This week in Awesome Stories we look at Walipini, creative wind turbines, brave children and simplicity.
Eco Machine
Image by Chris Tackett
Eco Machine is Omega Institute’s wonderful water treatment facility that mimics nature in purifying water. The facility takes wastewater and runs it through a series of treatments, all natural, with no chemicals, and finally returns the pure, clean water to the underground aquifer. The treatment uses anoxic tanks, wetlands, sand and gravel beds, and dispersal beds. The best part is this facility also serves as a classroom and model for sustainable building and living.
Merida Movement
The Merida Movement is a wonderful organization helping African youth. Christine Michelle co-founded this group to help empower, unify and strengthen the youth of Africa. The term Merida comes from the original name for the continent of Africa and means ‘our beloved land.’ Their vision is to ignite bold conversations and actions to uplift the youth of Africa. Read more about their exciting work here.
Be Brave
This wonderful song by Sara Barelies has been turned into an uplifting video to inspire the children and families at the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital. Enjoy!
Solar Leasing Takes Off
Most of us don’t have the spare money to buy solar systems outright. Fortunately, more companies like SolarCity and SunGevity are offering programs to lease solar PV systems. With a lease, you can put little or nothing down, have small payments, often offset by the energy savings, and have the installation and maintenance provided by the lease company. The only tradeoff is at the end of the lease, you either buy the system or the company can take it back. There are also programs like PACE that allow homeowners to pay for solar PV and other energy efficiency measures with the savings on your utility bills. Usually, the systems pay for themselves.
Thoughtful Simplicity
Duayne Elgin takes a thoughtful look at voluntary simplicity and offers what it means to him. He gives 8 suggestions for areas in our lives that can benefit from simplicity. I like his garden analogy with ideas for planting seeds of simplicity. The overall guide is to live in a more thoughtful way that acknowledges the interconnected nature of our world and the pressing need to live within the planets capacity to renew and continue providing. our planetary needs.
Baby’s Bath
If you want a quick dose of beauty, peace and love, then watch this wonderful video of a special baby bath.
Dragonfly Wind
I like these dragonfly inspired wind turbines. They are more graceful, less visually obstructive, function at low winds and hopefully a design we will be seeing a lot more of in the future! Check out these cool looking designs by Renzo Piano, working in partnership with Enel Green Power in Italy.
Do you Walipini?
This is a fun word for a great gardening idea. A walipini is a garden dug into the ground and covered by plastic to enable year round growing. It looks like something worth considering.
writing to freedom 
Yikes! I go away for four days, come home and try (desperately) to catch up on my favorite blogs. A challenge to say the least. And you have two posts in that period, each of which is filled with oodles of cool, inspiring topics. Arrggghhhh, I can’t read all of them. I’m just going to trust my intuition and know that there is an abundance of useful information in both posts, Brad. And for that, I am appreciative. I’ll try to create time to circle back. I hope life is treating you well!
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Life is about choices! 🙂 Thanks for putting me in your favorite blog list. I can relate to having too many to read and have cut back on some that I read. Thanks Eric.
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