DIY Village: How to Build Your Own Civilisation

Life doesn’t always end up the way you thought it would. Take Marcin Jakubowski, founder of Open Source Ecology for example. After attaining a PhD in Fusion Physics in his 20s, Marcin gave up academia to become a farmer.

If you think that it was a waste of talent, wait until you discover how this person used his smarts to give back to society in a way that is both inspiring and empowering. The TED Talks website describes his accomplishment as:

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

While open sourcing is not a new thing - Richard Stallman is approaching 60! - and has been around pretty much for as long as the personal computer has, this is the first time we have heard of open sourcing for information that can actually help sustain people and communities.

Tech geeks can save me the argument on the essential-ness of computers. We’re talking bread and butter essentials here.

This is indeed good news for all fledging eco-villages out there. More weapons in the arsenal of self-sustainability. Even more importantly, we can only imagine how these blueprints can benefit rural farming communities in developing countries.

Perhaps we, in our much improved lives today in a nation of consumers and not producers have inured ourselves against the hardships that many people in poor countries face in trying to eke out a living.

For farmers trying to make ends meet, a $10,000 dollar tractor versus a $50,000 dollar tractor is a world of a difference. It may mean being able to adequately meet ones needs or being in debt to a large bank or corporation. What Marcin has given these people is the ability to have more control over their lives and more freedom to determine their quality of life.

Yes, there are still corporations out there who put profits over people. What Mr. Marcin here has done is help loosen the grip a little bit so that a few people may trickle through the ironhold of subservience and debt.

Marcin is a beacon of hope and inspiration for us all. People like him are indeed making the world better!