EcOasys – Patrik Schumann
Patrik Schumann started EcOasys with two locations in Forestburgh, NY and New Mexico. One is a regenerating temperate forest including sustainable forestry and an edible forest, orchard, garden, and nursery demonstration. The other is a high desert institute for radical sustainability.
Patrick kindly answered some questions for EcoSpace:
What does the term ecoasys mean?
ecOasys means “economic Oasis ecosystem”, and is conceived as a household-scale micro-cosm of the larger habitat, hinterland, and biosphere for people plus the rest of life on which we depend. Visualise Gardens of Eden, think “nature AND nurture”, the outdoors in and the indoors out, homestead as locus of much-increased production as well as much-reduced consumption. Making any of human activity sustainable starts with profound personal responsibility right at home and throughout everyday life.
Is it rewarding to live sustainably and close to the earth?
After more than 20 years of challenging work towards it, I still cannot be certain that I have passed the quantitative threshold of true sustainability. Nevertheless I relentlessly continue to pursue that objective and pioneer/ exemplify/ enable it for others, and I do sense my own glass half full rather than half empty. There is a sublime satisfaction looking over half a life’s work of ecological re-productivity, yet there is so much left to do which I have initiated but the complete cycle of which is beyond my own lifespan.
What inspired you to begin this; how did you learn?
In my childhood, I was moved by the tear of the Native American chief in television ads. In my youth, I noticed the discrepancies between conventional and natural lives. In young adulthood, I questioned the official story and read between the lines. As an undergraduate, I decided to work on “designing man’s interaction with nature”. Thereafter I sought the most intriguing specialties and inspiring mentors as an apprentice, graduate student, and journeyman. As a practitioner and professional, I have worked to the highest standards of performance and integrity.
What challenges have you encountered?
Family wanting me to live conventionally and comfortably. Friends disinterested in anything so serious and weighty. Citizens interested in socio-political-economic comformity over where truth might lead us. Clients nickle-and-diming working relationships by cherry-picking holistic project solutions. A world of people distracted by everyday expediencies from existential crises.
Do you have advice for people starting similar projects or lifestyles?
“Only I can save the earth from myself.” Be prepared to hold that as sacred, in the face of the profane brought forward by everyday life and most people.
Are there any present or upcoming projects you are excited about?
- ecOasys high desert, my inner-urban sustainable household/ subsistence horticulture conversion in NM is after 10 years nearing substantial completion and growing mature, and we will shortly begin a proof test of its maximum horticultural productivity
- Institute for RADICAL Sustainability (RADICAL= Research & Development in Contingency & Livelihood) is being launched as a vehicle for sharing our work with the wider world and replacing with external support our personal investment, so that can be rolled over into new initiatives
- Orchard Conservancy/ Al-Munias Initiative is collecting, grafting, and testing hundreds of varieties of adapted fruit, nut, berry species for small growers in the Southwest. I’ve just finished grafting 1500 little fruit trees.
- ecOasys temperate forest is a 30-year sustainable hardwood forestry/ edible forest-orchard-garden-nursery in the third of a 10-year startup phase
How do you stay positive and hopeful in these times?
I assume the worst while working for the best. Every time I fall over or am knocked down, I pick myself up, dust myself off, renew my familiarity with my sacred objective, and redouble my efforts.
Anything else you’d like to share or add?
“Seek not water, but thirst!” Rumi
Tags: environment, horticulture, subsistence, sustainability
May 06, 2008
I have also encountered some of the kinds of resistance that you have experienced.
It is not always easy to hold on to the lifestyle and goals that you know are right when the people you care about the most are against you. I want to tell you how wonderful your project is and I am so happy to know that you have been able to maintain your sacred objective. It is right and so are you.
May 07, 2008
Very interesting interview. Is it at all possible to visit the New York location of ecOasys? I live in New York City but will be spending the weekend with my girlfriend at a cabin 30 miles away from Forestburgh this coming weekend and would love to visit the site and learn from its progress. I looked around for websites about the place bt could not find any. All the best.
May 07, 2008
You made a very interesting point as well as facts! This is a new start for all of us ,not just some of us to get involved and take the time to learn more about our future!….Focus….Focus…Focus…. Please keep us informed on your progress let me know the exact location of your project!
May 07, 2008
Good day all,
I was recently interviewed but just now discovered this site and that ecOasys is on it! Thanks for your interest and support. I have for so many years been working alone and in obscurity, with unanticipated responses to my public initiatives often forcing a hasty retreat back to the sanctuary of my sites and projects. Among all the recent hype and self-promotion, emerging recognition is modest – but for me it is heady stuff indeed! Kindly bear with me during my awkward adjustments.
The people we know and love are not against us. I believe they are viscerally afraid. For us, that we have chosen to move on alone into uncharted territory with few likelihoods and little comfort. And for themselves, that their ways of life may indeed turn out to have been unintentionally disastrous. It has taken me a long time to start turning my bitterness into compassion.
ecOasys temperate forest is entering it’s third year of ten just getting started. I only work the site in May when a combination of factors overlap: fruit tree grafts can still be handled, hardwood seedlings are available, heavy forest thinning is still bearable, and I can get away from my other projects. This year I am late because of a big push on my grow/ evolve programs in NM.
I’ve had draft websites in the works for years, but I never quite know how to present in its diversity and integration everything I am doing and never quite have the time to finally get it out there. The work has always come first.
Forgive me this, but I am inclined to make access to my projects and to me secondary to a journey of seeking, discovery, realisation, and change. If just available on everybody’s map and at their whim, I have found that people apply their conventional habituations and it is likelier to be disruptive to me and less beneficial to them. Ciao for now.
May 07, 2008
We Totally understand the journey with integrity,pride while realisation is our prority!….Focus…is more likelier to be beneficial to all! Excellent work! Change is beneficial to those who will accept while we need to be aware of all happening to our Globe!
May 07, 2008
Dear Patrik,
We live in Columbus, NM, in the Chihuahua Desert about 3 miles from the Mexican border, 30 miles south of Deming, NM and 65 miles due west of El Paso, TX.
We’re very interested in your northern NM project and would love to visit it sometime. We’ve just become WWOOFUSA volunteers, so are ready to roll up our sleeves and work, when we can leave the work here on our property.
We’re trying to create a desert oasis/desert forest garden out of our Chihuahuan desert scrub of mostly mesquite and creosote. Water is our biggest challenge, as there is no surface water here, other than an occasional spring in our Floridas and Tres Hermanas mountain ranges.
If there’s any way we can share info with each other, I’d be most grateful. I’m researching native or adapted trees and shrubs for desert forest gardening, based on TREES for the FUTURE’s agroforestry program, which they’re successfully creating in tropical and subtropical desert areas.
Since we’re a cool desert with record winter temps dipping below zero, no snow cover for protection and 5 months in which we can have below freezing temps any night, success has been most elusive.
Celinda Miller
May 14, 2008
Good day Celinda,
Thanks for your interest. Hang in there: as difficult as your site might seem, remember that it is much degraded from what it once was and can again become. Time, careful observation, caring work, and the occasional wetter season will yield astounding results.
I started my own SW plantscape work at Ardovino’s Desert Crossing in Sunland Park, NM, my backyard nurseries in ABQ with native plants of the whole SW region, and ecOasys high desert with the most ecologically- (wildlife) and economically-valuable (food) of those plants as a Foundation planting. Apply rainwater catchment and distribution, soil building with organic matter, insightful use of micro-climate, and over-planting with everything that might survive and be useful.
You know that the nearby Sonoran is the world’s desert with the highest tree diversity, and the Chihuahuan is also rich. I was impressed by the mesquite hummocks of the area as catchments of wind-blow, absorbers of water, micro-climates of shade and shelter, guilds of many plants. What one finds in many arroyos is very diverse and resilient. Your best approach is likely to try everything that seems likley.
NM and AZ State Forestry every spring offer cold-hardy and drought-tolerant species in quantity at low cost. AZ pioneer Tim Murphy’s Permaculture poultry-forage matrix in Permaculture Drylands Journal is a database (for also-human-edibles) mostly of western USA and high- and dry-land regions which offer double value. Adapted fruit, nut, berry are much more time-consuming in pursuit but there are also many obscure sources (Whealy’s Fruit, Berry, Nut Inventory, North American Fruit Explorers, National Germplasm Repositories, specialised regional plant collectors). Try Native Seeds/ SEARCH in Tucson for vegetable and herb seeds; Seed Savers Exchange for heirlooms; Bountiful Gardens for bio-intensive stalwarts. In a decade my own nursery and seedbank has grown to over 500 adapted edible species and varieties.
I’m getting closer to finishing up my spring surge with all the grafts I’ve made, have several away-projects and overseas initiatives to juggle, and a full year ahead, but I would be happy to pleased to receive a visit sometime.
All the best, Patrik
May 14, 2008
Dear Patrik,
Thanks for the good information. Obviously, we’ve a lot to learn about desert gardening life. I’d not heard of most of your sources. Maybe we’re barking up the wrong mesquite?!
Larry and I’d love to visit you, perhaps, when we return from our summer vacation. However, we’d need to know how to find your place.
How can we get in touch, so we can email you our query/resume which we’ve written up for our potential WWOOF hosts?
Oh, Larry also does websites and sells his low-cost, low-tech after market fuel enhancement devices on the internet. He created all his websites. They are: http://www.mileageman1.com, larryRmiller.com, adventureman1.com and smalltownswest.com. Check them out and and you can email us through the websites, if you like.
Thanks once again,
Celinda Miller
Sep 20, 2008
Amazing!