***Dispatch from Fairfield, Iowa***
I awoke to Alan and Cat searching Lonnie’s place.
“So if I a reach the gravel road I have gone too far,” Alan said with his cell phone to his ear, Lonnie on the other line. “Ok, so I’ll turn around and look for the wind turbines.”
After chasing the wrong wind turbine, we eventually found Lonnie’s place, one of many houses in a small community that has been off the electricity grid for fifteen years. Small turbines whipped around like plane propellers. Solar arrays were spread across the landscape on tops of buildings and on the ground angled south. We greeted Lonnie and walked quickly around the grounds. Inside the barn, drums and various instruments laid out across the loft, a work bench with tools, spare solar panels, about a dozen golf cart interconnected batteries, a dining table in the center and a small classroom and chalkboard. We walked between paths of fruit trees and fennel plants while Lonnie pointed out the pond, 
the rain water showers, and cabins for the Big Green Summer (biggreensummer.com) program. He explained the various ways the community conserves electricity and utilizes the land. Lonnie finished the abbreviated tour and corralled us onto the bus. He had plans to show off the bus and our project around town.
Fairfield is not your typical Iowa town. Two thousand members of the community gather twice a day for transcendental meditation at the two large golden domes at Maharishi University. Founded and named after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the spiritual guru made famous by his relationship with the Beatles. The school was designed around principles of transcendental meditation, mindfulness, peace, and balance while still having traditional academic disciplines.
We parked outside the dining hall around lunchtime and were soon answering questions. Burkey and I followed Lonnie into the cafeteria for a buffet of vegetarian dishes while Alan, Cat and Paasch remained with the bus to demonstrate to passers by. Students and professors waited in line for organic vegetarian food, most of it grown on university land. Lonnie brought us around to promote the talk we were to give at his home that evening, introducing us to dozens of students, professors and others who were at the University to work or meditate. We finally got a chance to sit down and eat before we took our rounds with the bus so the rest of the crew could enjoy the delicious food.
Lonnie next took us to a K-12 school in an old brick building a few hundred of yards from the cafeteria. The school taught sustainability as part of the curriculum. The Field to Table program allowed children to grow and eat food form the school’s greenhouses. A little sign read—“Sweet Potatos, 7th grade boys”. We picked some luscious looking chard for dinner and hurried off to our next stop on our tour of Fairfield. We pulled into the parking lot of a local natural foods store, and immediately attracted a crowd of smiling interested people.
“You take donations, right?” Asked a woman wearing jean overalls. She handed us $15 and told us to wait while she went to the ATM for another more. A man named Kim, who meditates for 8 hours a day, offered to buy our food at the grocery store. We gracisouly accepted and grabbed a few snacks before sneaking away down the street for an interview at the local open source radio station.
After a lengthy in depth discussion with Lonnie on the community radio station, we drove next to the home of the local SVO mechanic, then out to a organic farm in the hills that produced the local goat cheese as well as fruits and vegetables from their large greenhouse. Goats and 
chickens ran through grass and Lonnie led us into the big green house with rows eggplants, cherry tomatoes and hallways of bitter melon vine. It felt invigorating to be surrounded by so much life.
Our last stop before returning to Lonnie’s home for the evening was the Abundance Eco Village. Several homes that were completely energy independant using a combination of wind, photovoltaic, and solar thermal. The normal looking homes use one-tenth of the energy of an average home with a combination of insulation and energy efficient appliances, and rather than pumping valuable water to keep their lawns green, the homes are surrounded by edible plants.
“There’s no silver bullet for achieving sustainability, but what we have is silver buckshot,” said Lonnie.
He let us peak into one of the homes—the interior looked sleek and modern.
“These homes have washers and dryers some have plasma screen TVs. Aside from a little propane for cooking they’re completely energy independent. The showers are just as hot and the beer just as cold as any other home,” Lonnie said.
It was late afternoon when we got back to Lonnie’s. All of us still wide eyed from seeing the amazing possibilities and realities of sustainability. Lonnie went off to meditate leaving us to explore the grounds and join in communal dinner with the students in the Big Green Summer Program. We ate vegetables that some of the students had grown or picked themselves. Hart, one of the students interning at The Big Green Summer Program told us about the program:
“Lonnie started this program so that students could learn about sustainability by living as part of a sustainable community, rather than talking about sustainability while eating snacks from California. A lot of what we do is odd jobs, and learning the skills and doing the physical work it takes to actually do this along with all the classroom stuff.”
After dinner we gave bus demos as people from the community arrived for our talk. We explained the system and answered questions as the crowd gathered around the bus. Someone asked us about our journey and Lonnie suggested that we move the talk over to a small wooden stage on the hillside in front of the pond with open fields in the background. People poured cups of hot tea, spread blankets, and sat on the grass while Alan and I told sat on the stage with the sun setting behind us. We didn’t have to preach about sustainability 
to this community so we told the story of our journey, the things that we had discovered, the events and people that brought us here to this hillside in Southeastern Iowa. We answered questions and quietly discussed the outlook for sustainability across the country as the moon rose into the purple sky behind us.
Afterward, we took our big lillipads the little girls gave us to put on our heads and walked the barn to play some music. Lonnie and one student started jamming on bass and guitar. Soon, we were singing, playing drums and guitars.
I decided to sleep on the roof of the bus under the stars until dew soaked me and my blankets. Alan pitched a tent in the grass. Brian and Paasch must have made their way to the bus after more singing and Cat shortly after.
I woke the next morning walked down to the pond for a morning swim. I was soon joined by Alan and Chris, 
both plunging in past the lillipads and the mucky bottom along the shoreline into the deep center. We rinsed off in the outdoor shower and hopped on the bus to visit a budding urban permaculture garden before leaving town.
“It’s a work in progress, but eventually it will be nearly self-sustaining. See the grape vines growing up the telephone pole on the sidewalk,” Chris pointed toward twisted vines with unripe grapes hanging. “Here the beans feed nitrogen to corn stalk and the squash grow in the shade below. All these are edible weeds, this one kinda tastes like spinach. It’s great in salads. The bamboo is beginning to grow over there just in behind where the pond will be. The water all comes from the roof, from the rainwater catchment over there,” he pointed to a large tub next to the house.
We marveled at all the plants—annuals and perennials growing together in the small yard.
“Yeah we’re not self sufficient or anything like that, but we produce a lot of fresh food here, nearly all year round. And one day we hope it will be almost running on its own and we can relax do some serious sitting on the stone patio surrounded by all this.”
September 21st, 2007 at 3:50 pm
[…] made a stop in Fairfield during their tour last year…you can read about their experiences here. They were able to spend a longer amount of time there and they give a great description of all […]