We’re a passionate group of Namibians making our world a better place. We’ve come together to create the Living Earth Projects Voluntary Association, organised as a DAO.
Living Earth is dedicated to creating all the essential elements to realize its vision of “Lekker Lewe” – a harmonious existence where humans and nature thrive together. Our approach is akin to a food forest: diverse, interconnected, and resilient. Rather than relying on a single large corporate entity, which can be compared to industrial monocrop farming, Living Earth fosters a network of small, synergistic initiatives that grow and support each other.
Our network includes multiple social enterprises, a series of permaculture schools, an online school, a marketplace, a worker/farmer cooperative, and a social business startup incubator. We also host a yearly expo and competition to inspire villages to create their own abundance, and maintain a wiki and publish a book to guide our collective thinking. Coordinated through a DAO and built on community ownership and permanence, this structure ensures sustainable growth and mutual support.
Like a food forest, where a variety of plants coexist and benefit from one another, the Living Earth network nurtures small seeds of innovation and cooperation, allowing them to flourish together. This model not only fosters ecological abundance but also builds a peaceful, prosperous, and joyful society in harmony with nature. Through this interconnected system, Living Earth aims to reshape Namibia into a place where sustainable living and community well-being are at the forefront.
It is important to plant these seeds together to make the “food forest” flourish. Each part on it’s own will be much less impactful!
We want to bring together everyone who cares about a good, clean, healthy future for all in Namibia. The aim is that our projects connect lot of new people, that we learn a lot and that we then form groups that tackle the individual building blocks of this new future, so that we can move fast forward towards it.
We strongly believe in the Living Earth vision as so beautifully described by David Korten in his book “Change the Story, Change the Future”. Below is that story! Read it, imagine it
LIVING EARTH
“Imagine a world in which we organize ourselves as members of living communities of place.
Human-made structures are adapted to their natural settings, support natural processes, and connect people with one another and nature. People meet their needs for energy, nutrients, materials, and information in co-productive partnership with the natural living systems of the place they live.
There are no concrete jungles, food deserts, strip malls, or sprawling suburbs. There are gardens everywhere, growing a profuse diversity of beautiful fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Human settlements organize as self-reliant bioregional food, energy, and water sheds. Major settlements feature a high-population-density car-free urban core designed around public parks, walkways, bicycle paths, and urban gardens.
The boundaries of local government jurisdictions coincide with their primary food, energy, and water sheds. Most people are housed in multifamily, cooperatively owned living units of diverse designs that blend with their landscape clustered around shared facilities: laundries, guest and meeting rooms, composting facilities, solar and geothermal energy heating systems, and office workspaces and support facilities.
Neighbors share tools and implements and look out for one another’s children at play in car-free commons areas. Eco-village-style neighborhoods and districts share facilities for the management of nutrients, water, and energy. Many neighborhood and district eco-villages organize as locally owned, self-sustaining economic units offering a variety of locally owned commercial and recreational facilities and investment or employment opportunities reflective of the distinctive tastes, interests, skills, and personal preferences of their residents.
An urban core serves as the bioregion’s cultural, educational, and economic hub, providing it with excellent cultural, educational, scientific, and manufacturing facilities. Each of the region’s distinctive eco-villages makes its unique contribution to the diverse, resilient, self-reliant life of the whole. For eco-villages located in intentionally sparsely populated rural areas, economic activities center on the restoration and sustainable management of soils, forests, and fisheries.
Rural eco-villages offer urban visitors opportunities for nature education, recreation, and spiritual practice. Various forms of public transportation—including car-and ride-share facilities—connect eco-villages to one another and the urban core. Every person has a direct connection to every other person in the world by high-speed Internet and seamless videoconferencing and entertainment facilities. Most people on most days have no need to venture from the boundaries of the urban core or eco-village in which they live. They meet most mobility needs by walking and biking.
Young people are encouraged to take a year to explore the world by foot, train, and ship —connecting to its varied geographies and cultures and building diverse friendships they will maintain throughout their lives through digital communication. Hang-gliding is a favorite sport. Jet air travel is mainly a distant memory.
Money, markets, businesses, and governments are all part of this picture, but they are structured to support balanced and mutually beneficial exchanges within and among communities. People read about the money-seeking corporate robots that once ruled the world and wonder how and why their ancestors tolerated such insanity.”
Taken from Korten, David C.. Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth (pp. 84-86). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
The phrase “Living Earth” for us means both a living & livable planet and abundant life in the soil!
If we put life into our soil through organic & regenerative agriculture and permaculture then we can achieve the dream life mentioned above 🙂 That’s what the team at the Living Earth Expo focuses on.