Greenbuilding Workshops

If you would like to attend and would like to be updated when details and dates are available, send an email to info@ecolearningcenter.org.

Design will focus on using renewable resources and available building materials or recycled building products. The Food and Friends building will be a combination of earthship and strawbale construction with a timber-frame. Our goal is to create community and an enhanced network of communication in the design process and implementation of the designs. The design process was begun in the 2005 Green Building Design Charrette where experts in sustainable building design facilitated a four day intensive planning session at the Eco-Learning Center.

ELC infrastructure needs include:

• Food and Friends Building: a food building/demonstration center in which CSA members can gather, where food can be prepared for pickup, classes in natural cooking can be offered and educational resources will be located for studies in sustainable design. This building may also provide housing for future volunteers and interns.
• a bioshelter greenhouse for off-season growing, with a chicken coop, potting area and composting area
• a caretaker's cabin
• a barn for straw, recycled supplies, a cow and/or horse

The Eco Learning Center is a 40 acre parcel, 50% woods, 15% dunes and reforesting hills, 25% farmable land. This is sacred ground. Any project created here must integrate with the ecosystem and be proportionately scaled to the ecological footprint. The goal is to demonstrate man's ability to live within the biological system maintaining human dignity and a reverence for the natural.

Building a Bioshelter

Winter growing has great potential to extend the growing season and increase production in Michigan. The main challenge that needs to be overcome is one of finding a way to warm soil temperatures.

A bioshelter is a greenhouse that is modeled after the natural environment, that takes into account the body of heat of chickens housed within the building, the heat produced by composting and heat retension from sunlight in thermal mass, as well as the importance of gas exchange and growing medium

2005 WORKSHOPS

See the poster for last year's greenbuilding design charrette.
Dan Chiras, author of The New Ecological Home and Rusty Smith, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Auburn University began the planning and design process. Design professionals and community members interested in green building attended this four day planning session.

See the poster for last year's Women's Frame Drumming Class
Facilitated by DeDe Alderman: 231-276-BEAT or rhythmicadv@hotmail.com.