Cow Island Conservation Corps

Click here to apply for the CICC

Mission
To promote sustainable ecological and social systems through the care, stewardship and protection of Cow Island and it's surrounding environs.

Vision
Rippleffect's long term vision through the Cow Island Conservation Corps is to foster an alternative culture based on Earth-oriented ethics using practical, common-sense techniques and strategies for meeting human needs and sustaining Earth resources.

"Do not adjust your vision, reality is at fault" (Graffiti)

In 100 years, Cow Island will bear the marks of our passing, much as the remains of the 1907 Army Corp of Engineers presence on Cow Island remains in the random telephone pole, graded roadbed, or cement military foundation. It is ironic to use the phrase 'Leave No Trace' to represent our passing among the Casco Bay islands in kayaks and power boats, for we all leave some trace; it is in our nature as living beings. We are fallible, utilize resources through necessity and recreation, and are known to make mistakes. What we must decide is what 'trace' we will leave in the long-term, whether we will act as stewards of our surroundings or rape them of their riches.

The most recent archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that North and South America, before the arrival of Columbus, was not home to a few scattered tribes of native peoples, scratching like animals for the resources to survive, but was in fact home to hundreds of millions of civilized folk, engaging in vast trade networks, forming massive empires, and creating a rich cultural archive of writing, music, sculpture, dance, philosophy, and storytelling. ( The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492, William M. Denevan, annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 82, pg 369, September 1992) These people thrived, as did all humanity until very recently, independent from the use of fossil fuels, cars, planes and trains.

"What you call natural resources, we call our brothers and sisters."-

How did they thrive without all the modern trappings of our industrialized and space age world? The earth …gave them everything they needed. Scientists are only now realizing that the land and sea of pre-Columbian America was not a wild wooly savage landscape untouched by human hands, ripe for the plucking by pioneering Europeans, but was in fact a deliberately maintained anthropogenic forest ( Anthropogenic forest: A forest created, impacted, or maintained by human hands.) and manicured climax ecosystem that spanned hundreds and perhaps thousands of square miles surrounding each human settlement. (Climax ecosystem: The ecosystem that will eventually overtake a certain area of the globe, perhaps after the landscape has moved through a succession of other ecosystems, and will persist idefinetely thereafter, ending the process of succession. Also called the dominant or primary ecosystem. )

These forests, prairies, mountainous regions, deserts, and jungles were the result of generation after generation of careful attention to and manipulation of the surrounding geography, creating sophisticated trade networks and regional specialization. Using the Earth's resources in similar ways through the efforts of the Cow Island Conservation Corps, we will not only make choices that affect the future of Cow Island, but will also educate a corps of enlightened stewards that can help steer our highly consumptive and wasteful politico-corporate culture in the direction of sustainability.

Values
The Ethical Basis of Permaculture
(from Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, by Bill Mollison, Tagari Publishing, 1988)

Permaculture: (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.

Humans are thinking beings, with long memories, oral and written records, and the ability to investigate the distant past by applying a variety of techniques from dendochronology to archaeology, pollen analysis to the geological sciences. It is therefore evident that behaviours in the natural world which we thought appropriate at one time later prove to be damaging to our own society in the long-term (e.g. the effects of biocidal pest controls on soils and water).

Thus, we are led by information, reflection, and careful investigation to moderate, abandon, or forbid certain behaviours or substances that in the long-term threaten our own survival; we act to survive.

We survive by applying the following ethics:

• i. CARE OF THE EARTH: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
• ii. CARE OF PEOPLE: Provision for people to access those resources necessary to their existence.
• iii. SETTING LIMITS TO POPULATION AND CONSUMPTION: By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles
• iv. FOLLOW RULES OF NECESSITOUS USE
  We leave any natural system alone until we are, of strict necessity, forced to use it.
• v. FOLLOW RULES OF CONSERVATIVE USE:
  1. Reduce waste, hence pollution;
  2. Thoroughly replace lost minerals;
  3. Perform careful energy accounting;
  4. Make an inventory of the long-term, negative, bio-social effects on society, and act to buffer or eliminate these.

In practice, we evolve over time to various forms of accounting for our actions. Such accounts are fiscal, social, environmental, aesthetic, or energetic in nature, and all are appropriate to our own survival.

Consideration of these rules of necessitous and conservative use may lead us, step by step, to the basic realization of our interconnectedness with nature; that we depend on good health in all systems for our survival. Thus, we widen the self-interested idea of human survival (on the basis of past famine and survival of environmental disaster) to include the idea of

Cow Island Goals
Cow Island Zones: Preservation vs. Conservation
Islands and their surrounding waters cover one-sixth of the world's surface and provide habitat for more than half of the Earth's diversity of marine plants and animals.

Islands and their coastal areas are also a critical source of food, jobs and income for millions of people – more than 600 million people live on the more than 100,000 islands around the globe. Island conservation must go hand in hand with sustainable economic development to find a balance where both humans and habitat thrive.

The future economic and ecological health of islands and their coastal areas depends on the collaboration, dedication and effective management practices of governments, local communities, individuals and private organizations from around the world.

Rippleffect's goals include both developing the economic potential of Cow Island as a recreational and educational human resource as well as restoring and maintaining the ecosystem it supports; unique to Casco Bay. Our Cow Island Conservation interns help define the areas of the island to be used for recreation and education and those that are strictly areas of conservation.
Over the course of the season the interns will;

• Create new trails
• Maintain existing trails
• Reclaim unused or unnecessary trails
• Clear invasive or exotic fauna (e.g. Bittersweet & Poison Ivy)
• Define and improve public campsites
• Maintain the compost and garden support systems
• Maintain the organic garden plot
• Help to develop new island resources (e.g. ropes course, meditation garden, activity areas)
• Cleanup Beaches
• Reutilize and adapt existing construction for current programming needs

Forest Gardening
(from How to Make a Forest Garden by Patrick Whitefield, Permanent Publications, 1996)
A NATURAL WAY OF GARDENING

Wherever you are on Earth the most sustainable and Earth–friendly way to grow food is the way which is most like the natural vegetation of that area. In our New England climate, a forest garden would work the same way a deciduous or coniferous woodland does. The forest garden, like a natural woodland, has three layers: the canopy of tall trees, a lower layer of shrubs and coppiced trees, and a layer of mainly herbaceous trees at ground level.

• Three types of food from a forest garden: fruits, nuts and leafy vegetables.

"Our food production system has become so dependent on oil that, by the time the food arrives on our plates, for every calorie of energy in that food, approximately ten calories of fossil fuel energy have been expended to produce it. This includes the energy used to run the tractors, to manufacture them and all the other machinery, and to make the fertilisers and other chemicals. It also includes transporting the food, processing it, wholesaling, retailing, driving to the supermarket and back, and cooking it."

This ration of ten to one is an average. It has been calculated that the energy cost of a Kenyan mango, eaten in London, is 600 times the amount of energy contained in the fruit. Permaculture is an approach to food growing –and many other aspects of life- which takes natural ecosystems as its model. People sometimes assume that permaculture and forest gardening are one and the same thing, but this is not so.

Cow's Garden
Photo - J. Yankura

Although both learn from natural ecosystems, the learning is much more of a direct copy in the case of forest gardening: a forest garden looks like a woodland, but a permaculture system may not look like a natural ecosystem. Permaculture is not modeled on the outward forms of ecosystems, but on the underlying principle which makes them work. What makes them work is a web of beneficial relationships between the different plants and animals, and between them and the rock, soil, water and climate of their habitat.

For example, different plants specialize in extracting different minerals from the soil, and when their leaves fall or the whole plant dies these minerals become available to neighbouring plants. This does not happen directly, but through the work of fungi and bacteria which convert the minerals in dead organic material into a form which can be absorbed by roots. Meanwhile the green plants provide the fungi and bacteria with their energy needs. Insects feed off flowers, and in return pollinate the flowering plants. In desert ecosystems every plant and animal is adapted to minimize the use of water, while in very wet ones plants are adapted to cope with waterlogging, and so on.
Natural ecosystems can be very productive, and they don't need all the inputs of fossil fuels and other materials that are needed to support our present-day agriculture, industry and infrastructure, nor do they emit any pollution. Permaculture seeks to create systems which have all the desirable characteristics of natural ecosystems but which provide for human needs. The key to achieving this is to set up a network of beneficial relationships between the different elements we need in a garden, on a farm, or in a whole community.

So the things you find in a permaculture garden may not be radically different from those in any other garden, but they will be placed so as to create as many beneficial relationships between them as possible. For example, there may be a greenhouse, but it is unlikely to be a free-standing greenhouse. It is much more likely to be a conservatory placed on the south side of the house. The waste heat from the house keeps it warm in winter and spring, while it in turn contributes to warming the house. Young seedlings grown in the conservatory get maximum care and attention from the gardener without the need to even step outdoors. Here is a simple web of beneficial relationships involving house, glasshouse, plants and people.

Although forest gardening and permaculture are not the same thing, there is much that they have in common. Both are about putting components together in a harmonious whole, so both have a strong element of design, and both are firmly rooted in a sense of ecology. But permaculture covers a much wider field than gardening, including farming, forestry, town planning, financial and social structures, and much more. A forest garden may be a component in a permaculture design, but it is most unlikely to be the whole thing.

Forest gardening is also much more than a part of permaculture. It is a way of gardening, indeed the basis for a way of living, which arose quite independently: it can be preactised by anyone who has access to a little land, and the desire to try something that is quite new-and yet as old as [humanity].