07/14/15 – Joshua Hughes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right y'all welcome back to the show.
On the line I've got Joshua Hughes from Verde Energia Pacifica.
The website is verdeenergia.org but they share a E at the end Verde in the beginning of energy there you get it green energy.
His farm his permaculture farm down in Costa Rica.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing Joshua.
I'm doing great today Scott.
I think the Internet seems to be functioning right on.
Glad to have you here.
OK.
So first of all tell us about your awesome project that you have down there.
What is this thing.
Well I moved down here about eight nine years ago with a group of friends that wanted to do something different kind of get off the grid see what we could do potentially on our own here.
A lot of our lot of the people I was hanging out with in Oregon and especially in the radical political movements we were trying to figure out how to come up with answers not just a bunch of nose.
I was in the streets protesting but I wasn't doing much to come up with the yeses.
So we we started this collective this farm down here and it was a chance to experiment and see what we could create without input from the processes that we didn't really like.
I don't like slavery I don't like you know trade imbalances I don't like all these things that the big hegemonic corporations are doing.
So this place was a chance to experiment and come up with our own answers.
All right.
So what is it exactly.
It's a farm.
Well we have a big our farm is now 62 acres and that's a mix between some like local I mean our food production and like a traditional garden like you've probably seen near you there and all around.
But then we also we're working here on food forest design and we're also doing a lot of sustainable things like lumber creation or other types of longer term crops things that come with the from the forest not just from traditional farming standpoint.
So yeah we've been working on that down here and now we have maybe 50 acres of what we call zone 5.
It's where we keep the stuff that we're going to use long term.
So I have trees that are growing now that my daughter will be cutting in 20 years to go to so she can go to university or she can go to Europe on a trip or whatever.
So we're really thinking about wealth creation differently.
Very cool man.
All right.
And so then how'd you come up with the idea to offer a vacation a week's vacation down there.
Well a lot of people have been.
I didn't really realize this when I got here but a lot of people interested in this.
So I've had thousands of people a month contacting me or visiting our Web site over the years and we realized quickly that we had a place that could help people kind of see this for themselves.
So this is we opened ourselves up we started out we opened a couple of buildings up here for dormitories and for sharing with people that come from around the world to learn.
So I love the idea of getting more people here and from different walks of life more people from different walks of life.
So I wanted to do something whatever I could to help support your show.
I really enjoy what you do and this is a way I thought I could help is offering one of your listeners a chance to come here and enjoy this place and learn and see what we're doing.
Very cool man.
Well much appreciated by the way.
I hope I remembered to mention that at least a couple of times how much I appreciate this.
And yeah it sounds like a really cool deal.
And and I guess as we said on the show and it says it Scott Horton dot org slash raffle of course airfare is on the winner to get down there but you'll pick them up from the hotel and basically take care of them for a week between here and there right.
Yeah and we'll teach them about what we're doing here.
So they'll get kind of a crash course in what permaculture is and what it means to have collective ownership and and the things that we're kind of fighting for here.
So I'm excited to share all of that.
And normally the people come here for a week end up coming back the next year for six months and doing their own thing here or their own study or whatever.
So.
And you said you have a hammock.
We have lots of hammocks yeah.
Lots of hammocks.
We try to only work in the mornings before it gets hot here.
I'm big time on the siesta model.
I'm learning that.
So we are we enjoy our mornings out in the fields and doing fun stuff and or building or making products that we spend our afternoons reading and listening to things like your program or music or enjoying the hammock like you say.
It's it's it's it's got all things here for us now.
It's not just a farm it's a way of living.
We're really trying to create here.
Cool man.
And so there's swimming and all kinds of fun stuff to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We've got a it's kind of the winter.
It's not the wintertime right now but it's kind of the wet season at this moment.
So the rivers are a little crazy but we've got a nice spring fed swimming pool no chemicals right here outside the yoga studio and this place is just we really set it up so we could have a nice you know we could have our luxury time and we could and we could learn about what we're doing here to the bigger picture so that people that want to can come enjoy and relax during the afternoons and listen I don't know if you can hear it but there's birds and cicadas all around me here right now.
It's quite beautiful.
Nice sunny day but it'll be raining really hard later on and we'll sit in here and we'll discuss the world and politics and how we're gonna affect change and and and or someone could go fishing in my ponds and eat a bunch of tilapia while they're here if they want to.
So it's just whatever people want to do but it's really a chance to see what we've done and understand some of the principles and see how it applies in the big world.
I think small is beautiful and what we've done here is a little example of what can be done anywhere.
Yeah that's really cool man.
All right well thanks again very much for this Joshua it's been very helpful for the fundraiser and it obviously promises to be a lot of fun for whoever wins it and here on the show the drawing is tomorrow and I don't know how many entries we've got but quite a few and thank you very much oh and you also said to if I can quote you right that anybody who entered gets half off any future stays down there and in fact I just got an email from you this morning before I drank coffee I almost completely forgot about it where is it I got a thing from you where you talk about next time too you want to mention that real quick oh well we're gonna have a permaculture design course in January and it's really like a radical redesign of how communities can work and it's a crash course with some really beautiful teachers that are coming here for about a month and I'm gonna I'm gonna offer a few scholarships to that out to listeners of your show and a few of the other media outlets I really love and we're gonna start that soon so I'll keep you posted but this is this this week long vacation will be a good taste but I would love for more people that are coming from from our side of the political spectrum here listen to your show to realize how empowered they can be and and take activism and really get it into their local community and local soil so we're gonna be doing that in January and I'll be happy to share in any way I can to help help keep your show funded and do whatever we can yeah right on man isn't it ironic how living the dream means being an American expat so many people think about you know where to flee where should I go where can I live and be free so terrified of the state here well here's a guy who's actually doing it and showing you how to so check out energy when I was when I was living up there I found a lot of frustration in the news mostly demoralized me I had to get something started in Costa Rica is one of the few places in the world that doesn't have a military so that's why I really chose this place they focus their national wealth on things like education and health care so yeah but this can be done anywhere and that's one exciting part of this now as I've learned how to how to calm myself down enough to see the light here and see how to help people help guide people through this even if they live in Texas or Oregon or Florida or New York cool man all right well thanks again very much Joshua appreciate it thank you all right so that's Joshua Hughes and the website is Verde energy org sharing the e in the middle there find the link at Scott Horton org slash raffle again the drawing is tomorrow Wednesday July 15th 2015 here live on the show buy your ticket before it's too late you hate government one of them libertarian types maybe you just can't stand the president gun grabbers or warmongers me too that's why I'm then a liberty stickers comm well Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them but still if you're driving around I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are there's only one place to go liberty stickers comm has got your bumper covered left right libertarian Empire Police State founders quote central banking yes bumper stickers about central banking lots of them and well everything that matters liberty stickers comm everyone else's stickers suck hey I'll Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson the war state in the war state Swanson examines how presidents Truman Eisenhower Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War two this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone we are going to have to abolish the Empire know your enemy get the war state by Michael Swanson it's available at your local bookstore or at amazon.com and Kindle or in paperback just click the book in the right margin at Scott Horton org or the war state.com