Yeah, check it out.
Y'all want to win a free vacation to the jungles of Costa Rica this summer and help support the Scott Horton Show?
You can.
Joshua Hughes, peace activist and permaculturalist, runs Verde Energia Pacifica, an intentional community in the mountains of Llanes de Periscal, Costa Rica, and he's offered a raffle off a week's stay to listeners of this show.
Airfare is on you, but transportation to and from the airport, as well as a seven-day stay for you and a guest in your own private house with three meals a day is covered.
You can learn and practice some skills, or just go for a swim in the river, pool, or waterfall, walk jungle trails, enjoy the views, do yoga or dance in the studio, make art, play music, check out a local soccer game, or simply relax in a hammock by the river and read.
Raffle tickets are just $50.
Stop by scotthorton.org slash raffle for details, and anyone who enters will get half off on any future stay down there. scotthorton.org slash raffle.
All right you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
All right, next up we got Joshua Hughes.
Welcome back to the show, Joshua, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Good, good, happy to have you on.
Yeah everybody, we'll get back to the bad news here in just a minute, but now for the good news.
You know, I think maybe I didn't set all this up right back a few days ago when I first started talking about this.
How about, let's make this, this is the spring fundraiser for this show, and if you donate $50 then you get entered into this raffle to win a vacation to Costa Rica, to the Verde Energia.
You pronounce it right and tell us what it is.
Well, it's green energy, and I have, our farm here started with the idea of like learning how to get the energy that we needed, or the food, or the the biofuel, or whatever we were we were dreaming of in a green way, in a way that really was sustainable.
So Verde Energia is the name of our farm and our collective free school that we run here in the jungles of Costa Rica on the Pacific Coast.
Cool, well and I figured out too, when I went to your website at, say it again?
Verde Energia dot org.
Yeah, green energy, green energy.
It's spelled like Verde Energia, but they share a E there, kind of thing.
Yeah, that's right.
And you can find the link there at Scott Horton dot org slash raffle.
And what you do too, when you get there, it took me a minute to figure this out, but there's three little bars on the upper right hand side, and when you click that, it's a drop-down menu thing, and you can find the gallery and look at all the great pictures of the lush jungle, and all of that kind of thing, and the beauty of this great place that you guys have out there.
And so, and all kinds of great pictures of the landscape and everything.
And so, how did this come about?
Talk about, you know, how you came up with this great idea.
Well, I was living in Portland, Oregon.
Thank you.
I was living in Portland, Oregon.
I grew up in Oregon, mostly in Southern Oregon, but I moved to Portland, and I got involved in recycling, and just kind of trying to climb the corporate ladder.
And after 9-11, and after the big changes that I saw in the U.S., and my awakening to political, what was going on, I started to try and do something better.
And up there, it was very hard to pull anything off.
I tried to start collectives and co-ops for biofuels and for soaps, and I found that what I did mostly was illegal, because it's really hard to do things up there with the bureaucracy that was in my way, to learn sustainability, and to try and live a different way.
So, we came down here, and I kind of liked the eternal spring, and it gave me a chance to play around and experiment with different crops and products, and try and get, try and get back to some kind of local production.
And it turned into so much more over time.
Now there's 65 owners of our farm.
It's a pure collective here, and people from all over the world, and we're just playing and learning, and we have great teachers come through here and teach us things like permaculture, which I didn't even know about when I moved here.
But learning about permaculture and what it means is really learning and observing what a, what a local area or local watershed or community or a state can really do, and what is, what is right to expect from the land base, or from the oceans around you, and or whatever.
So we're learning to mimic nature here, and start living off the land in a much funner and better way than I, than I had when I was making money.
Now I eat from the trees all day long, and play with my friends, and we have guests from all over the world come here and learn these ways to, ways to sustain community differently, ways to govern communities differently, ways to take power from the big corporations, and withdraw legitimacy from them by creating our own products and stuff.
Getting back to cottage industry, I really love this.
It's been a great experience.
Man, it sounds really cool.
And how big is this farm that you guys have there?
Now it's 62 acres, 20 of which is like a food forest, mixed food forest, and it was just destroyed cattle land when we got here.
And we just got a new farm above us, which is another 42 acres of reforestation we're working on.
So I really wanted to, I always love to reach out and find new people that want to come experience this.
So when, when I, when I, I love your show, and I wanted to help support you, and I don't really make a lot of money these days, but I do have this space, and I'm totally happy to host some people and have them come experience what we do, and see how we're working towards a truly, like, local sustainable option.
Well, we sold a few raffle tickets so far, and I've gotten at least, what, two or three responses where they're saying, you know, they're really interested in what you're doing down there, too.
Really looking forward to the chance to learn about what you're doing, and might just go there anyway, one of them said, whether he wins.
Well, that's, that's great.
It's, it's a, it's a place to come and experiment and have fun at the same time.
And we take, I take politics seriously.
I, for a year, I came down here, and I didn't move here just to get offline.
I mean, at first it was offline, but I do have an internet connection now.
So I, I stay tapped into what's going on in the world, and I want to, I want to use this idea of permaculture as a, as an antibody, or as a way to help sick, help sick system, system.
We need to, we need to figure out a new way.
So this, this place gives us a chance to do that, and it's lively.
You know, we're here discussing things that I hear on your show every day.
I'm echoing through community here, and we're learning how to, how to, how to live a different way.
And again, withdraw legitimacy from the things that we don't like, as I make more products myself, and get people excited about things, like food production again.
It's a way to empower community, and take power back from the, you know, the Walmarts and the McDonald's of the world, and live healthier, and all those things mixed up, mixed together.
So yeah, it's, it's a, it's a good chance to do.
If somebody was so lucky to win this trip to Costa Rica, what would they expect?
What do they get?
How does it work?
We have a private house on the back of the farm.
I'm gonna donate for a week to two people that win the raffle on your show, and they can come eat from our kitchen, as included in that.
They can play in the jungle here.
They can wake up with us, and learn how to make cheese, or yogurt, or soap, or, or whatever they'd like to do.
Relax in the jungle, bird watch.
We're only a few minutes from the ocean, about 45 minutes from the beach, so if they want to do that, they can go down there.
But this place is really kind of off the grid in Costa Rica, and it has a really unique, like, I don't know, it feels like the 50s in the US, the way the community works.
It's really helpful farmer community, so it'll be a great experience for somebody to come and tap into that for a week.
Man, that sounds like a lot of fun.
I kind of got a conflict of interest.
I don't think I can pull my own raffle ticket, but maybe someday, man.
But these pictures are just great.
It looks like so much fun there.
People, again, it's Verde Energia, pronounced, you know, by me.
They share an E there, Verde Energia, all one word.
And, and so yeah, it looks just beautiful.
And so if you win, you got to pay your own airfare down there, but it's just a couple, a few hundred bucks.
The, the drawing is gonna be on July 15th, and so then hopefully that'll give you enough time to get a plane ticket to, to make it there by the end of August, this vacation month or whatever for people, right?
So that's, that's my plan.
They can come anytime, so I'll leave it open for when it works for the, for the winner of the raffle, so.
And anybody that does, if you're flexible, it stays springtime down there, like you said.
It'll be nice through September and whatever, so whatever's convenient for you.
It doesn't have to be in August, right?
That's good.
Yep, that's correct.
Or next year, if they want to come next year, just whenever works.
And if anybody buys a ticket for this and doesn't win the raffle, I'd be happy to extend like 50% off of the cost of living while they're here.
So it'd be a very inexpensive trip for anybody that joins the raffle anyway.
So that's great.
Yeah, that's a real bonus.
So there you go.
And then, you know, I had a guy that mentioned to me in the email, I only read it very briefly late last night here.
There were a couple of different ones actually, but one of them was saying that I need to combine, I didn't make a one big fundraiser and combine the gold coin thing with the raffle ticket thing, where, so that makes sense.
So how about anybody donates to the show, 50 bucks or more gets donated or gets entered into the raffle.
Anybody donates 150 bucks or more, you get a raffle ticket and you also get a commodity disc in the mail that you too.
A silver QR code commodity disc.
That sounds like a pretty good deal.
Let's see if I can raise some money.
I need some equipment and some, I got to pay off some of the wife's medical bills and cost of living keeps going up.
They say that the CPI is low, but it doesn't seem like it to me.
Now, maybe where you're living, you're getting around that, but over here, I got to shop at HEB, man.
We don't lie down here about inflation.
We have a 14% a year inflation in Costa Rica and the big markets here.
It's because they admit to real inflation.
In the U.S., they adjust it down and don't count what fuel.
Right.
It only counts like houses and cars or something.
Oh, you can't afford steak?
That's fine.
You'll just see a hot dog, so that doesn't count.
I'm really excited to, again, share this idea with people.
I came from Southern Oregon and it was a really like do-it-yourself kind of place.
I grew up in a wrecking yard and then I moved to Portland and it was very much like the liberal attitude of changing the world, of trying to top-down approach.
Now, I'm really finding a balance of building community and feeling like really getting revolution done, but in a very peaceful and grassroots way.
I enjoy it and I really do thank you, Scott, wholeheartedly for having such amazing guests on your show and keeping me informed while I'm down here scrubbing my pool or planting trees.
Yeah.
It looks like you've done a lot more for me than the other way around, but yeah, man, thanks.
I appreciate it.
This is a great idea.
I'd have never thought of this myself for doing something like this, but we've sold a few tickets so far and hopefully, we'll get some more done if people want to go and check it out.
You can just go to scotthorton.org slash raffle.
It has all the rules and regulations and details on how it works.
There's not many rules and regulations.
Just give me some money and you'll get it to me.
You can find the link to Joshua's website where you can see all the great pictures and what all they're doing there and learn about what's up and see how badly you want to go.
How much this stuff that we're doing applies no matter where you live.
It's not just about being here.
What we do is really fun.
It's like just getting in touch with your food and your community again.
A lot of people leave here, go back to New York or wherever, and they're often running in a much more balanced way and feel like they can do something, help the revolution, push forward.
I'm sorry.
We're losing our internet connection with you here, but thanks so much, Joshua, for everything, dude, and for coming back on the show.
All right, everybody, that's Joshua Hughes.
Just go to scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Check out the website at verdenergia.com or Verde Energia, but they share an E there at the end of Verde and beginning of Energia.
You get it?
Kind of combined together, one word.
Verdeenergia.org, but just go to scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Check it out.
Join up.
Anybody who donates $50 or more to the show gets a raffle ticket and $150 or more, you get a raffle ticket as well as a QR code commodity disc.
Maybe I should just say $100.
Yeah, $100 is probably better and more likely.
All right.
Thanks.
We'll be right back.
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