A Fascinating Topic For A Dissertation 

Bringing an American eco village counter culture and Hispanic immigrant culture to a greater mutual understanding is a long term effort. I was told the Hispanic residents have been invited to join eco village planning meetings and social occasions with translation but there has been limited participation. There are multiple challenges to overcome. Virtually all the Hispanic residents came to the US for its mythical economic opportunity.  

And now, they are drawn into the midst of an eco village project they never could have imagined, a project embraced by gringos predicated on a vision and set of values for downsizing lifestyles and building uplifted civic culture that, to a significant degree, rejects the economic and material opportunities in America the Hispanics risked their lives to be a part of.

If I was a sociology grad student or phd candidate, I would have a keen interest in this unlikely cultural arrangement. Kailash is a great story totally on its own. Then add Annapurna’s early eco village changes and then, if that wasn’t enough, add Annapurna’s Hispanic residents and their fateful interactions with the gringo counter culture.

After a look around Annapurna, Ole and I returned to his apartment for a key to the guest room so I could settle in. The guest room is very nice with a patio out front with lots of container plants, a succulent garden and interesting rock collections. A spindly metal kinetic sculpture extends up towards rain water pipes coming off the roof, 25 feet above.  I am told, when there is rain, the runoff rotates the metal sculpture producing a clanging sound and a small amount of electricity. There are lots and lots of flowers and tiny bridges over the rain gardens along the short pathway to the mandala garden. There’s another path from the patio up slope with green all around to the larger garden area. Who would have ever thought this green and colorful area was nothing but a blank of grass and a parking lot not long ago.  See the before fotos above.

Much of the time at Kailash was simply me exploring the eco village and having the chance to meet people out in the gardens. I did consider this visit to be research. The intention for me to learn and then to write an account of my visit to be included in my book, A Primer For Paradigm Shift. I love to hear stories about how people arrived to where they are in life and in particular to such a compelling location.

After checking out my lodgings, I walked up the sloping parking area towards the former Kailash swimming pool. I had been here before. Along the way, I saw a dozen private cars while the community has two electric cars for shared use. A good number of people do not own cars including Ole and Maitri. Ole told me only a bit more than half of Kailash residents have their own car.

Also walking to the former swimming pool area, there is more de paved parking area along the sidewalk in front of several apartments that create more landscape that now, instead of pavement is water management and beautification. On both sides of the complex on the ground floor, people are encouraged to adopt the space in front of their apartment to create their own small landscape of plants and art. I saw some beautiful personal micro parkettes that anyone walking along either side of the building can enjoy. A place to live should be attractive and uplifting to the spirit, whether an apartment complex, a private home or any public space.

At the up slope end to the parking lot, the southwest corner of the entire property, one would not know there had been a small swimming pool. The pool has been taken out and replaced by gardens with paths, arbors, terracing and views of the very mundane next door apartment complex referred to as the barracks.

Hawaiian Glamor

Before Kailash, the apartment complex, dating from the 1950’s, had been an upscale address with a touch of glamor and a Hawaiian theme. There was a long decline over the next 50 years or so that ended when Ole and Maitri bought the place in 2008.                                                         
The next place to check out on the north side of the building through the breezeway, was a tree house that was built since the last time I visited 7 years earlier. Along the way, with hopeful anticipation, I passed through the breezeway again. But, alas, the chocolate chip cookies left out for the taking, were all gone.

During covid times, plans for a new housing development on a separate property along the north side of Kailash stalled and Ole was able to buy it. See the before foto above. Most all that added area is 10 by10 foot personal gardens giving way to numerous fruit trees approaching the property line where one finds a thick bamboo planting  right along the property line.

In the upper left, or northwest corner of Kailash one will easily find the tree house. The tree house is flanked on the west and north by a bamboo area. All very shady and cool. The tree house, about 30 feet in diameter and the floor 15 feet above the ground, is set into that bamboo grove with a mix of native plantings, pear trees and a small gurgling pump driven brook with lots of ferns. 

The personal garden spaces begin just east of the treehouse and extending further east to the humanure composting, green house, the passiv house and mandala garden. The tree house is built on three large cherry tree trunks that were cut to support the beams under the floor and roof above the tree house. There is a dry play area underneath. The entire design and construction is simply beautiful and completely screened by the bamboo and various fruit trees from the property on the north and Annapurna to the west. 

I talked with a fellow one evening and learned the tree house was not universally popular. The lament was the three large cherry trees were cut and killed for the tree house. Planning for the best use of urban space is an issue both in the mainstream world and the counter culture world. Few decisions anywhere will be embraced by everyone. 

The treehouse, like an air traffic control tower with an expansive view overlooking the entire Kailash garden area, is a great amenity. One evening I sat up in the treehouse, commenting to myself, this is an open sided and elevated community living room. I could imagine all kinds of happenings up there with lots of chairs, wood floor, table, cushions, hammock. I later learned the place is host for weekly yoga and meditation sessions and community members can reserve it for social functions.

The roof is conical with a big circular sky light with south Asian touches. From the vantage point that evening, I could see people out taking care of their gardens, chatting with each other as light faded on a cool cloudy day, the gurgling brook provided a faint and agreeable background sound.

The Gardens

The garden was a great place to meet people. I spoke with Ole’s son in law as he was watering his plot and he told me how he came to be the property manager at Kailash.  He had degrees in both environmental studies and business from the University of Oregon and his graduation timing was perfect for taking on the manager’s job, complementing both his business skills and his environmental interests. He loves being part of the eco villages.

Another fellow was tending his garden and picking ingredients for salad.  He had lived at Kailash for nine years and was on the wood chip crew.  There are woodchips in all the garden pathways and it takes a lot of wheelbarrow loads to keep the paths in good shape.  He admitted he could be more involved in community life but he very much enjoyed the eco village.

On another encounter, I met Nick who was the organizer of a collection of shared garden spaces including the one at Annapurna described above. In past years, Nick had squatted in London and New York City. An American woman was his magnet to the US. The magnetism was lost but he loves living at Kailash. Many community members participate in the community garden spaces. Much of the production goes to farmers’ markets and those who helped, receive a modest payback in the profits.

My first morning I was making breakfast in the community room kitchen while several residents came in for a qigong session.  We chatted briefly, everyone had upbeat comments about living at Kailash. I left for the patio to have breakfast.
Hover over the fotos below for a caption. 

Teams With Responsibilities

Kailash has many intentional opportunities for engaging with others.  Along with ad hoc groups such as qigong, there are established teams. Over the years, the beautification team has built a mosaic mural in the central breezeway overlooking the cookie table, they built another mural that is the large Kailash welcome sign at the top of the east facing wall one sees first arriving at the property. The team worked with City Repair to paint a mural on the neighboring street to slow traffic and meet many neighbors.

Another team is communal cultivation as mentioned moments ago. Many residents participate in these larger garden projects. 

The recycling team has done well to reduce waste.  Thanks to the team, it's possible to recycle odd items by special effort and a great deal is re used. The ideal is to reduce eco footprints and mitigate many of the external costs to people and planet that every product has.  All Kailash residents must recycle and compost food waste although humanure is voluntary. There are detailed instructions at several recycling centers on the property.

Another  good example of reducing eco footprints at Kailash is the shared clothes washing and drying facility.  Not only do people not have to own their own washer and dryer, they don’t have to devote space in their small apartments to a washer and dryer. 

There is a bike team that looks after bike needs which include over a hundred bike parking spaces and half of those under cover. Bike users have access to a shared cargo trailer and cargo bike. Basic bike tools are available to all and there’s a bike stand for working on one’s own bike in a place one is likely to connect with other bike enthusiasts.

The garden team takes care of the 50 plus fruit trees along with the tool shed and community tools. There is a tech team that helps maintain dependable internet service and also helps residents with computer issues. There is an e mail list serve that connects people using the internet. Before my visit, I emailed Ole and asked him to put a note out to members that I was coming for a visit and would like to meet people. I had several responses that resulted in great conversations. Sunday community potlucks are popular. Many people meet spontaneously in the garden. Life at Kailash is intended to be social.

The Kailash website provides a great way to learn about life at the eco village. The site is well documented with text and many photos - before, during and now.  kailashecovillage.org

So after breakfast, I walked over to Annapurna and found Ole and another resident filling in trenches for water lines. I helped out for several hours, a great opportunity for exercise, see a bit more of life at Annapurna such as a woman out walking her cat and simply to be a part of lending a hand to what I consider to be exciting and valuable work not only transforming an apartment complex but also boosting the far greater task of paradigm shift.

After a few hours and a couple hundred feet of trench filling, I connected with a woman who had responded to my e mail request to meet people who lived at Kailash.  We talked for a couple hours while enjoying the view in the treehouse.  C was from Alaska and came to Portland to be closer to her kids. She found out about Kailash and is very happy to be a resident now for three years. An enthusiastic Buddhist, we shared anecdotes about our lives, what we thought about the state of the world and why Kailash is such an important place. 

Shortly after our chat, I met one of the people she suggested I meet, Mr. “Bike.” When we met, he was doing some work on his heavy lift electric cargo bike. I asked if it was true he had not even been inside a car for over five years. True enough and he had not been on a plane for longer than that. Mr. B was anti car for many reasons and I could totally agree with. He is a photographer and manages his business using an electric bike.

By that time, it was late in the day but I had energy for physical work. Again, I walked over to Annapurna and again, I found Ole hard at work boxing up odd chunks of wood from removing unwanted shrubbery and small trees.  I helped out and after we finished, we moved on to do more trench filling on the slope leading up to the swimming pool. We grabbed some tools and while walking to the trench site, an older woman came to me, very upset, and told me she needed help gaining access to her apartment. She had locked herself out.

I told her I was not the person with a key but could help. We talked with Ole. He did not have a key either but the solution was to bring a ladder to her balcony and a young neighbor climbed up to her apartment, entered through the unlocked sliding door and let her in her unlocked front door. Issue resolved.  

Ole and I did another couple hours of work filling in trenches. It was very satisfying work to see the mounds flatten out and the yellow tape taken away. Time for dinner. Ole and I drove one of the shared electric cars to a vegetarian Chinese restaurant and had a great meal. Ole and Maitri met in the Philippines, Maitri’s home country. They discovered an interest in each other exploring the Philippine rain forest. That was forty years ago.

I asked Ole if he often consciously thought about the awesome work he and Maitri were doing.  He said not so often. He told me it's simply the lifestyle of transformation. A retired general practitioner MD with a strong spiritual side, Ole chose the names Kailash and Annapurna because they refer to lofty mountain peaks in Nepal that have mystical connotations. He is greatly concerned with the environmental, social and public health damage caused by the consumer culture. Reducing eco footprints and facilitating community culture is a core ideal for the eco villages.

Returning to Kailash about sunset, Ole and I ascended the steep stairs to the cupola built on the top of Kailash, an architectural flourish, not yet complete. Still remaining are several spires with the goal is to make the outline of Kailash resemble the temple architecture of Nepal. From the cupola's lofty vantage point, Ole described the 68 kilowatt array of photo voltaic panels covering the south facing roof. Kailash produces about 70% of the electricity it uses with the grid acting as a sort of battery.

He also described a grant to install triple pane windows for the entire eco village, a high level of energy conservation. In case of emergency, the eco village can use the batteries from the electric cars for domestic use and are planning to develop the capability to use their solar panels directly for Kailash use if the grid goes down.  One Kailash member is a ham radio buff so that adds to the interest of emergency preparedness. I was told another eco village member is chair of the neighborhood’s community organization.  

Kailash invites neighbors to take wood chips and there is a neighborhood bulletin board with snack garden out along the street. Kailash has a lot going both within the eco village and also with the surrounding community.
You can hover over the fotos for a caption.

Paradise or Paradigm Shift

Next morning, I had to leave for my train to Eugene. Returning my room key, I walked past the apartment directly below Ole and Maitri and directly above the guest room. There was a bug screen in the doorway and a person standing just inside as I walked by. Of course I stopped and we ended up talking for close to half an hour. She was a sociologist with a degree from the University of Oregon. We talked about Eugene and life at Kailash which she enjoyed a great deal. Her hope was to move to a flat with its own kitchen.  At present, her kitchen is shared with another resident via a door from the other apartment, a design fluke from rebuilding Kailash. With all the interest in reducing eco footprints and building community, people still like to have their own space. I am sympathetic.

Finally, it was time to go, just as my new friend from the day before was arriving to visit my new sociologist friend.  We greeted, shared a hug and I was on my way, a 5 mile bike ride from southeast Portland to northeast Portland. I followed the signage of Portland’s pedal friendly neighborhood bike boulevards. I encountered minimal traffic even crossing an interstate highway on a bike and pedestrian bridge.

My destination was to Our 42nd Avenue, a non profit agency dedicated to context sensitive local economic development in northeast Portland. I had visited the place years before, was impressed with their work doing sensible and sensitive economic re development in that small area and I wanted to update. Alas, the office was closed.

But I still enjoyed the bike ride. The 1940’s vintage homes I passed by were decidedly tidy, attractive, green, with lots of large trees.  I saw several excellent front yard gardens and a number of intersection repair murals.

I made my way downtown crossing over the Willamette River. At this point, the River is much larger river than upstream in Eugene and who could imagine this entire downtown area had been periodically immersed under 300 or so feet of water 10,000 years ago? It was the Missoula Floods during the last ice age, a great story of world class geo morphology.  

I had some time to explore the Pearl District, only a few blocks north of downtown.  Up until the 1980’s the area was industrial with warehouses, light industry and rail yards. It's now a trendy, upscale residential area with restaurants, galleries, boutiques and gleaming 15 to 25 story apartment buildings. I gazed up at the different styles of architecture, wondered about what happens inside the shiny facades, the balconies and what looked to be penthouses above and the mostly well off street life below.

Still with some time, I biked a few blocks downtown to Pioneer Square, Portland’s signature center of town, the site of a large hotel 75 years ago, then a parking lot and now a public open space surrounded by office buildings, franchise businesses and local food carts. Both the well patronized downtown tram and Portland’s light rail lines clatter by frequently on one side of the square.

Finally, time to head for the train station, returning to the area with all those gleaming apartment buildings. But my route was different, meandering through a very different urban landscape.The buildings were old with no gleam, there were few cars, no stores, no tram but there were dozens of down and out people both in clusters and alone, some with their meager possessions, often laying on the gritty sidewalks or leaning on dirty walls, some taking drugs as I biked past.

This was another side of Portland. I know most cities in the US have similar places. Eugene has a smaller area and also many homeless people. I came around a corner looking for the tower of the train station but saw the large colorful bus of a local public health non profit, parked down the street. As I biked towards the bus, four workers looked my way, a couple stood up as I approached and appeared eager to welcome me, glad to finally assist someone in need.

I was in need. Of directions to the train station. I thanked them for being there for those many dozens I had just passed by and after a bit of conversation, we all lamented the condition of a society that allows anyone to decline like those on the sidewalks a block away. There is no shortage of money to fix so many of our problems. The issue is how do we prioritize our time and money. 

On the 3 hour train ride home, aside from chats with the woman sitting next to me who worked as a docent for a public science museum, I contemplated the visit to Portland, particularly peoples’ living conditions.  Of course, I loved Kailash and Annapurna.They totally fit my ideal of paradigm shift and moving towards sustainability and uplift. Kailash is repairing the urban landscape, residents are learning social and lifestyle skills while reducing eco footprints and creating a real life example of what moving past the consumer culture can look like.  Trading large eco footprints for positive personal, social and aesthetic habitats.

Meanwhile, the green and tidy neighborhoods with modest but still probably million dollar homes I passed through on my bike ride looked beautiful, but still with eco footprints multiple times larger than the planet can sustain for everyone.  The high rise upscale Pearl area is very modern, very walkable, even with a convenient tram to access nearby downtown and return home. Living in downtown Portland, one could easily be car free. Depending on the lifestyle particulars, some of the residents in the highrises could also have modest eco footprints by US standards.

And then, the smallest footprints, those people mostly homeless and living on the streets; disabled by drugs, bad luck and probably some bad choices, too. My guess, from what I saw, their eco footprints are far below the sustainable level but, of course, not at all desirable.

Catching the occasional waterfront view of the Willamette River on the train, south of Portland, I replayed to myself an encounter only an hour earlier while sitting on a shady park bench in the Pearl area. There was a large splashy water feature a short distance away with someone using it to wash up. People passing by were paying no attention. A middle aged and comfortably dressed woman sitting near me asked if I had just saved a lady bug. She saw me walk to a shrub nearby and gently brush something off my arm onto a bush. Surprised and amused, I asked her, how did she know that was a lady bug?

We ended up talking for a while. I told her I was from Eugene and had visited an eco village in Portland. I was eager to describe some of my visit to Kailash but she quickly navigated the conversation in a different direction. She told me she was taking a break as one of the Jehovah's Witnesses I had seen earlier a couple blocks away, on the street with their display, reaching out to people passing by. She said there was an opportunity for life on earth to be a paradise, free of pain, suffering or want. No need for hip replacements, hearing aids or any medical or social interventions. All we want.

Personally, I would settle for less than paradise. For me, paradigm shift would work, a condition where people simply behave in their own best interests which means living within the boundaries of the natural world and cooperating with each other for the common good. That would look a lot like Kailash Eco Village.

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