Eco Community
Green to the Extreme
We are Green to the Extreme, including no garbage, please.
ZERO FOOTPRINT:
NO GARBAGE IN; NO GARBAGE OUT.
We don’t let any non-compost-able garbage onto the retreat. After taking a hard look at the land fill areas all over Bali, we made hard choices.
Nothing comes onto the land that can’t be composted or reused. If it slips in with a guest, such as a toothpaste tube or battery, we ask them to take it back to their own country to bury into their own lands.
We know where all our garbage goes: kitchen foods to the village pigs and everything else is composted or recycled. There’s even a special composting trough from feminine hygiene products which guests are given a special paper bag for disposal. See our article on our Library of Articles page https://www.balisilentretreat.com/do-you-know-what-happens-to-your-garbage-we-do/
Organic is an interesting word and we know that many gardeners and farmers feel that it simply means not using pesticides. For us, it means NO commercial anything; no bags of fertilizer, fungicide, herbicide, insecticide. We embrace SUSTAINABLE farming, which means saving our seeds and strong self sustaining vegetables. Our soil? We take dead clay soil and over many years, resurrect it into life-giving-food.
Poopook day is every day from our Balinese cows.
Eco Community
Responsible Tourism
It’s more simple here and we’d like to keep it simple.
- Reset expectations for the “aha! experience” (read our Off the Grid page).
- Know where your garbage is going.
- Don’t buy products that aren’t easily composted and don’t put them in a plastic bag.
- Remember we’re care takers of our environment.
- Do everything as though it matters; it does.
| LIGHT & WATER | Set out your solar light in the daytime so you have light at night. Shower when the water is hot from the sun. Drink solar distilled/purified water. Use a sarong for a towel instead of a heavy towel requiring Big Quantities of energy to dry. |
| EAT | Help pick fresh live organic vegetables for meals. Eat what you dish-up, compost waste, wash your simple dishes. |
| ENGAGE | Listen to the wild-n-crazy frogs at night. Watch the stars from your balcony. Walk the jungle path or rice fields or subak channels in the day. Awaken to surrender in a walking-meditation in the labyrinth. |
| DISENGAGE | Read, write, sleep, ponder, pray, meditate, take some really deep breaths. |
| DON’T | think for even a second about buying Balinese land . . . leave it to the Balinese and the glory of rice. |
| DO | engage in discovery of medicine herbs, Balinese culture, our crazy green-to-the-extreme gardening experiments, the combinations of fresh foraged foods with their amazing flavors, textures, and aromas, spiced with an abundance of love. Write it down. Take the memory and feeling and knowledge back to your home country and share with everyone who might listen. |
| GARBAGE | We know where our garbage goes. It’s recycled or composted. Our gray water goes to the garden and our black water goes to the teak forest. We have worm farms and fish ponds. Any grease from the kitchen goes to the village pigs. It’s all full circle. |
Eco Community
Off the Grid
We’re Off the Grid, using solar electricity and every possible form of catching the sun:
- solar water distilling
- solar herb dehydrating
- solar lanterns, path lights, and motion sensor spot lights
- solar desk lights
- solar flashlights
