How was PeR created

When you arrive at PeR your attention is immediately drawn to the most recent renewable energy technologies, but everything started from the oldest human-agricultural technologyes for producing energy.

Agricolture

Our agricultural techniques are modern in the true sense of the word: integrated pest control; composting; associations; crop rotation; solar bollards to keep wild animals out and large water tanks to collect water … We use very little water on our crops and the vegetables do have more flavor – tasting is believing.

Agriculture of the future is not about chemistry and plastic greenhouses, that is our twentieth-century heritage: which has not maintained its promise to relieve the world of hunger. On the contrary, hunger has increased, the divide between rich and poor has grown and provoked the urbanization of half the world’s population, impoverished soil and created insatiable parasites.

The reality is that monocropping and quantitative agriculture has emptied these fields: after they have feed the population, be it abundantly or poorly, for millennia. In the sixties a “new hunger” arrived, what happened to these mountains in that time was worse than any other famine, pestilence or war before it. The farmers in order to make a living had to sell their produce by weight not quality, unfortunately, there was not enough water “to pump” the vegetables i.e. use industrial-agricultural methods. So, the farmers of the land, like almost all other farmers on the planet had to move to the city and find other ways of making a living, and then, buy insipid vegetables, contaminated with chemicals and cultivated by others.  When we arrived these fields were covered with brambles and the hamlet had become a ruin.

The first step we took was investing in the disordered retreat. We bought the ruined buildings and began their reconstruction in 1999.

We started this wonderful (and laborious) adventure, with our own initiative and resources, i.e. without financial assistance from the government.

Now, we’ll tell you what we’ve done, but before we explain our renewable-energy solutions we want to make one point clear.

Everything you see here is our idea of ecological systems, in that, there are many possibilities. Every place; climate; person; landscape context; purpose; the abundance or lake of particular building materials, such as stone or wood in the local area, all effect the solutions people choose. Also, every decade throughout history has created or had preferred technologies, which can be likened to fashions in energy efficiency.