Greetings,

The First Annual Moab Sustainability Festival: A Celebration of Community Resilience

The First Annual Moab Sustainability Festival will be held October 9-11 at the Grand Center and the Grand County High School Auditorium. The event, which is being hosted by Grand Canyon Trust and the University of Utah, is a community co-creation drawing on the diverse talents of Grand County citizens and the many groups, organizations, businesses and government entities already working for a sustainable Moab. The purpose of this event is to educate and inspire local people, visitors and our extended regional community to make sustainable lifestyle choices and to provide the resources and support to bring great ideas into form.

Speakers, exhibitors and vendors will provide tools and information about renewable energy, natural building, local food production, organic agriculture, land/ water revitalization, holistic healing, primitive skills and environmental/ social responsibility. There will be a panel discussion on distributed power generation, a community vision jam, a tour to the University of Utah’s Entrada Ranch Field Station and a natural building home tour. See demonstrations on solar oven cooking, bee keeping, hands-on natural building and flint-knapping. Children can enjoy inspiring educational activities provided by Canyonlands Field Institute, yoga classes and sustainable art projects. There will be food, music, art exhibitions, very interesting people and lots of opportunity for spontaneous joy.

The City of Moab passed a resolution for a sustainable Moab in December 2008 and has created a Sustainable Moab Plan to foster community awareness and encourage water conservation, water re-use, energy efficiency, sustainable construction and retrofitting for sustainability. The City has pledged to “work with businesses, residents and non-profit groups to create a community-wide commitment to the ethos and practice of sustainability.”

Among the many local people working in green building construction, Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer stand out as artists and innovators. They co-authored the book “Earthbag Building”, the first comprehensive guide to all the tools, tricks and techniques for building with bags filled with earth. The couple has been in the construction industry for twenty years, specializing in affordable, low tech, low-impact building methods and together they developed the “Flexible Form Rammed Earth Technique” of building. Last year they joined Builders Without Borders to construct a strawbale eco-house on the terrace of the U.S. Botanical Gardens across from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. for the exhibit “One Earth-Ours.”

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