A Week in Auroville

To be honest, I had kind of a prejudiced attitude before I even got on the train toward Auroville,
and it really didn't do too much to change my preconceived opinion. This place was started back in the 1960s by a bunch of mostly European "spiritual" folks seeking to create a community dedicated to expanding universal consciousness and furthering the evolution of the human race. Riiiight. Anyway it now has a global reputation as a place where many innovative startups have taken root, especially with renewable energy, organic farming, value-added products, and other "social enterprises." Also this chunk of land near Pondicherry in eastern Tamil Nadu was severely deforested and degraded when the original legion of hippies moved in, and actually they have impressively reforested the area so that they can have ridiculous tree houses and such.

I spent the week sleeping in a "capsule" (actually quite nice, made only from tree branches and

thatch as far as I could tell) and trying to check out as many interesting projects as possible. One of the many, many differences between this place and "real" India was that a lot of people didn't have or didn't want to make time for me. I guess they're inundated with obnoxious tourists who come to India only for Auroville (I met several of these), and also the place had a palpable feel of European (especially French) snobbiness. Nevertheless, I did manage to shoulder my way into a number of places and the following is a brief rundown.The Auroville Earth Institute has apparently pioneered some innovative ways to use raw earthas a building material, mainly through the use of a human-powered press machine and various dies that form dirt into convenient shapes and sizes, such as interlocking tongue-and-groove blocks. They didn't have time to talk to me unless I was going to pay for an expensive earth building course, but the French guy in the office was nice enough to let me walk around and look at their displays. I briefly checked out Auroville Wind Systems although the main guy (German) didn't have time for me; apparently they make 5kw low-altitude wind turbines. I got a tour of Upasana fair trade clothing from an Indian fellow I had met the night before. Not really my interest, but at least this one was started and run by a lady from Bihar, one of the country's poorest states. Supposedly she's a real hardass and a also a former Ashoka fellow, quite a prestigious title. Finally, the (Indian) director of Sunlit Future, the Auroville solar energy installation company, was willing to give me a chunk of time and tell me about how most households and farms in Auroville have at least some solar capability and about the remote village installations they do from European grants. However, he said that solar makes up only about 8-10% of Auroville's total energy usage. The rest comes from the massive brown coal power station in nearby Neyveli, and I decided to make a trip there with the guy who gave me a tour of Apasana.

This nice fellow from Dehradun didn't really know what he was getting himself into, and I think

he wasn't really accustomed to my style of seat-of-the-pants industrial disaster tourism. Still he was a good sport about it and I couldn't have seen the completely massive open-cast lignite mines if not for him and his rented motorbike. It was visually reminiscent of the huge mines I saw in eastern Germany, except in this case a lot of really poor people were living right on the edge of the mining area. I found out that the huge, outdated power plant turning this extremely inefficient fuel into power for Auroville and the rest of Tamil Nadu was just down the road, so me and bubby started that way. He decided to ask the guards if we could get a tour of the plant, and while they were nice at first and seemed to be entertaining the idea they suddenly became very suspicious of me and even brought some "head inspector" to question me. I guess I was looking like a terrorist that day. We then went to the village area which is just outside of the concrete and barbed wire fence, and it was yet another intensely surreal Indian moment of the very traditional meeting the ugly side of modern development head-on. Massive smokestacks seemed to emerge directly from mud and thatch huts; field workers tending crops were overshadowed by huge steam generator units.

I spent the last bit of time at Auroville checking out some organic

farms and food processing enterprises, two more things I hope to do back in Appalachia. Buddha Garden was a 2-3 acre organic farm started by Priya from the UK who originally moved to Auroville as a spiritual hippy like everybody else but got fed up with the realities (i.e. hypocrisies, BS, etc) of the "communal life" and decided to move just outside of Auroville proper and start a farm. It was a very nice and efficient operation with a young Indian farm manager and a ton of white interns, with growing methods consisting almost entirely of permanent raised beds and drip irrigation lines. She has written several books about farming now and was nice enough to take over an hour to talk to me when she had several other things to do. I did a bit of volunteer work threshing rice at Solitude Farm (yes they all have stupid names) and ended up with a nasty rash, but it was nice to see their "one straw revolution" style planting methods and windmill-driven water pump. I also visited Botanical Gardens, which was actually a seed saving and selling farm as well as tree nursery, contrary to the name.

Naturellement was a value-adding business started some 20 years ago, and it seemed to be a

very nice enterprise despite the obnoxious French name. Martina, the Swedish founder/owner has done a good job of employing quite a few Indians from the surrounding villages for much higher than standard wages to make a diverse line of sweets and baked goods. While not all of the ingredients are local, almost everything is organic and the distribution is within India only. Kofpu was a small raw foods producer (mainly kombucha, spirulina, and such), and while I thought they were casually inviting me in to have lunch with them they ended up asking for 200 rupees, about 4 times the cost of a typical Indian meal. Pebble Garden was a fair ways outside of Auroville, but it was worth the trip to see how they've managed to turn very rocky, barren land into a thriving organic farm. As far as I could tell this half-Swedish-half-Indian older couple doesn't sell anything and mainly function to sustain themselves and save seeds which they distribute for free to nearby farmers. More than any other place I visited, they were focused on permaculture techniques with in-situ composting and raised beds using only fallen branches for the walls and a mix of leaves, biochar, and bits of dirt to make excellent soil. My last stop was the Sadhana Forest intentional community. I was too late for the proper tour and so I was only barely able to see the reforestation project and the dozens of "capsule" homes for the interns, and mainly ended up watching a film about how badly the aborigines of Australia are being screwed over. As with the rest of these projects you can learn plenty just by looking at their website that I've linked to, but basically this place was started by an Israeli family with the intention to bring back the native forest and its now home to a mass of almost completely white interns.

So, that was my Auroville experience. Definitely a lot of really good ideas and quite a bit of good execution, and I really only scratched the surface in my week there. But I just couldn't bring myself to actually like the place, and you would almost have to pay me to live and spend any more time there. Maybe it was the fact that it was an island of European wealth and pretentious attitude surrounded by some very poor villages, even by Indian standards. Maybe it was the way that I could feel this snobby attitude rubbing off on the Indian locals, as opposed to the very open and friendly India I had come to know. Or maybe I just don't like new age hippies, and there were plenty of those. Either way I was pretty happy to be taking a bus up to Chennai to catch a train to the mountains of northeast Andhra Pradesh, but at the same time I really appreciate all of the time people took to share their experiences with me and I hope it can all be somehow relevant for my future.

Bioenergy and Sustainable Living in Rural Karnataka

A big part of my focus back in Appalachia has been sustainable distributed bioenergy systems, and I've been hoping to make that a focus of my time in India as well. I was finally able to make a solid contact with BERI (BioEnergy for Rural India), and after leaving Gudalur I was on my way to the Tumkur district of Karnataka, about a 3 hour bus ride away from the software megacity of Bangalore. BERI has received some big grants from the UN, the state of Karnataka, and a few others to show what a model distributed renewable energy system could look like for the rural parts of India, and I wanted to see how this framework could be relevant for back home. I could tell from their website that the technology (gasification of locally harvested wood) and scale (0.25-1MW) was roughly inline with my past research, and soon I was being greeted at the bus stand by a fellow who would give me a ride on the back of a motorbike to the area where I'd be staying for a few days.

This was the first of what has now become a trend of being treated to tours of rural sustainability projects on the backs of motorbikes through windy roads that range from falling apart pavement, dirt roads, or foot/animal paths. Needless to say it is a very awesome way to travel and the photo opportunities are endless. I did in fact get to see a few biomass gasification plants which were way lower-tech than the places I saw in Austria but also much more affordable and better suited to local conditions and feedstocks. Also this technology results in about 10-15% leftover biochar as a co-product after gasification, which to me is a big advantage over the Austrian model that completely gasifies the biomass and therefore release all of the CO2 to the atmosphere. The biochar here was apparently being used by local blacksmiths, but it could just as easily be used for improving agricultural land and sequestering carbon.

The BERI project had a few other facets that I wasn't initially aware of and which definitely worthwhile components of an overall rural sustainability model. First, several dozen bore wells have been drilled and connected to the power supplied by these plants; the water is then pumped into holding tanks that supply drip irrigation lines for small-scale organic farming. In a country where rainfall only really occurs from June-September, this has enabled very poor villagers to produce nutritious vegetables for their families and local markets at times that wouldn't have been possible before. Second, several multi-family cooperatively run biogas digesters have been established, wherein the families put cow manure into the system and then get clean gas for cooking (displacing traditional indoor wood-fired cooking which is terrible for respiratory health and depletes nearby forests) and organic fertilizer for their fields. Finally, many of these villages now have vermicomposting systems and composting toilets to better process waste and give nutrients back to the lands that they depend on for survival.

I definitely appreciated the time they took to show me around, and all of this without charging me a single rupee. But for the sake of balance I should include some critique. The main problem I saw was that the feedstock for the bioenergy plants is coming from non-native eucalyptus and acacia trees. They're growing short-rotation "energy forests" on land which is too rocky, uneven, or distant from villages to b used for farming, which in theory can be a good model if using native and ideally multipurpose trees. Also, I have to wonder how replicable this model would be without inputs from agencies like the UN and state government. But the counterpoint to that would be the massive expenditures the Indian government is already making on huge centralized coal and nuclear fired power plants, and in my opinion it would be much more cost-effective, reliable, and environmentally friendly to have a network of small-scale renewable energy power plants than to rely on megalithic installations that displace thousands of people and put this rapidly developing country on a fast track to ecological destruction and which provide only about 2-4 hours of electricity per day to the rural poor. In short I think this could be an excellent model for the entire country if the feedstock was from native species and if the government had the best interest of the people at heart, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

A friend in Wales had told me about a place called Navadarshanam, just a few kilometers past the Karnataka border into Tamil Nadu near Bangalore. They had a very nice website and I decided to pay them a visit as it was apparently an "intentional community" dedicated to sustainable living and Ghandian (as in the Ghandi that led the movement for independence from the British) philosophy and spirituality. I only spent a couple of days there, and while it wasn't exactly a groundbreaking experience, they did have a nice collection of good ideas. They had some solar panels, a wind turbine, a biogas digester, a couple acres of organic gardens, buildings mostly made from compressed earth blocks (CEBs), and a value-added food processing center that employed about 35 local villagers. The latter two were of the most interest to me as I had never seen these CEB buildings before and they were very, very nice. Cool and comfortable in the heat of the afternoon sun, and they had an attractive and conventional appearance (as opposed to many of the hobbit-looking natural buildings found in the US). There was one building dedicated solely to making chutneys, pickles, peanut butter, jams, and other nice things from organic and mostly local ingredients, and it ran on a cooperative management model employing mostly women from nearby villages.

I ended up my time in Karnataka by meeting with the head gasification scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, a world-renowned technology development university. I still don't know why top guys like him are willing to meet with my uncredentialed self. As I've been thinking about getting projects going in Appalachia, I'm always on the lookout for potential partners and I was mainly interested to make a connection on the chance that it might make sense to work with these folks to do a pilot installation back home in the case that I can't find anyone with suitable expertise or in the right price range in the US. Of course there's the logic that it's always better to use domestic resources than outsourcing, but to be honest I think there's a good chance that US companies will be far too expensive for an initial small-scale installation and the Indian technology seemed much more simple and adjustable than the highly automated systems typically found in Western countries.

Next stop will be Auroville, arguably one of the weirdest places in India and somewhere I definitely wouldn't go if not for its reputation for innovative renewable energy, organic farming, and reforestation projects.

PS for more pictures click here

Biochar in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu

Mumbai wasn't nearly as much of a shock to the senses as I'd expected, but the sleeper class train (basically the lowest class and cheapest trains where you can lay down) I took to Hyderabad was a bit more of an experience than I thought it would be. I guess I had gotten used to the relative comfort of the AC trains with their cleaner berths, fairly sane comings and goings of passengers, and controlled environment, so the wide-open windows, tons of people squeezing onto one seat, and unkempt nature of the ride was yet another adjustment in this country of constant assaults on the senses. It really wasn't so bad and despite being constantly stared at by the youths crowded together I really enjoyed being able to see the scenery so clearly, as well as the random conversations with folks happy to practice their English skills.

The next stop was Hyderabad, a mostly uninteresting city which is now becoming one of India's fast growing IT outsourcing hubs. I was there to meet with Dr. Saibaskar Reddy, a fellow trained in geology but now one of the country's main proponents of biochar as a means to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in charcoal and use it for improving agricultural land. The approach his group, GEO, has taken is to build and distribute low-cost small cookstoves to rural villages which enable people to remove the charcoal before it completely turns to ash and which also create much less smoke than traditional wood-fired cooking methods. I spent a couple of days out in the countryside with him visiting places where the stoves are made from completely recycled materials, seeing their biochar training center, and also villages where the stoves are being used.

This was definitely one of the poorer areas I'd visited so far, and it's been strange to see the limited means people have to work with yet how they generally seem to be in better spirits than people from more "developed" places. They were also uniformly friendly and happy to share with outsiders like myself. I was also a bit surprised to see a couple of monuments adorned with communist flags; apparently this region produces some of the leaders of the Maoist Naxalite movement from time to time. Through Dr. Reddy I made a contact with a group in Tamil Nadu that was just starting to work on a biochar project, and after receiving a positive response from them I made plans to travel to the Nilgiris area of the Western Ghats mountains as my next stop. After checking out Golconda Fort and a nice museum, I boarded a bus headed to Bangalore where I would get another bus to Gudalur.

One of my favorite aspects of this trip is watching the countryside change from a bus or train window, and this time I got to see the arid plains of Andhra Pradesh turn into the tropical farmlands of Karnataka and then into the forested hills of NW Tamil Nadu. I was lucky enough to see a wild elephant as I passed through the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, and soon I was finding my way to the office of the Shola Trust where I would be collaborating on their biochar project for a couple of weeks. The Shola Trust has a few different focus areas (biological conservation, tribal livelihood development, etc), and this biochar project touched on a few of these. There is an invasive shrub known as lantana camara which has taken over large areas of the ecologically sensitive Mudumalai Tiger reserve, and it's particularly nasty because the leaves are inedible to wildlife, the roots exude chemicals which prevent other plants from growing nearby, and it resprouts more vigorously when cut or burned. Therefore Shola is working with the Forest Service and nearby tribal communities to uproot lantana, remove it from the forest (open burning in the forest leads to forest fires and actually encourages lantana), use the nicer branches for tribal-made furniture, and convert the rest into biochar to be mixed with manure/compost and applied to agricultural land.

My task was to design and build a portable, efficient biochar kiln that could be taken to villages to utilize the nearby lantana and also use the excess heat to remove the bark from the lantana branches that they would be using for furniture making. After some hours of internet searching I had a basic design, and the next day I started working with a local metalworker to cut, weld, and put everything into place. This was a growing experience in a few ways. First, this fellow spoke almost no English, and I had to communicate only through drawing, gestures, and moving pieces of metal around. Second, I was amazed at their working methods, as they use hammer and chisel to cut thick pieces of angle iron and there was no welding mask in sight, despite quite a bit of high voltage arc welding. Finally, this fellow and his family were devout Christians, and they were the first I'd met in those mostly Hindu country. I came to find out that South India and Tamil Nadu in particular has a much more even mix of Christian/Muslim/Hindu peoples, and that here they coexist very peacefully.

After a few days it was time to test this oil barrel + galvanized pipe + angle iron contraption, and thank the Lord it worked as it was supposed. It always ended up being a bit of a party when we would do a test firing as everybody wanted to come and help with building the containment walls, getting the wood ready, starting the initial fire, and watching the flames roar out of the gasification pipe. As far as I know they're using the unit out in the field now, but unfortunately I felt like my time was too limited to stick around for more than 2 1/2 weeks.

I'll just say a quick note about some other people and projects in the area that are definitely worth mentioning. Many parts of India have serious problems with the exploitation of the indigenous tribal peoples (known as Adivasis), and this mountainous area is no different. Back in the 1980s a very inspiring fellow named Stan Thaekaera started an organization called Accord, and they have had many important victories which have forced the government and non-tribal Indians to recognize Adivasi land rights even when they don't have a formal document asserting their ownership. There is a hospital and school in Gudalur dedicated to Advasis, and both were excellent models of non-condescending ways to help locals. From Accord, a side group known as Just Change developed in the 1990s with the aim of empowering Adivasis through community owned sustainable enterprises and an international marketing framework that takes "Fair Trade" a step farther. The Shola Trust was started by the Stan's son Tarsh, and they share an office with Just Change. Finally, there's this awesome guy Madhu who rescues snakes (including lots of cobras) who have come into contact with humans as Shola's wildlife conservation fellow and releases them into safe habitats, and sometime soon I'll try to post a youtube video of one of his capers.

India: The First Month or so

I have to admit that I was experiencing a fair amount of anxiety and trepidation as the flight from Germany to India finally got into the air. I had never been to a “developing” country before (unless you count Appalachia), and most people I had talked to had given me more to worry about than to look forward to. However, I had chosen this destination for good reasons, and I was determined to at least spend a few solid weeks in the country before giving up.

Upon arriving in Delhi, my first day went about as wrong as it could have. Air India lost several people's checked baggage (including mine) in Germany, and we had to wait for hours only to find that they would take our information and deliver the baggage when and if they found it. I had been planning to stay with someone that I had contacted on www.couchsurfing.org, but I couldn't access the internet anywhere to look up their number so I got a taxi ride to a part of town that I heard had cheapish hotels.

To make a long story short, the taxi driver drove me through some very sketchy looking streets to arrive at a relatively opulent hotel which was way more expensive than I was looking for. My senses were overwhelmed on the ride there by the completely new sights, sounds, and smells of one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world, including traffic with no rules whatsoever, random cattle all over the place, lots of tiny three-wheeled cargo vehicles, horse carts right next to huge trucks, and the most intense haze of smog I've ever seen. Basically he pulled a tried-and-true scam where a shell-shocked foreigner who has just arrived in super crazy Delhi is shown some of the “rougher” parts of town and then delivered to a cushy hotel, and the driver gets a fat commission if the tourist stays there. It was getting dark and I didn't have the energy or guts to go searching for somewhere cheaper in this overwhelming place, so I paid my 1800 rupees and got some sleep.

I spent the night wondering if I would be able to handle this place for any length of time, although I had barely seen anything at all. Thankfully everything started to change almost immediately the next day. I finally did hook up with the fellow I had found on couchsurfing.org, and I eventually made it over to his flat after visiting the Qutb Minar monuments. Abhinav and his flatmates were all young professional Indians (mostly with MBAs) living in the area of town known as Mehrauli, technically the oldest part of Delhi as it existed as an independent town even before the actual city. I spent some time wandering through the amazingly congested and chaotic narrow streets filled with cows, motorcycles, bicycles carrying amazing loads, little kids, trash, and every kind of shop you could imagine. I definitely felt like I was in a different world, and I don't think words can describe the intense sensory onslaught. Somehow I felt relatively comfortable walking through these streets where I was the only white person around, and I no longer felt overwhelmed as when I had first arrived.

I quickly came to be familiar with the public transport system in Delhi as I was mainly there to have meetings and make contacts that would ideally help pave the way for the rest of my time in India. I was reasonably able to get around town on my own only using the metro and my feet, which I felt proud about considering how chaotic this place can be. I met up with people at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), The Energy Research Institute (TERI), Indian Institute of Technology's Centre for Energy Studies, and someone associated with Navdanya. In the end I wasn't sure how useful it was overall, as I came out of the week with only a few additional contacts and no more set places to go. I missed out on most of the more “touristy” attractions in and around Delhi (like the Taj Mahal), but this didn't concern me so much as I was pretty determined to not be a typical India tourist.

Before heading to my next “official” engagement, I made a four-day detour up to McLeod Ganj, AKA the home of the Dalai Lama and a Tibetan refugee settlement. I mainly went to go see some Himalayan foothills and interesting cultural stuff, but I ended up being very affected by the situations that the Tibetans are in. I've always been vaguely aware of the issue of Tibet having been violently taken over by China in the late 1950s with most of their ancient monasteries destroyed and many peaceful monks tortured and/or killed, but it never really hit home til I was in their capitol-in-refuge. Through documentaries and hanging out with young Tibetans who spoke broken English, I came to learn about the ongoing systematic undermining of their culture by the Chinese authority and the persecution of any dissidents within the country. Unfortunately this left me feeling mostly frustrated and powerless, but it did plant the idea of possibly going to Tibet to see things there with my own eyes if I end up going to China later. Otherwise I got to see some very beautiful mountains and waterfalls and such, and then onto an extremely uncomfortable overnight bus ride to my next destination.

I had planned for some time to go to the Bija Vidyapeeth organic training farm outside of Dehradun in Uttarakhand. This was originally set up by world-infamous author, speaker, activist etc Vandana Shiva along with a couple of other people back in the 1980s. Not only does it contain about 25 acres of organic fruit, vegetable, herb, and grain production, they also have a diversified seed bank and they host research, development, and regional farmer trainings. Bija Vidyapeeth is the demonstration farm for Navdanya, a nationwide organization that sets up seed banks, trains farmers to grow organically, and which also helps them with marketing and branding with many branches and operatives working in several regions. This is significant considering that at least 60% of this country of 1.2 billion people still makes a primary living from agriculture, and since the 1960s they have become quite dependent on synthetic chemical inputs that they can scarcely afford and which contribute to further degradation of already damaged lands.

I was excited to arrive and jump straight into hands-on work alongside the Indians who work there full time, but this was thwarted on the first day by a crippling stomach illness. I had been told that I would probably get sick at some point in India, and so I had attempted to inoculate myself in the first week by eating samosas from street vendors. I still don't know what triggered it, but after two weeks into the trip I found myself struggling with the most unpleasant night of vileness that I can remember. For the next several days I was much weaker than usual with a very limited appetite. Eventually I got violently ill again, and finally decided to go to the doctor for antibiotics. I was cured within a day or so and have not had any such episode again.

Although I was at less than full capacity for about half of my time at Navdanya, it was at least good to see and spend time with an organization that is doing activities all over the country that are similar to what I would like to do with organic farming in Appalachia. I can't say that I really learned anything new about farming as I didn't notice anything particularly innovative about their methods, and it was surprisingly expensive to stay and volunteer there. In fact I have the feeling that the financial side of the organization is significantly propped up by the high prices foreigners pay (about $14 per day, which is a ton of money here) to come have an authentic Indian farming experience, as well as the very high prices they charge for their products in fancy markets in Delhi and Dehradun. I certainly could have spent my money on worse causes, and while I wonder about the overall financial sustainability of a model that depends on constant input from foreigners I do think they are doing good work that deserves to be supported.

I had planned to go from Navdanya back to Delhi for a week and then over to the mining regions of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, but this was not to be the case. I met an Indian visitor at Navdanya who's family lives in Rajasthan, and soon I found myself pulled in an unexpected direction. Rajasthan is known as a mostly arid desert state which is home to some of India's most impressive ancient structures (built by the old-time kings known as Rajputs) and also beautiful folk art and music. I ended up spending about 2 weeks traveling through Jodhpur, Jaipur, and Jaisalmer, and while it wasn't all completely relevant to my project it was definitely an unforgettable experience in many ways.

Without going into too much detail, I received the most luxurious treatment of my life due to my friend's father being very high-ranking in the Indian railway system (the largest employer in the world apparently), I got to see massive old forts built on top of sandstone mountains, I spent New Year's Eve camping on a sand dune after riding for awhile on camelback, and I rode a motorcycle for the first time with a Rajasthani village native into his home area and then spent the night in a mud hut there after trying their version of moonshine. Actually this fellow is trying to set up an organic farm in his village that visitors can come to and spend time, and I would highly recommend hooking up with Shivnath if you have the chance (http://dumpalorganicfarm.blogspot.com/). I could easily write an entire entry about those two weeks only, but it would end up being too much in the way of personal details and little of project relevancy.

Finally I got back on track and ended up in Mumbai (Bombay) for a few days to have some meetings, again with the intention of making contacts that could help pave the way for my next steps. That did happen to some extent (i.e. coordinator for Biochar India and a fellow running Oikos, an ecological design business), and also I can now say that I have spent time in and successfully navigated around the world's 2^nd largest city. Highlights include the Elephanta island caves where massive thousand-year-old Hindu carvings adorn the walls, seeing the sunset from the beach, catching the extremely crowded local trains, driving around the city in a top-down jeep with one of my “contacts,” and touring the Dharavi slum (2^nd biggest slum in the world) with someone I randomly met at a dental appointment. Just like with Delhi, I experienced anxiety and trepidation on the train ride in, and within a day I felt strangely safe and comfortable moving around a ridiculously huge city on my own.

This covers the first month and a half or so of my time in India, and from here I end up heading south to spend time in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Hopefully I'll have the next entry finished in much less time than it took to put this one out, so stay tuned.

PS I know I'm being very sparse on details so as always feel free to ask me more about specific people, places, and/or projects at nathandavidhall@gmail.com.

Austria - Slovakia - Poland - Czech Republic

This is a very long entry as it covers a month and a half and four countries. It's also long overdue. As always email me at nathandavidhall@gmail.com with any further questions/comments etc, and click here to see more pictures.

The Gussing bioenergy plant in southeast Austria was one of the first places that I proposed to go when I decided to apply for the Watson Fellowship. I had discovered this place while doing research at Berea College, and had used it as an example of sustainable community-scale renewable energy in several presentations (one of my professors even started to use it as an example in his lectures). I was pleasantly surprised when one of the main scientists at the plant quickly responded to an email to let me know that I would be welcome to come spend some time there on my travels. We kept in touch over the months after I first submitted my proposal, and based on his suggestion I planned the first leg of my Watson trip around being there from mid-October til mid-November to avoid a planned maintenance shutdown period in September.

When I finally arrived to start my internship I found that they had changed the maintenance shutdown period to mid-October til mid-Novermber; in other words the exact time I had planned to be there. No one bothered to let me know about this change and I definitely could have set up my travels a little better, but oh well. I will spare the readers the boring details and complaining I could do, but basically I spent about two weeks doing absolutely nothing whereas I thought I would do a month-long internship learning about the inner workings of a state-of-the-art community scale biomass energy system. For posterity's sake, I will at least explain what I already knew about the plant before coming.

Gussing is a small town (around 5,000 people) in the southeast Austrian region of Burgenland, which until World War I was part of Hungary. It is considered to be the "poorest" part of Austria, but to be fair Austria is nowhere close to a "poor" country and this area looked to be quite well off to me. It's mostly a rolling landscape with a few hills and lots of small to medium sized farms and tracts of forest. The town of Gussing is of interest because over the past 15 years they have successfully implemented a number of renewable energy projects, especially around biomass which is a main interest of mine because of its potential for Appalachia. They have one of the only fully functional biomass gasification plants in Europe, meaning that instead of just burning wood or whatever else for energy, it is cooked under limited oxygen to release gases which are then used to fire an engine. This gas can also be used for other purposes, such as to create liquid fuels or to be reformed into chemicals like methanol or propane. Nearby there are also a couple of traditional biomass combustion energy systems, as well as a biogas system (anaerobic digestion, like the ones I visited in Germany). Finally, a solar panel manufacturing company has located here in recent years and the European Center for Renewable Energy is headquartered here.

I originally wanted to come and get involved in whatever work was available, but a serious language barrier prevented me from helping with the maintenance team and no other operations were happening. Instead, I spent time trying to figure out how the initial planning and funding for this project had come about. From what I could gather, a fellow named Reinhard Koch originally came up with the majority of the idea for the whole bioenergy concept for this town. He is a native of this area, made quite a bit of money in the construction business, and then worked with local officials to secure lots of grants and matching funding from the European Union to make this into a model region for small-scale renewable energy. Almost by chance he met with a research scientist at the University of Vienna who had been developing a unique approach to biomass gasification, and they decided to use Gussing as a place to test this design on a real-world scale. After some initial tweaking, the plant has been in nearly constant operation (except for occasional maintenance periods) for the past 10 years, and a couple of others have been built in nearby towns based on the same model. Besides producing quite a bit of electricity, they also supply most of the heat needed for the town via a network of underground hot water pipes.

I still think that this is a very good example of how a rural area can achieve energy independence and sustainability, and there are plenty of aspects of this place that could be applied to development in Appalachia. I spoke about how Europe has a bit of an advantage in terms of political will for implementing community renewable energy projects in my Germany blog post, and the same issues apply here as well. Beyond this there isn't a great deal to say about my time in Austria without starting to sound negative and I don't think anyone wants to read that. I visited some interesting places in the mountains (like Eisenerz, where metals have been mined for the past 1,000 years, and the city of Graz) and I was hosted by some really nice people (thanks Peter and Honzo!), but overall I was disappointed in my time here. After getting a ride to Vienna to apply for my visa to India, I suddenly decided to take a bus to nearby Slovakia and see what might happen.

I spent a couple of days in the capital city of Bratislava wandering the narrow, winding, crumbling cobblestone streets of the old city center and eating bryndzové halušky with no clear plan for the coming days. I made a random trip to the nearby town of Svaty Jur to go hiking, and met an older Slovak couple in the woods who were well-travelled and spoke excellent English. They spent a couple of hours telling me about the places worth checking out in their country; suddenly I had something of a plan for the most unplanned part of this trip so far.

My next stop would be Banska Stiavnica, a very old silver and gold mining town in central Slovakia. Once again I navigated a tricky rural bus system into non-English speaking territory to find one of the most endearing places I've been on this trip. Nestled amongst Appalachian-looking hills, this town was once the heart of the mineral wealth for the Hapsburg dynasty in the Middle Ages, surpassing even Vienna in importance at one time. Now it's a pale shadow of about 10,000 people (versus 60,000 in the 1600s) with a beautiful but somewhat falling apart town center that looks like it hasn't been touched in a few hundred years. Silver mining only recently stopped in the past 20 years, but now a Canadian company wants to restart operations with a method that would use some potent chemicals. From what I could tell the locals were very much against this idea because of the pollution it would cause, despite the jobs it might bring to this otherwise low-opportunity area.

I stayed with a very nice family who took me around to several interesting places, like a mountain that overlooked the whole area, a tour of an old silver mine, and my first view of a Slovak Gypsy ghetto. The latter was especially surprising; several gray nondescript apartment buildings were all crowded together and completely isolated from everything else. The only nearby landmark was an abandoned mine shaft structure that loomed over one of the buildings. Many of the windows were missing and had black stains all around the outside; I was told this was because the inhabitants would often sell the radiator for scrap metal and then make fires in the middle of the living room with the former window used as a chimney.

From B. Stiavnica I went on to Novaky, where one of the largest coal mines in Slovakia is still operating. There was a mine explosion accident in nearby Hanlova last year that killed 29 people, much like the Massey explosion that killed 29 in West Virginia in the same year. I got a tour of the abandoned part of the mine, and it wasn't really worth the 8 euros but at least I can say I've been in a Slovak coal mine. Then on over to Poprad where I had hoped to go hiking in the High Tatra mountains, AKA the Slovakian Alps but a thick fog that lasted for days made this less feasible. I decided instead to try to hike in the "Slovak Paradise," which I think would have resembled the Red River Gorge in Kentucky if I would have made it. Unfortunately this was thwarted by my first real Gypsy encounter.

I wrote a personal journal entry about this event (email me if you want to read it), but to make a long story short I got very sketched out when attempting to pass by a Gypsy community that looked like a total slum out of a movie. Two teenagers approached me demanding money, and when the little bit I gave wasn't enough I decided to turn back toward the town. It was a bit of a challenge to lose them, and I ended up paying some local with a car to take me back to Poprad since it would be a 2 hour wait for the next train which was on the edge of town by the Gypsy village.

I started this trip being very interested in Gypsy culture, especially in Eastern Europe. When I've met people who are from Eastern countries (especially Romania), I always ask about Gypsy culture with complete naivete and curiosity. Time and again I'm told that they are not nice people, they will rob you, it's not unheard of to be murdered, but that their music and stories are very interesting. Of course I am never one to listen to such advice so I wasn't too worried about trying to pass by the remote, isolated village on the edge of the "Slovak Paradise" national park. After this sketchy situation where I honestly felt like I could have been robbed, I am now much more wary and likely to listen to people's warnings but I'm also still determined to not let stereotypes influence how I perceive cultural groups which I know very little about.

When it seemed like the weather just wasn't going to clear in Slovakia, I found a bus north through the Tatras over to the Polish town of Zakopane. I really didn't know what to expect of Poland, and I have to admit that as an ignorant American I thought that it would be quite poor and fairly undeveloped. Zakopane was an annoyingly over-developed tourist town, and apparently a major destination of winter sports enthusiasts from all over Central and Eastern Europe. I only spent a couple of nights there and luckily was able to finally get up into some real mountains. It had been strangely warm for the past couple of weeks; I really didn't expect a Polish November to be in the 40s snd 50s. The temperature dropped very quickly as I went up to the nearly 5,500 ft. peak of Mount Giewont, where it was quite a bit below freezing and extremely windy. I didn't exactly dress for the occasion and felt pretty lucky to make it back down without freezing to death.

Krakow was the next stop as several people had told me that it's a very attractive city and definitely worth visiting. I was lucky enough to be taken on a couple of tours of different parts of the city from some nice locals. The old city center was very nice, but to be honest I've started to get used to the old European city look and feel. I ended up making it over to Nova Huta, which was not very visually attractive but for some reason I found it a bit more interesting than the picturesque center. This area is reputed to be the "ghetto" of the city, and it's basically a series of huge, identical looking "communist bloc flats" for as far as you can see in any direction. These were all built with the single purpose of housing workers for the nearby ultra-massive steel factory known as Huta im. T. Sendzimira now, and formerly known as Huta im. T. Lenin.

I started out not knowing very much about Polish history or communism in general, and while I wouldn't call myself an expert now I definitely learned quite a bit by walking around this eerie but weirdly endearing collection of massive identical looking buildings and abandoned factories with a born-and-raised local. For instance, I had no idea that the effort to end communistic control of Europe began in Poland with the Solidarność labor union movement in the 1980s. Also I didn't know that Soviet repression of the Church had been so severe; apparently police had used high-pressure water on people trying to go to Sunday service. Americans are familiar with the idea of the former Soviet Bloc countries from growing up hearing about the Cold War, but it was quite something else to be right in the middle of one of the defining communist neighborhoods.

A couple of days later I found myself in the midst of a series of unexpected and intense experiences. I woke up in Krakow worried about not having any clear direction for the next few days when I suddenly got an invitation from a native of the Silesian coalfields to go meet her retired coal miner dad and see some mines. This region was especially interesting to me because it's the heart of Polish coal mining country, and every country I've visited that used to have mining is now importing Polish coal. I wanted to see what the mines here actually look like since former miners in these other countries claim that Poland is using cheap and unsafe labor to undercut their mines. Before I would get a chance to see these places, my host had another experience in mind for me.

Silesia has another international claim to fame: Auschwitz. This was the heart of the Nazi death machine, and the entire concentration camp network was coordinated from the headquarters at the infamous Auschwitz I camp. It is now home to a memorial and museum which is owned and operated by a Jewish family, and this was our afternoon destination. Words cannot describe the feeling in the pit of my stomach as we walked through rooms of unbelievable photographs, piles of inmates' shoes, eyeglasses, and suitcases, and recreations of their living conditions in the very buildings where they were kept. My brain has trouble processing the fact that this all actually happened, that humans are mentally and physically capable of doing this to other humans in such a systematic, deliberate, organized, and ruthless fashion. It's one thing to learn about this in school and even to see film of the actual places; it's quite another to physically be there and sense the unimaginable suffering that went on for several years.

We then got a bus to her parents' place in Beirun, and I remember the strange feeling of seeing rail cars loaded with coal right underneath the "Auschwitz" sign at the main train station. After a nice dinner her dad took us around to several operating coal mines (including the one where he used to work), and I was able to ask many questions about the realities of Polish coal mining. These mines looked nicer and more professional than any mine I've ever seen in Appalachia. The buildings were sleek and sturdy with nicely paved parking lots and full showering and storage facilities for the miners. I wasn't able to actually go into any of the mines since I showed up on such short notice, but I was assured that I could go into a working mine if I could give a week or so notice.

The following day I also interviewed the former director of Piast, one of the largest single underground mines in the world, so I'll combine his information with that from my host's dad for a quick impression of what they had to say about coal mining in Poland. To my surprise, Polish coal miners get the same retirement deal as Spanish miners, meaning that every year worked equals 1 1/2 years of retirement benefits. The retired miner I spoke with was in his mid 40s and had started a roofing business with another couple of retired miners. The mines in this area were an integral part of the union organizing that eventually helped to bring about the end of communism, but it came at a serious cost with 1,500 striking miners staying underground for 2 weeks in 1981 and 9 miners being shot by police in that same year. 5,000 people work in the Piast mine, and another 4,500 work in a nearby mine that joins up with it underground. The average pay for a miner is about $1,000 per month, which doesn't sound like so much by American standards but the cost of living is much lower than in the States. In fact, all of the houses that I saw in this region looked quite decent and while the communist-era apartment buildings lacked visual appeal they are perfectly nice and livable inside. About 60,000 miners work in the small district that Beirun is in, and many many more work in the whole area of Silesia. Almost all of the mines are government owned and operated, with the one remaining private mine about to shutting down. About 25 miners die in Polish coal miners per year.

This all combined to present a very different picture of coal mining in Poland than I had come to expect. I thought that I would see a very poor place that mirrored the more run-down parts of Appalachia that I know, but even the small houses were sturdy and well-kempt. I also assumed that the mines would be rag-tag with poor working conditions, and while I didn't actually get to go underground the outside impression was quite the opposite. Both of the people I talked to had no connection to the industry anymore and as far as I could tell didn't have an agenda. Of course this should only be taken at face value since my time and investigation here was so limited. What really struck me was that even though this area employs far more miners and produces much more coal than Appalachia, I couldn't detect anything like the kind of "coal culture" we have back home. Even those who had made a good living and retired from it just thought of it as a job. There was no tradition of strong identity based on being a miner, nor was there any fierce defense of the continued extraction and use of coal. Both of the guys I interviewed had no qualms with the transition to greater use of renewable energy, and both acknowledged that mining would no longer be part of this area's reality in 30 to 50 years.

I visited a few more small towns in southwest Poland on my way toward the Czech Republic. One of these had a small organic farm that I spent a couple of days working on, and it was very good to finally get my hands dirty again. I learned about an organization that's creating a network of traditional small Polish farms that emphasizes organic practices and sustainable living, but unfortunately I didn't have the time to really dig into this since I was feeling the need to hurry up and finish my time in Europe and head to India ASAP. After passing through Bielsko-Biala and Cieszyn, I met up with some locals from the Czech Republic who gave me a ride across the border and into the Czech mining town of Orlova.

I spent the next couple of days waiting for an intense fog to clear and then set about exploring the area. The eastern Czech coalfields seemed a bit more depressed and dilapidated overall than what I saw in Poland. I learned that this area has some serious issues with subsidence (when underground mining causes the surface to shift downward, making buildings and roads crack and sometimes break apart), and entire neighborhoods have been abandoned in some cases. While this area wasn't as hilly as Eastern Kentucky, the overall look and feel of the place had a strange familiarity. This only really applies to the countryside, because the bigger towns like Orlova are mostly filled with huge apartment buildings form the communist era.

I was lucky enough to meet and talk with one current and one former coal miner from this area (indirectly through an English-speaking daughter), and the feedback I got from them was a bit different than from the folks in Poland. Their opinion was that no one works in the mines unless they absolutely have to, and everyone leaves as soon as they can. The pay is quite low and the safety conditions poor, with many younger people already showing signs of black lung. The former miner has early-stage black lung and now works a low-level desk job making more than he did in the mines. Much of the work is still manual with pneumatic hammers and handloading of coal, though many mines are transitioning to longwall miner sections. Neither of these guys was very supportive of the coal industry; for them it was just one of the only options in a depressed area. Miners were once held up as the epitome of working class heroes by the communist Bolshevik regime, but after the fall of communism mining came to be considered one of the lowliest jobs in the land. To be clear, I didn't go looking for people who might be anti-coal; these were just two completely random guys I happened to meet.

The eastern Czech coalfield area kind of sucked me in and I spent about a week hanging around here with the friends I'd made and also hiking in the nearby hills which definitely looked like Appalachia. I also visited a town which used to have a huge mine operating there that was imposed by the communist government, but which was now defunct due to local opposition. The modern government is now trying to reopen the mine and possibly expand to surface mining in the hills just behind the town, but there's a very strong local movement to prevent this from happening which includes the mayor of the town. The website for the group organizing these efforts can be found here.

If you're in the Czech Republic, it's almost imperative that you see Prague. I was able to justify my visit to this beautiful and historic city because there was also a Czech biomass energy conference happening, so I spent my first day there sitting through a series of presentations that I mostly couldn't understand inside a university building. I did make some contacts that could be useful, but for the most part it was material that I was well familiar with. From there I spent another day just wandering around the entire city. I'm definitely not a city person (especially when they're filled with tourist types), but Prague had a certain unique charm that took a few hours to set in. It was good to take in all of the history and gorgeous architecture, but a day and a half was good enough for me.

I next passed through the town of Trebic to visit a biomass energy installation that I had learned about at the conference a few days earlier. TTS Bioenergy supplies nearly all of the heat and a portion of the electricity for this town of about 10,000 people through direct combustion of locally-sourced wood and straw. They also design and manufacture boilers and plants for clients around the world. The size and feedstock for this planet is similar to what I would like to do in the future, but I'm not such a fan of direct combustion since it's more difficult to efficiently make use of all of the potential energy and since there's no carbon-storing charcoal left over from the process. Still I was very grateful for the time they took to show me around the plant, complete with my own personal translator.

The next few days were spent in Brno, the second biggest city in Czech. There was nothing too interesting here, as I was mainly using it as a base to explore a nearby village self-sufficiency project on my way back to Austria to fly to India. The village of Hostetin has several worthwhile projects happening to make it a model of sustainable rural development. Organic farming around the town, a fruit juice processing plant, fruit drying ovens, wastewater treatment through natural wetlands, lots of solar power, and a biomass heating system were the main points of interest. It appeared that someone had been quite successful in securing grant funding judging by the nicely-packaged promotional materials and the small staff of non-profit workers housed in the town. I would certainly like to be part of helping something similar to happen in East KY, but I always wonder about the long-term viability of projects that depend on constant grant funding to stay afloat.

By this point my Indian visa was finally ready, so I made my way back down to Vienna to pick it up and get on a plane headed toward the great subcontinent. I honestly had no idea what to expect; many people had tried to instill in me great caution and even fear about going to this "developing" nation of 1.1 billion people, so I was carrying some of that with me through the myriad of annoying delays and lines at the airports in Vienna and then Frankfurt, Germany. As soon as I can find the time to write the next blog post, I'll relay the craziness involved in landing and finding my way around in New Delhi and where I've been since then.