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An Introduction from the
About. The Practice. We Love This This is the most expensive hotel in Egypt! It is built in an oasis near the border of Libya. The walls of the structures are built of salt block cut from the salt lake seen in the distance. The blocks are covered with mud in the traditional “Siwa style”. During the day, the walls of the structure absorb heat and the heat is released to the interior at night. In the morning the walls are cool and keep the interior cool during the heat of the day. The hotel has no electricity. It is very quiet. A majority of the vegetables served are grown in the organic garden, irrigated naturally with the cold spring of the oasis. Small amounts of propane are used to run the gourmet kitchen, heat shower water and run the pumps that bring domestic water to the top of the butte to be distributed by gravity to the rooms.This place is one of the most delightful and joyous places to be on the planet. When most people think about sustainability they dream of projects like this: Simple, elegant, beautiful, serene, working with natural cycles, indigenous, low impact with close to zero use of fossil fuel. These projects thrill ours hearts, our minds and our eyes! We love this! Energy and Identity But we live in the Northeastern part of the United States! It gets cold here, it rains here, most of the time we are not on vacation, and like it or not, the consumption of energy is intimately linked to our identity. The consumption of energy provides us with physical comfort, allows us to be highly productive, gives us access to all kinds of input, encourages diversity, promotes intellectual activity and makes us bigger and stronger than our own bodies. And we love this too! Art and Science NESEA is engaged in the project of reconciling these issues in our culture. Our culture wants things that work technically and aesthetically. NESEA wants to inspire and make manifest projects and practices that people can deeply love, cherish, value, while sustaining the systems on our planet that nurture life. We have chosen this as a place to intervene in our culture and we know that a profound and intelligent synthesis of Art and Science is required to bring this about. The issues are complex and the project is not easy. Some answers are simple other extremely complex. At the BE 2005 conference we will give people from many fields the context, the tools and the inspiration they need to make informed decisions that will positively influence our lives and their businesses. Some people will be attracted to the art, some to the science, some to the synthesis. A cross pollination will occur. |
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