-The process of moving toward local and global sustainability requires the development of countless simultaneous projects. Below are lists of some of the projects that we plan to initiate, organize, facilitate, support, fund, promote,etc. Depending on the core collective's time and resources, some of these many never either start or finish. With your help and application of targeted skills and interest we can all synergize and accomplish much more together than we could alone. We are developing high-tech communication systems to integrate ideas, research, media, and art from all over the world.The Gaian Mind and all of its sub-projects can be a global outlet for artists, poets, scholars, researchers, writers, computer programmers, gardeners, and anyone else who'd like to use both our cyber and physical premises to share their work and participate in our efforts to address the ecological crisis.

-Depending on your location relative to the Gaian Mind, you should be able to find projects to participate in based on the data in the table below. Please see project descriptions for info on which aspects we need the most help with.

Notes: Geographic scope refers to where the project applies and can be operated on from, GM= Gaian Mind, L=Local southern california community, G=Global. Status refers to whether a project is Active (A), On Hold (H), or Cyber (C), or Uninitiated (blank).

Use this form to ask questions and receive participation information.

The most essential crop that must grow out of the Gaian Mind is this project. All of our commercial, educational, and technological projects serve this. The concept is to design a sort of "Metal Gear" type of 3d character model. Rather than working for the military, you're fully equipped with gadgets and tools for use in surveying for endangered species, wilderness survival, animal first aid, resource mapping, invasive species removal, ecological restoration, clean-up, etc. So we can build a "Ranger" model in 3d art, and actually implement this character through our free school wilderness program. We can either solicit equipment donations or purchase things like:

• gps systems
• compasses
• maps
• organic seeds
• flash lights
• camping knives
• leds
• endangered species i.d. materials
• digital cameras
• binoculars
• boots
• water-proof gear
• camping gear
• back-pack guitars
• fiddles, and other blue grass implements!
• dried food
• cordage
• tree climbing equipment
• kayaks
• water bottles
• etc.

We can actually become a small scale retail distributor of some of these things from the store here so that people who aren't enrolled in the eco-scouting program can just get a couple cool devices and contribute to the project at their leisure. Otherwise, all of this stuff would part of the package for enrollment in the program. We'll be working to get grants and donations to cover some of the expensesl. We're anxious to attain non-profit status as soon as possible so we can move forward with this.

Any equipment, experience, and other donations to this project would much appreciated. This project will take some time to get fully established however we'll be testing and building it with whatever we've got any chance we get.

Free Food Distro

We've partnered with several farming families at the Harbor area farmers' markets. They donate their unsold produce to the Gaian collective to sustain the efforts of the collective, struggling families in the community and youth students. The food also supports our weekly potluck, and breakfast and lunch for our crew of saturday gardening youth. Whatever goes bad is composted at Long Beach Organic gardens.

The farmers, gardeners, and the gaian family are all really excited to be building a tight energy and nutrient flow system that's circular. The love and intent put into the farms flows through the gaian family in the form of work to expand the scale of organic gardening in southern California. Each fruit and vegetable is like a foot of rope handed down to pull us out of the toxic nightmare.
As we begin to flourish, we'll be able to extend our own lengths of rope to others and continue to empower and liberate the victims of the artificial food system.

The following is a list of the basic resources that are always available to the community:

• free phone
• free wireless internet
• public computers
• art supplies
• workspace
• tool library
• media library
• free box
• free school

Mic Club

Friday Potlucks

Jeet Kune Do self-defense

Bruce was a scholary philosopher who sought the core truth in all things. In the spirit of Taoism he accepted nothing as the complete stand alone truth. While rigid formal martial artists compete to establish their style as superior over others, he found that all styles had elements of perfection that if distilled and combined could provide a solid foundation for a sort of unified style. Like a juicer, his life project was to strip away the outer shells of knowledge and make a nutrient rich mixture of all the essential ingredients in a pure form.

This holistic approach is well aligned with the Gaian Mind's systems and we're excited to explore, master, and apply Jeet Kune Do as a physical and philosophical peace system.

Based on the models of various other communites who've made alternative currency we'll be setting up an economy whereby people can trade work hours for goods and services amongst each other. This system truly equalizes the value of trades because all hour tokens would be worth the same=one hour of work, or 30 mins, or 15, etc. An example of an exchange of this currency could be: a doctor needs his lawn mowed one day. He gives an hour coin to a landscaper who lives down the street for the job. That landscaper can then, say a week later, use that token to have his back looked at by the doctor. What the capitalist system would have made impossible to attain amongst even neighbors, can be facilitated by this economic system because it values all labor equally. Not only could that landscaper use the token as a credit unit to later cash in on with the same person; through a whole community network of the use of the tokens, he could have saved it and gotten a massage from someone else for his back. And maybe during the massage it just so happened that the masouse needed to have some tree's planted in front of their house, and bam, another opportunity exists to earn more equalized currency. A meme like this could very easily raise the standard of living, community intimacy, and self reliance exponentially very quickly.

Why it’s needed: We feel that the creation of a sacred space for women is vital to the health of a real community. There's a lack of a support network for women in the punk scene and beyond. Women are an isolated minority that’s contributions to the male dominated subculture are often unappreciated and unacknowledged. Furthermore, there's little collective consciousness of the power of unity among women. Individual women, who haven't experienced the joyful empowerment of a family-like, loving sisterhood within their scene don't know what they're missing, nor does the culture as a whole as it is missing so much in its state of perpetual imbalance. We all stand to gain from the healing energy, nurturing, creativity, and vision that a Sister Circle can collect and share with us all.

What's going to be accomplished: a sense of solidarity, stronger bonds, the development of a vocabulary of empowerment, development of new modes of self-defense on all physical and psychological levels, the creation of new non-dogmatic approach to feminism, women’s mental health, and general skill sharing.

Planned activities will include: co-authoring a “Patriarchy Survival Guide” with the men’s group, producing women's items for the A.G.C. merch table, such as re-usable cloth pads, herbal remedies, and other items for women, skill shares, alternative women's health-care research, encouraging initiation and maintenance of healthier habits with each other, meeting in natural places to connect with healing earth energy, creating a So Cal women’s resource list, having open and anonymous support infrastructure for crises (web, phone, and group meeting based), working with the men’s group, setting up women's gatherings timed with lunar cycles, hosting punk kids days.

This group will continue in the early summer. Please contact us if you want to be involved.

Natural Healing Database

Pilates Holistic Exercise

Through Pilates, an overall balance and control,an overall body awareness, is brought forth. Everyone is welcome to join us. Wear comfortable clothing and bring a towel. If you are familiar with Pilates, come share with us. We meet at 8:30-10 every Thursday night.

Academic Mastery Technics

Creating an alliance to support teen rebels with a cause who are excelling in extra-curricular education/artistic activies yet suffering academically.

"From skipping classes to skipping grades!"

This project profile has hatched into its own site. Please click here to go to the full profile.

-The Gaian Mind interior and exterior design is intended to be perhaps one of the most study conducive environments ever known. Before explaining how; here's an analogy that will set up the importance and purpose of our study design.

-It is our belief that much can be learned from cellular level biology. They say, you're only as healthy as the health of your cells. This is very important fact and should prompt us to examine how things work at the cell level. First of all, cells can live a long time as long as they continue to be supplied with the nutrients they need and if their wastes are carried away. The blood stream supplies the oxygen and nutrients, the lymph system removes the wastes. When both are working at their highest performance, the cells are robust, energetic, and fully charged to do their job. Proper exercise, diet, and hydration are the determinants of the quality of cell performance.

-Unfortunately most with the U.S. don't exercise properly, they eat terrible dead nutrient-empty foods, and are chronically dehydrated. Not surprisingly their cells get swamped in lymphatic sewage, oxygen and blood are blocked from the cell, and whatever gets past is the product of fast shallow breaths and fast shallow food. The cells are constantly declining and thus so to is the overall body. The cell can't do its job right, so nothing else can either. Organs weakened, sometimes shut down, etc.

-This problem is similar to the learning process: a toxic mind in a toxic environment will not be learning in a healthy way. Memories don't form, stress hormones strip the whole body of nutrients. Negative thoughts, doubt, and lethargy lead to school performance decline and eventual expulsion.

-We believe that through juicing, raw foods, exercise, breathing, and hydration, we'll be able to help teens and college students really cleanse their systems and get them primed to learn, think, create, move, work, and play with the easy and eagerness of children.

-Once you remove the corrosive, immune system irritating, nervous system tweaking sugar and coffee and bleached white flower sugar pastries that constitute the backbone of global academic study fuel, you can actually start supplying the body and brain with clean energy and food sources that stimulate the learning processes.

-Here are a few elements we'll be combining to set up the context:

• Our raw food cafe will be serving the much healthier and safer herbal tea stimulant called Yerba Mate, a staple of many South American countries.
• All food will be sweetened either with dates or maple syrup (which is one of the most nutrient rich foods in existence
• We have many reference books
• Free wireless internet
• Community computers
• Free Voice over IP phone for free calls anywhere anytime in the U.S. and Canada
• Free food and juice for k-12 students while studying
• Store credit for college kids who make themselves available to help k-12 students
• Programs set up for students to recieve course credit for working us
• Daily free school classes to help build basic and advanced skills
• Computer program support
• Pleasant lighting, and a living room atmosphere
• Quiet isolated study areas available
• Study group friendly
• Art project supplies, space, and support
• Counseling for all issues
• School supplies for sale and work trade
• Basic subject study groups and reference materials, digital flash card games,
• Online study groups where people can log in at a scheduled time to be connected with others working on the same homework, class, test, etc.

Free School

Conflict Resolution Sessions

We have a "Scenario Suggestion Box" where anyone can anonymously submit a mini-scene that they'd like to see acted out. Each Skit System session randomly draws names out of bag. When people arrive who want to act, they can write their names on strips of paper. When the scenario suggestion box is opened and a scene is introduced, we then pull names out of the name bag and a random assortment of improv volunteer actors will be assigned the roles. As the skit begins to be acted out, the audience is encouraged to verbally "paint-in" props, scene changes, other factors, ad lib lines, etc. so as to create a truly dynamic interactive environment. Our hope is that these skits can involve confronting sexism, racism, homophobia, discrimination, discouragement, family dynamics, lover conflict, etc. Any type of situation that you'd want to see represented and resolved can be played out by volunteer improv actors. From comedy to deep drama, we can all learn social skills of peace and respect and potentially even resolve past situations that we wished we'd said the right thing or done something different. Victims and perpetrators carrying the baggage of all manners of embarrassment, abuse, mistakes, etc. can bury the hatchet with their subconscious and be equipped to "do the right thing" in the future.

-The demands of modern civilization make reading for pleasure, extra-curricular learning, and even curricular learning less and less compatible with the pace of life. In response to this we'll be building a network of readers to be commissioned to read books and digitally audio record their readings. The value of this will be that rather than immobilize ourselves by each reading the same linguistic content, we'll be able to share and rapidly uptake and assimilate linguistic input without having to process and "digest" the roughage of visual data. In other words, audio-linguistic learning is a lot like using a juicer to extract the desired material from fruits and vegetables, whereas visual reading is more like chewing through them. Both methods eventually make the essential content available to the body however one requires so much effort, time, attention, and space that you can only ever get a small amount of the desired content per consumption session.

-With audio books, lectures, etc. you can be in motion, driving, cleaning, doing dishes, exercising, etc. Your hands, eyes, and even some of your attention can be made available simultaneously for other things. This will exponentially increase the amount of valuable information we can be operating from at any given moment. Just think of the amount of time we spend in cars driving in L.A. There is no reason we've not learned several languages and mastered the subjects of our interest in the commuting times many of us log everyday. And there's no discipline involved, it requires no effort whatsoever, your mind processes audio input at all times even during sleep.

-The rate of data assimilation made possible by this project can even have the effect of dislodging the obsolete ideological, prejudicial, and anedotal plaque that blocks new information from reaching people's authentic truth seeking, rational, thoughtful minds. It would be amazing to see this project humble some of the heavy-handed argumentative wind-bags.

-The highest goal would be for this accelerated learning to put an end to immature aggressive intellectual debates. Think of the feeling that many of us have had in arguments to convince family members, co-workers, teachers, peers, etc. of, for example, a basic axiom of natural law. Chances are our "opponents" were not trained in the etiquette of academic discourse nor how to identify the patterns of fallacious argument. You end up going in circles and understanding is no longer the point of speech and exchange, rather it ends up being a spirit crushing, demoralizing exercise in futility. Furthermore, this kind of communication dysfunction can deeply damage our capacity to have respect for each other and thus corrupt otherwise endearing relationships.

-We always think during the psychic hangover following these "debates" that 'if only they'd read that book I gave them they'd understand!' But the sad truth is that reading a book is a major investment of time and energy in modern society. It requires immense effort and taxes our rapidly shrinking attention spans. However, if all of our theses we're eloquently laid out in audio format, we'd be able to communicate the premises for our belief systems without demanding self-sacrifice and we'd know that at the end of an hour of spoken word, lecture, book on tape, etc. we'd have real substance to pick apart and reflect on intelligently with the antagonist.

-The Gaian-Tech collective is comprised of people in various parts of
the world who share an ecologically conscious technological
perspective. As lovers of life and nature our intent is to use
machines to ad beauty, skills, and knowledge to the living world. We
believe that technology can be a valuable tool for communication and
community and personal development but we want our engagements in
cyber-space to be as efficient and functional as possible so we can
get out and log-in to planet earth!

-It's our goal to decentralize technological skills so that anyone
who wants to be equipped to navigate the cyber terrain can do so
easily and with ample support. A major flaw in modern society's
information/skill transferral mechanism is that so many of us are
struggling separately and alone to learn the same things. In
response to this, a communal study group dynamic is what we'll be
creating at the Gaian-Mind. For example, a session could involve
creating a photoshop document and applying a vast array of basic and
advanced techniques so that we can all benefit from each others
individual experiences of the program.

-Without this type of knowledge swapping and without costly computer
classes, many users spend litteraly hundreds of accumulated hours in
application environments where they have developed awkward,
dysfunctional, and inefficient habits. The introduction of basic
elements such as keyboard shortcuts, tool bar modifications, and
hidden control panels can exponentially increase the power and
efficiency of the user.

Cyber class room

Many of our dreams have been facilitated by craigslist alone, it is by far one of the most useful web tools in existence. We want to take the craigslist model and make a more filtered version of it for use by and for members of socially and ecologically conscious movement. It would be nice to have a system free from patriarchal exploitation, sleezey business schemes, etc. And it would be nice to have a resource, job, free stuff sharing web resource that you could trust would connect you to people who really share your core values. So for example, if you're elderly and need your lawn mowed, but you'd like to know that you're money isn't going to feed the alcohol, tobacco, and pornography industries, you could use our craiglist to seek the labor of someone who's profile reasonably convinces you that they aren't into that. Conversely, as a laborer looking for work, you can better trust that you'll not be in danger or be treated in a sexist manner.

-Craiglist is a magic valve, if we can harness its simple powers and keep them in the container of our conscious movements, our own economy, knowledge,skill, and resource base would greatly appreciate.

HELP! WE NEED PROGRAMMERS FOR THIS! THANKS

We're currently creating a 3d map of southern California for as the background to a flash game engine whereby through a website users will be able to visually navigate the landspace and find mapped gps points of natural resources, autonomous spaces, conscious business, and more. It will be a sort of "people's map" that contains only information relevant to the conscious movement. We be able to put search criteria on it that will allow the user to literally "see" the results for all the bike resources, health resources, natural beaches, edible fruit trees, medicinal herbs, etc.

-With this interface constantly being added to, we'll eventually have a solid visual reference to the resource base in so. cal. and be able to develop a strong sense of the relationality of the resources we often use but don't string together in our travels due to previous lack of a concept of their proximity. It would be rad to have to go to some dreaded appointment for work, medical reasons, or whatever and check our map and see that you're exactly 1.32 miles from a co-op house, vegan cafe, community center, river, fruit tree etc.

-As we build the protype interface, we'll be soliciting long term project involvement by game programmers, artists, and web programmers. The ultimate goal is not only to have a flash system that allows us to ad individual user interactivity with the objects on the landscape, (e.g. your can take the standard character and navigate them across the map to the Gaian Mind and see cartoon images of what garden foods are ready to pick for trade, and you could then arrange a trade transaction through a from or instant message system that's wrapped in a classic RPG village shop interface) but we eventually want to ad multi user interactivity so that you could design your own character and all the online users could see each other on the map, approach each other and converse through an IM interface that again looks just like an RPG frame.

-The basic idea is to take the static 2d world of say myspace.com and represent all the same features as flash objects on a 3 landscape. So say if some is loggin into the map at the Gaian Mind, whereas myspace would just animate its standard "user online" icon, we'd take a similar code and have it "turn on" our porch light on the caricature icon that looks like our place on the map. All objects on the map can be programmed in action script to pop up a new window with even just plain html showing the details of the person, place, or thing, but rather than looking like a stale standard profile page website, you'd be seeing it much like the nintendo game "Ninja Gaiden's" cinematic frame sequences.

-Most of these ideas would be quite simple to code however time is the most scarce resource holding back the project. Any and all support, programming volunteering, advice, etc. is welcomed.

To get a general idea of some of the foundational elements of the system that will be emulated check out this flash game engine, 3d so. cal. map, and already existing similar mapping project by clicking below:

Ecotopia Map Game Models:

Flash game engine base:
www.knifeproductions.com/gem_saver

So Cal caricature 3d map base:
unique media so cal 3d map

Already existing fruit mapping project:
www.fallenfruit.org

Other conscious flash media and game projects for reference:

The Meatrix (flash movie based on the matrix exposing the cruelty of factory farm industry)

Veal: Forget about it (anti-veal messages set to the Godfather)

Steer Madness (animal activist version of Grand Theft Auto)

Please help us add to this list of conscious flash and gaming projects so that eventually we can network and develop projects together. The Gaian Mind would be a perfect place physically gather when possible and more often and conveniently meet through the web and the use of our video projector (dreamweaver breeze service donation would be nice...)

We're currently working hard to pull the pieces together to install our raw/vegan/living foods cafe. We hope to be up and running this summer. This project is in critical need of support since it's the most expensive and labor intensive to even get started.

Distro tabling

Online sales