Nea Makri Pt. 2

Another slow morning as the kids were whisked off to school. We said quick goodbyes, and I then had the house to myself for a few hours. When Stamatina returned, we shared photos and reflections until she had to leave to pick them back up. I set out around 1:30 to meet with Nicos Anastasoupoulos in the center of Athens.

As I struck out in Athens for the first time since returning, I found it all a bit overwhelming. Having been nurtured by an enriching, sheltered community of kind, caring people for the previous week that felt like a month, it was a bit disheartening to return to the reality of megapolian life. Our little cob construction seemed like less than a blip on the enormous flat screen TV of modern global capitalistic society - but I clung to the recognition of the dendritic expansion of skills and good will that I know will result from our time together.

I forgot Nicos’ metro stop, guessed it wrong and had to make my way back around. We met and caught up over a sumptuous feast of tiny friend fish, tzatziki, french friends, salad, calamari, wine… He told me about the interesting challenges of his new unpaid post as the director of a national park in Nea Makri - home to an endangered species of pine - with a challenging set of reproductive needs. The cones and seeds are activated by fire, something human management tends to suppress. Thus, in its absence, the pines are failing to regenerate. So the question then becomes, how to maintain the population? It’s the classic conservation-mindset catch-22. When we start to manage ecosystems, taking them out of their natural reproductive ecology, we create considerable work for ourselves. It seemed to me that the problem is much greater - not so much just this one endangered forest, but the fact that now it’s up to us to ‘preserve’ this tiny fragment of a much more widely damaged regional ecology.

After a few hours, it was time for us to head to Nea Makri for my evening presentation on natural building, permaculture and our workshop the previous week. I caught some welcome sleep on the bus ride and our stop cam e a bit early for my liking. It was an interesting community space - great for events like ours. Stadium style (kids-size) seating, a bar, a stage… About twenty people showed up with about ten familiar workshop participant faces. The talk seemed very well received and we got some wonderful feedback from folks, learning a bit about some of the similar building buildings traditions from other parts of Greece.

Afterwards about ten of us went out for dinner and wine (a veritable feast) along the water’s edge. Great food, good conversation, friends and wine coalesced into a valuable exchange. I sat next to Dimitris Tsangis, who ironically enough, I had contacted a week earlier through a connection with the UK’s Permaculture Magazine because of his interest in finding a teacher to host a Permaculture Design Course in Greece. Very very small world.

Nicos and I got a ride back to his place in Nea Makri where we went to sleep around 1:30