Website: https://www.tamera.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tamera.Heali…
Tamera is a peace research village with the goal of becoming “a self-sufficient, sustainable and duplicable communitarian model for nonviolent cooperation and cohabitation between humans, animals, nature, and Creation for a future of peace for all.” It is also often called a “healing biotope“. Literally translated, “biotope” simply means a place where life lives. In Tamera, however, “healing biotope” is also described as a “greenhouse of trust, an acupuncture point of peace, and a self-sufficient future community.” It is located on 335 acres (1.36 km2) in the Alentejo region of southwestern Portugal.
History
Tamera was founded in 1995 by three Germans: Dieter Duhm (M.S. in Psychoanalysis, PhD in Sociology), Sabine Lichtenfels(de) (Theologian), and Rainer Ehrenpreis (M.S. in Physics). However, its history goes back to 1978 when these three left their professions and tried to create an interdisciplinary research center to find solutions to the ecological and technological problems the world was facing at that time. Very quickly they discovered that if their project had any chance of surviving, they first had to research the core human relationship questions that lay hidden under all issues and prevent real solutions – such as competition, greed, and jealousy. In 1983 they began a three-year “Social Experiment” with fifty participants in the Black Forest of (Germany), and then further developed the results of this research into creating a functioning community in other projects throughout Europe, until they finally established Tamera in 1995.
Experimental research
Currently, approximately 250 coworkers and students (including children) live and study in Tamera which operates as an experimental research center dedicated to discovering how human beings can live peacefully among themselves and with nature, and create a successful, working, and sustainable community. Tamera is also a “free lab” and an international meeting place where peace workers and specialists in various fields from many parts of the world share their expertise. In 2008 participants from more than twenty-five different countries lived, studied, worked, or visited there.
Projects
Tamera serves as the headquarters for a number of different and independent projects that, when brought together properly, they believe can establish a new social model and a new culture of peace. They include the Global Campus, Monte Cerro Peace Education, the GRACE Foundation, the Institute for Global Peacework, Verlag Meiga Publishing Company, the Children’s Center, the Love School, the SolarVillage, the Permaculture Project, the Horse Project, the Seminar and Guest Center and the Terra Nova movement.
The Permaculture Project
Since Tamera was founded, an ecological team has made ponds and oases, and planted about 20,000 trees. Sepp Holzer, Austrian mountain farmer known throughout Europe as the “Agro-Rebel,” is cooperating with Tamera to build a sustainable “lakescape” in the dry Alentejo region of Portugal, surrounded by a self-sufficient edible landscape with trees, gardens, and wetlands.
Videos
Nowadays water is dammed, deviated, privatized and turned into a commodity. One billion people on the planet are without access to clean drinking water, while others are following their profit motive. It is in our hands to change this.
The large water cycles can be restored, even in extremely damaged landscapes. All around the world, people are working on solutions for the global water crisis. They are protecting rivers, lakes and wells. While applying different methods, they are following the same principle: collecting and decelerating rain water where it falls on the earth. In this way, the earth’s body can absorb the rain water, the groundwater level rises and the land can become fertile again. The example of Tamera shows how a decentralized and natural water retention landscape can heal a disturbed landscape and create the prerequisites for modern subsistence. Read John’s full blog on http://www.whatifwechange.org/blog/?p… or visit http://www.tamera.org/index.php?id=80… for more information.
the basic ideas for the construction of a water retention landscape: a local and natural solution to the global problem of disturbed water balance.
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