Guara Ki (The Place of Earth Spirit)

Guara Ki means “The Place of Earth Spirit” in the Taino language. The Tainos were one of the Pre-Columbian Arawak peoples that inhabited Cuba and the West Indies and are thought to be the ancestors of the Tequesta and Calusa peoples who inhabited South Florida. The language would have been very similar, if not the same.
 
Context
We live in the Greater Everglades Bioregion, an area that encompasses most of South Florida from the Kissimmee headwaters south to Biscayne and Florida Bays. The Everglades has been drained and transformed into a system that now forces humans to depend upon technological management in order to receive adequate water in their homes and businesses.

In many ways, South Florida’s recent history has been driven by limitless and unsustainable urban sprawl. Currently, urban development threatens to consume significant areas devoted to farmland, compromising our ability to grow regional food crops and eliminating a critical green buffer that the Everglades and the bioregion need.

The Federal and State governments have begun a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar effort to restore some of the former functionality of the Everglades. This is the largest ecological restoration project ever undertaken to date and is serving as a model to the rest of the world. In order to ensure a positive outcome and avoid the collapse of our natural systems, those of us living in the Greater Everglades Bioregion must learn to live sustainably and design a built environment that enhances those natural systems.

Plan

Earth Learning is in the process of developing a Model Sustainable Farm and Learning Center that will offer learning opportunities in sustainable agriculture practices based on permacultre design principles.