Dear Reader,

This is it. Will you help us build a regenerative, resilient, and abundant future?

Our goal this year is to raise $7,500. For every dollar raised up to this point, we will allocate an equal amount into our Resilient Systems grant fund. This fund provides direct support to projects at Dancing Rabbit which increase our environmental and/or economic resilience.

Donate Today

Maximize your impact by donating during the following “power hours” (listed in Central Standard Time):

• May 9
• 9-10 a.m.
• 12-1 p.m.
• 3-4 p.m.
• 6-7 p.m.

Also, whether you donate or not, you can help us spread the word by forwarding this email to your friends and family.

Resilience is the ability to foresee, cope with, and manage the impacts of changing climatic economic conditions. Three key attributes are:

• The ability to recover quickly from a shock.
• The ability to withstand a shock.
• The ability to avoid the shock altogether.

Last week, I talked about some of the ways we are already building resilience at Dancing Rabbit. These were: establishing a 5- acre Chestnut Orchard, rotationally grazing herds of cows and goats, growing grapes to make wine, building our homes with natural and local materials, managing all our organic waste, capturing a huge amount of rain water (and using it domestically or for agriculture), and doing all of this in a community which is re-imagining the social, economic, and political structures that shape our lives.

While these are all steps in the right direction, it begs the question: is this enough? In short: no. While I don’t know just how de-stabilizing climate change will be, it has already impacted just about every system (human made and natural) on earth, and these impacts will continue. It is crucial to prepare our communities to weather further changes. Conveniently, just about everything we do to build resilience has both immediate and long term benefits to our quality of life, sense of community, and health of our bodies and planet, regardless of what the future looks like.

So then, what more could we be doing? Well quite frankly, there’s about a million things we could be doing; The process of building resilience is never complete, rather it is an ongoing journey in which we must continually adapt to, and stay a few steps ahead, the ever evolving state of the world. Though, for the purposes of today’s post, I’ll highlight a few things that seem relatively achievable in the next 1-5 years.

More Ponds

The benefits of ponds are multifaceted: In addition to capturing rainwater for irrigation, ponds provide habitat to many species of wildlife, recharge groundwater, create stabilizing microclimates, and provide a pleasant place for humans to relax, catch fish or cool down during the ever hotter summer months. While we have three and a half ponds on our land currently (the “half” is an ephemeral pond in the woods), We, and the land, could easily benefit from more. Specifically, there’s a spot near the top of our agricultural land, which also has a rather large catchment area, that could benefit immensely from a pond. A pond here would allow us to provide water to the majority of our gardens and livestock; reducing our dependence on municipal water sources, while alleviating the stress on those sources during times of drought.

An idea that I'm quite interested in is using two ponds, one lower and one higher, to create a “gravity battery” which can generate electricity when our solar panels cannot. It’s simple in concept: using excess solar power you pump water from the lower pond to the higher pond. At night, or a cloudy day, you allow the water from the upper pond to flow to the lower pond, passing through a turbine which generates power.

Resilient Heating Systems

One of the Seven ecological covenants we live by at Dancing Rabbit prohibits us from using fossil fuels to heat or cool our homes. Therefore, the buildings here are heated by wood, sun (through attached greenhouses and passive solar design) and electricity. Wood is a quite resilient heat source: with proper forest management we’re able to harvest it indefinitely from our own land and ensure that there is sufficient regeneration to both capture an equal or greater amount of carbon relative to what is released upon burning. The technology and materials required to actually burn the wood in our homes (i.e. stove building and maintenance) exists, in large part, within our community or region.

We still have much room for improvement in this realm: Some key areas include: Installing more efficient systems in some of our larger buildings, continuing to push the boundaries of passive solar design for new buildings, more developed forestry plan and infrastructure for harvesting, storing, and transporting of firewood, and improving our knowledge and execution of building tight, well insulated, natural homes.

Regional Network Building

One of the most impactful things we can do is increase our network of sustainable and resilient communities. A mutual exchange of knowledge, resources, and skills will aid greatly in building a web of resilient communities across the region, country, and world. We’ve started to do this to some extent; sending skilled workers to help build Ekvn-Yefolcv: an Indigenous Ecovillage on ancestral Maskoke land, offering “founders retreats'' to folks wanting to start their own ecovillages, sending rabbits on speaking tours, and partnering with the Chestnut improvement Network to collect data and aid in the regional adoption of perennial tree crops. There is still much more we could do. For this movement to gain momentum and catalyze real change we must work together. If you know of any communities or organizations in your area that could benefit from this type of mutual support, we would love to hear from you.

Food Growing and Preservation

This one does not need much introduction. If you follow us, you know that we are already doing quite a bit of this, though we have a long way to go. Some ways we could increase our capacity: Canning and preservation co-operative, climate controlled “cheese cave” for aging/storing cheeses, buying a slightly larger tractor and/or some key implements to help us to restore fertility, grow food, and improve the biodiversity of our fields and prairies. The Agroforestry Coop has a promising future as well; after successfully planting 250 chestnut trees they’re showing no signs of slowing down; they could further develop their mushroom business, interplant diverse perennials on the margins on the Chestnut Orchard, explore the possibility of cultivating woodland medicinals, or help with the restoration of our native prairie-savannah landscape by establishing native white oaks and hickories… among so much more.

These are just a few of the many ways we could be building resilience at Dancing Rabbit. While funding is not the only thing preventing us from following through on many of these (available time, human energy, and competing priorities play a big role), it is a factor for most, and having more money available in the Resilient Systems Grant fund does increase the likelihood of many projects like these in coming to fruition. If you’d like to support this, and the other work of our non-profit, please consider making a donation today.

In Resilience,

Eric Mease

Villager // Land Steward // Development Lead
Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture at