought to model social and community sustainability, represented in the full participation of people in a climate of equality and mutual and environmental respect, in the process of achieving personal self reliance and collective survival. The center demonstrated both technological approaches and social/community approaches to understanding and seeking sustainability.

The Center

At the Center, visitors saw various integrated technological systems, most relatively simple, that used local resources such as soil, water, and the sun to provide for human needs.

In one integrated system, a three-season bio-intensive organic garden provided nutrients from composting and from animal manure, water from a solar-powered water-pumping windmill and storage tank.

A solar greenhouse provided seedlings for the garden, extended the growing season, and allowed winter food production.

A relatively simple energy efficient passive solar building (the solar schoolhouse) had its heating, cooling, electricity and hot and cold water provided for by the sun, wind, and biomass (wood).
Some of the methods and technologies have been around for some time, while some (small-scale bio-intensive gardening methods, PV's, small efficient wind generators, solar pumps) are on the cutting edge of today's modern technologies.

The Center was not a demonstration of exactly how we should live, but it offered examples of many technologies and ideas that could easily be incorporated into your current household and lifestyle. These included:

• small-scale production of food
• yard and organic waste composting
• energy efficiency
• minimizing use of all resources
• recycling
• maximizing the use of the sun to provide energy for many purposes
  

These approaches to providing basic needs can make people more self-sufficient, help extend resources and save money, and reduce pollution.

These technological demonstrations did not exist as isolated examples, but rather as part of a set of interrelated relationships between people and their natural support systems. The nature of these relationships is qualitatively different than the normal ways that people rely upon technological systems to meet their environmental needs.

Rather than reducing nature to a storehouse of resources to be exploited by humans, the AEEC suggested that people can meet their needs successfully by acting with and through nature, not against it. Thus, a relationship of stewardship and participation characterized the activities at the AEEC.

People engaged in growing their own food, they directly felt the warmth of the sun that heats their buildings, they pumped their water up from the ground or un-leased the force of gravity to drop it down from the storage tank, they placed organic wastes in the compost bins and then stirred the piles, becoming agents of the composting process.

In all these things, they created and built and experimented with nature as a guide---as the ultimate teacher. But they also saw the cyclical relationships of nature---how compost fuels plants that are eventually composted. And, thus, they viewed nature as a learning process, of response to feedback, that creates highly variable and adaptive systems.

In a world in which our needs are met by mindless switching on of circuits, at the AEEC, there was the possibility of discovering an intelligence far different from the automated virtual reality we have surrounded ourselves with.

Participant learning followed Barry Commoner’s ecological rule that "nature knows best." It is incumbent upon the individual and the social system to provide the skills for observing, understanding and collaborating with nature. What are some of the lessons to be learned?

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