Strasbourg, the green city

First, I will explain you how I managed to follow my ideals back home, in a city life far from my rural travelling life style… You will discover there is also many ways to be green in a city in Europe :

• No car, just use your bike: I discover how easy it is to go around the city by bike. No worries of parking and their cost, just enjoying the sun and the numerous bicycles lines. And if my bike breaks down, an association is ready to teach me how to repare it with second-hand pieces. This is a really fun way to move around in summer and for small disctance, otherwise I still use hitch-hiking…
• Why buy new, just use second-hand: I discovered several associations and networks to by second-hands clothes, furnitures, books, dishes and about everything esle… For example, Emmaüs is selling for very cheap many articles. Otherwise, every small village in Alsace organizes big second-hand market during the summer…

• Consume local, seasonal and organic: no more supermarket and industrialized products, a local network is emerging selling food produced locally and in an environmental friendly way. Farmer stores, AMAPs or farmer markets are many way to consume better and local products certified by AB or Demeter labels.
• Start home gardening and composting : even in cities and small flats it is possible to grow a few tomatoes and to recycle kitchen waste by starting a small compost pile. The city itself is financing compost equipment if several people agree to use them…
• Eat alive, wild, fermented or dried : eating more raw and alive food is easy by germinating some seeds at home. Preparing probiotic is also easy by making kombucha and kefir. I discover a website where you can easily get the starter and many advices. And even around cities it is easy to find some wild fruits and plants to pick and cook. In Germany there is a map indicating all the places where you can pick fruits for free J I also installed a home-made solar dryer to dry some plants…

With all these new way to live in a city, I reduced my environmental impact a lot. But it is sometimes a fight to avoid using a car, plastics and all kind of pollution, because it is everywhere…

The dream must go on…

I am back in France, but it doesn’t mean that I will stop giving news, because the travel into an alternative way of living is just beginning… It is not only at the other end of the planet, that I can change my way of life. The dream to live closer to the nature and my real needs begins here and today. So I will now describe you my fight in France to define and create the world piece after piece…

You will follow me in my project of creating or joining an ecovillage in France. For now, I only have ideas and some knowledge. I still need partners, specific knowledge and a great land. So I am planning to spend 1 or 2 years to learn around France all I want to know about growing organic veggies, fruit, spiruline, bees, sheep and mushrooms… I am planning to visit many ecoplaces in France to gather this knowledge and also meet people sharing the same values…

Ideally, I am looking for a 10 ha land with drinking water, some forest, some fields and a little house in natural material. From there, the place could get bigger by building other houses with natural or recycled material and installing tippies, caravans or yurts. So different families could live there using solar panels and spring water. The purpose is to much as much as we can what we need through herbal and veggies garden, food forests, a few chicken, goats and bees, and even a mushroom and a spirulina farm. Growing some cereals would be possible by using animals like donkey or horse.

To be financially balanced, we could sell some transformed surplus like bread, jam, veggies cans… Or we could also develop some services according to our competences and desires: school-farm, vegetarian restaurant, farm-pension. We won’t need much money, but we want to be open to every visitor to share our way of living J

 “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”