In this issue:

• TrackersNEWS
• Ernie spiels (as only Ernie can) about FIRE and ROCKET STOVES (too cool)
• Erica tells us how to make a fashionable floor out of dirt!
• And yes... Tony talks about the upcoming clinic at REI and what we really mean by "Connecting Children to Nature"
• Plus we have some news on our immersion programs

And new on our YouTube channel...

• Video Molly's new bio (for some reason Molly's bios get the most views than any of our videos)
• Video Highlights from the recent immersion taster day
• Video This one is difficult to watch, our immersion teens killing and skinning two rabbits for food. Every animal is treated with care and respect.

TrackersNEWS

Molly's new bio is on the site! Her video's constantly get the most hits?! and we are not sure why. We decided to make another one as an experiment. Also, note the ring on her finger, our wedding is Sept 20! (this is Tony writing)

Our first round of TrackersTEAMS Immersion students have been chosen! Starting Fall 2008 they will be working and learning on these skills full time, in a fellowship of practice. Hopefully you will get a chance to meet these "significant 7" in the newsletter in the coming weeks.

Also, many folks have been waiting for this, but we finally have dates for our Bow-Hunting Immersion Program along with an application posted on the web!!! Be ready to apply as soon possible. For more updates on our immersion programs, including the brand NEW TrackersVILLAGE Program (a one weekend a month program featuring social technology and community arts) see the article below.

Rocket Stoves: A Brief History of Heat

Congratulations! You have made Fire with No Matches. Now, what are you going to do with it? A flickering campfire is marvelous for storytelling and marshmallow-torches, but will it keep you warm all night? Or bake your bread? Our ancestors learned to use hillsides, stone walls, caves, vents, holes, insulators, and chimneys to channel and capture the flames' heat. They built shelters around the fire, forms to provide radiant heat and light, and forms to contain the heat and smoke so the cooks don't roast with the food. Traditional forms include earth and brick ovens, cookstoves, fireplaces, grates, torches, kilns, furnaces, and a dazzling array of clever tea-stoves, reflectors, chimney pots, and ember-carrying devices. Much of the world still uses these traditional technologies for daily life. An Indian villager's "cookstove" may not have any metal parts at all: it may be three earthen bricks, standing on end to support a pot over a bundle of thin twigs. In these situations, a little ingenuity can create dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency and human comfort. The idea of cooking a family dinner over three bricks, day in and day out, makes me grateful for modern comforts. Aren't we lucky to have central heating, high-efficiency woodstoves, cars, clothes dryers, and all those other clever and convenient devices that keep us safe from sparks and smoke? Perhaps. Or perhaps we simply pay more for the privilege of ignorance.

The most efficient gasoline engine converts no more than 40% of the energy contained in the fuel; the rest is wasted as heat or smog. Most combustion processes are far less efficient. Our woodstoves send most of the useful heat, along with unburned fuel (smoke and creosote) right out the chimney. At a rough guess, we use at least six times as much fuel, per capita, as the rest of the world. Much of this cost is passed on to the nations that supply our needs, and hidden from daily experience in our transportation, power grid, and manufacturing systems. Unburned fuel and hazardous byproducts drift through our neighborhoods, collecting in pools of smog over major cities and downwind of industrial centers. As this inefficient infrastructure provides for our needs, our skill with raw fire diminishes. We are hostages to the repairman's schedule. Modern woodstoves offer a tantalizing glimpse of our oldest technology, enclosed in metal and glass like a sacred relic.

Rocket Stoves

There are a few pioneers, studying ways to combine simple materials, create comfortable lifestyles, and reduce hidden costs. These voyagers between the worlds study traditional and modern technologies for using fire, then test new designs to meet local needs with local resources. Rocket Stoves are one such pioneering technology. Rocket Stoves capture most of the waste products in conventional wood-stoves, and convert them to usable fuel, heat, and comfort. The simplest rocket stoves channel the flames down before drawing them up, creating a clean burning and convenient heat source. More elaborate Rocket Mass Heaters add a re-burn chamber for total combustion, and a masonry heat exchanger to capture the exhaust heat. It's a quirky and experimental way of emulating our ancestors' ingenuity. Neo-traditional "Natural Builders" replace expensive manufactured parts with recycled and local materials, replace owner's manuals and contractors' fees with hands-on basic science education and personal observation. It's one team's answer to a lot of human problems: how to provide comfortable heat and cooking, while conserving energy, air quality, and abundant natural resources.

To learn how to build Three Layer Earthen Floors join to Ernie and Erica's workshop for hands on experience this February.

Covering A Perfectly Good Floor with Dirt

by Erica Ritter

If you've ever tried to work, dance, or even stand still on a concrete floor for any length of time you start to look for alternatives. Concrete's hardness hurts our bones and joints, and pretty soon we're not dancing, we're just surviving. Most Americans have no experience of actual earthen floors. Our imagination substitutes familiar situations: muddy campsites, caves, under-floor "crawl spaces." Stepping foot onto a real, well-constructed earthen floor has become the privilege of world travelers and archeologists. In most parts of the world, earth is an obvious choice for flooring. Maintenance is easy: sweep regularly, and walk on it. Bare feet burnish the floor to a smooth shine, and a sprinkle of water keeps it resilient and dust-free. Nothing hides dirt like dirt. Earth is easily repaired, non-flammable, and non-toxic, and can be broken up and re-used in case of a remodel.

Quiet acoustics, resilient stability, and remarkable heat-storage capacity create a peaceful, comfortable space. In our modern nation, we have given up such primitive technologies in favor of expensive, energy-intensive, processed materials. Yet cheap carpet, concrete utility floors, and plywood (our common vernacular options) do not offer the same sturdy comfort as a peasant's hut in rural Morocco.

Luckily, we can enjoy the benefits of both traditional and modern technologies. Camping with cell phones. Sailing with GPS. Earthen floors soaked in glossy wax and oil, like inches-deep linoleum. Today, they are at use as a green building technique in homes worth millions. It's all part of our brave new world, a world in which we are mindful of both our ancestors and our future descendents.

To learn how to build Three Layer Earthen Floors join to Ernie and Erica's workshop on the subject for hands on experience this February.

Lost Connections

by Tony Deis

Let's remind ourselves of of who we were and what we wanted. It puts both child and adulthood into perspective.

That's my paraphrase for what my mother told me when I first started working with kids. Although she said much more simply:

Always remember what its like to be a kid!

She told me this when I was 17 years old. For the next 15 years I took this advice to heart. It constantly informs what I notice of any child's "needs".

When many of us were kids our circle of exploration and reign was much bigger. We had a yard, neighborhood, toys littered the front and back of all our lawns. Packs of our fellow children roamed the streets, they played baseball with curb sides and manholes for bases, and you could hear yelling and laughing into the late evening hours as birds gave way to the crickets. We all went from drainage ditches to fallow, sopped fields catching frogs and hounding the blackberry patches. When we saw a rabbit we'd try to sneak up on it or chase it down to kill it (and eat it of course). Usually parents were not looking over our shoulder to tell us what was right or wrong, often it was simply a band of lost boys and girls picking off scabs and climbing gnarled apple trees. This relationship with nature was raw, creative and we experienced our own consequences in a real and personal way.

Compare that to the saccharin regimen of environmental education today. Where everything is about water quality testing, always being set up for success because there is a "right" way to do things, recording your data, recycling, and academic benchmarks and morals fraught with an imposed higher purpose. Even programs claiming to be highly experiential, time tested with the latest or the oldest methods of "creative facilitated play" make me drop back into my memory of 10 year old Tony and his response is, "dork-alert".

I'm scared I sound pompous and arrogant. I want to simply say, "let's stop fooling ourselves." I notice that kids today swallow the pap our culture gives them simply because they have no other option. They let us treat them like children because they look up to us and they trust us. Often I say, give me a rebel any day, someone that questions my authority and yearns to collaborate, to own their own experiences, even if they are sixteen, thirteen, ten, eight or even four years old.

Of the two notions of environmental education discussed above, I offer that one is real experience and connection to the natural world and the other actually dissuades connection and ownership of an experience. You decide which is which.

Now here is the problem with my thesis-- I offer no real solution. One, because I recognize the very real need and fears of parents. The world we are in today does not allow for the same opportunities we had. Greenspace Rangers won't let you tromp off trail in the mud, schools lock their kids inside where they can't carry a knife to whittle with, our media insists on kids being incompetent and simply consumers of stories, not heroes in their own adventures. TrackersNW Camps are NOT the solution because we are not the family (but we do our best to provide intelligent options). No, the solution lies in how the actual "village" changes its ways it SUPPORTS parents. How I, as an individual, rallies my community to help parents give their children opportunities to play baseball in the street. So I propose we start this conversation. I propose we find real solutions to do what it actually takes to bring freedom back into gowning up.

REI in both Clackamas and Portland have moved forward to support us in this. The Audubon Society of Portland will also be joining us for the conversation. The two 1 hour clinics we will be doing there in April and March will only start the conversation and like anything with TrackersNW, we will always insist on candid open discussion. So mark these FREE workshops on your calendar and we hope to see you there.