Downshifting Romanian Way - Ulmu Base

If 100 years ago every settlement had craftsmen skilled in local techniques who helped to build houses, nowadays this practice is almost lost. But there are initiatives by young self-taught people who have learned natural building techniques, applied them and now offer others the chance to learn. This is the case of Lucian and Andrei Lupșe from the Ulmu base, two brothers who have returned to the land of their grandparents. In the village of Ulmoasa, a suburb of the small town of Tăuții-Măgherăuș in Maramureș (19 km from Baia-Mare), these two young men have started a living school of permaculture, where you can learn both natural gardening and natural building techniques.

They started to study permaculture, permaculture design, botany, no-till gardening, ecological architecture, efficient cooking and heating systems, traditional agriculture and ecology applied to agriculture. Since 2013, hundreds of wonderful and interested people have come here, working, learning both theoretically and practically, who can be categorized into three categories - trainees, volunteers and simply curious visitors. Most of them came from abroad, from Germany, France, England, Ireland, Norway, Canada, Austria, Tasmania (AU), Denmark, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, but many also from Romania.

Here's how the team at Ulmu Base describes their experience:

The idea was to create an example of best practice in agroecology and natural constructions. Given the vast amount of information on permaculture, we wanted to simplify the 'mysteries' of permaculture in a way that is easy to understand for those who are new to an ecological lifestyle. Organizing techniques and information is a priority for us in order to have a quality education and to be able to start any kind of project. Although the example we have created is a medium-sized farm of 1 ha, in our courses we also offer solutions for designing large farms of 40-50 ha (see the models designed by Joel Salatin in the USA or the Bec Hellouin farm in France) or even thousands of hectares (see: savory.global). This is much needed for sustainable agroecological development in a faster timeframe. We must also consider that it is much more efficient to create a new system of food production than to complain about the current one, where everything is chemized.

A very important aspect that we follow in permaculture design, in terms of habitat design, is to think holistically about the layout of the space. Conventional thinking almost abusively separates humans from nature by separating 'home' from 'garden'.

In the 'living' area, we have large houses and small plots of land. This means that people spend a lot of time indoors, 'stuck in front of the TV', because the land is too small to go outside. At the same time, because the house is big, people will stay inside, but they will suffer in the winter, having to cut down the woods to heat such a large house, where they may only use one room most of the time. The rest of the space is usually devoted to collecting 'duplicate' objects on which they spend all their money. So let's not destroy our country's forests just to heat things that don't need to be heated anyway, and so we don't have any wood to heat ourselves in winter.

It is usually not possible to build in the "gardening" area. This happens for at least two reasons:

1. the laws are such that housing cannot be built in areas with large tracts of agricultural land, which makes it easy for large industrialists to subdivide and thus own it. They do not use agro-ecological methods and so the food we buy is not exactly healthy;

2. the lack of a culture and education for natural gardening and the indoctrination in school and society that if you are a peasant, you are a man of reduced mental capacity and should be marginalized. This education is propagated by most of us today.

In order to understand what permaculture is, we have to go back to the origins and first understand what it means to be a peasant, because that word has lost its true meaning in our Romanian villages. But what does it mean to be a peasant? (My definition is a very simple one: based on the etymology of the word țărână = earth, i.e. terran/ inhabitant of Planet Earth/ Earth.) A true peasant, nowadays, is a man who applies the ethics of permaculture, namely caring for the earth, caring for people and sharing the surplus fairly. A true Terran, as an inhabitant of the Earth, will, in order to build and cultivate, use methods of agro-ecology and sustainable architecture that do not pollute and will use resources in a regenerative way as much as possible.

In 1984, Iranian architect Nader Khalili worked for NASA on building solutions for other planets and the moon. He invented a technique called velcroadobe. Since the world has been reluctant to move to other planets, and because on this planet we are most in need of clean construction methods that are resistant to the forces of nature, he adapted this technique for our planet under the name superadobe, known as the "earth-filled bag" construction technique. (...)

Read the full text in issue 1 / 2016 of Arhitectura Magazine

Downshifting Romanian Way - Six stories about green communities