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Have time at the end of this month? Have you been interested in visiting the Tamera Ecovillage Solar Test Field, with its amazing greenhouse and food waste heated Stirling engine and Solar Kitchen, constructed wetland water retention landscape and permaculture gardens, but wondered when the best time would be to make the trip? This is your chance! There is still time and space for you to become a part of the Global Campus biogas team and turn your European Vacation into "Spring trip to Tamera in Portugal" and come home a biogas apostle.

As we work to define our roles in the Solar CITIES movement around the world, clarity comes from considering that what we really aspire to be are "Possibility Managers" in the sense discussed by Clinton Callahan. These paragraphs from his book "Adventures in Thinking" do a good job of summarizing how a Solar CITIES team member should approach the work:

There was a time when only planners and architects and engineers had access to the toolkits necessary to turn dreams into realities.

Those days have changed.

For several years now, would be world builders have had a plethora of pre-visualization tools at our disposal.

When I was pursuing my Ph.D back in grad school, starting in 2000 when I completed my master's degree, I had a hell of a time researching and writing my dissertation.

Basically I got writers block because I felt lonely.

Domestic food wastes have been the focus of many environmental remediation efforts, from municipal attempts to encourage source separation and collection to “Do it Yourself” (DIY) and commercial attempts to treat organic residuals on-site through aerobic composting.

For years now, many of us have been engaged in various discussions and experiments to determine the best way to continuously monitor the pH of our biogas systems.  Those of us doing this at home on limited to nonexistent budgets have dreamed of an inexpensive DIY microcontroller based system that we can stick in a port in our tanks and forget about (except for the readings on our smart phones which would alert us when things are going sour, of course!).