Bage is an agricultural city in Southern Brazil near Uruguay. Surrounded by grain and soy fields, it is one of the areas where members of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra ( MST), or Landless Workers Movement, call home.  MST is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members organized in 23 out 27 states. The MST carries out long-overdue land reform in a country mired by unjust land distribution. Since 1985, the MST has peacefully occupied unused land where they have established cooperative farms, constructed houses, schools for children and adults and clinics, promoted indigenous cultures and a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality.

In 2002, the Instituto Permacultura e Ecovilas do Pampa (IPEP) organized a permaculture course with Scott Pittman as the lead instructor.

The course was held on the grounds of the Bage cathedral and was a great course.  While MST is admirable in its ability to organize and lead thousands of landless peasants to land that is vacant and unused and then get title for those people, there is a shocking lack of knowledge about basic sustainability of human settlements.  Rudimentary hygiene and human waste disposal are major problems with the new villages and there was nothing in place to educate people about necessities of community life. The permaculture course focused on the issues of waste management, watershed protection and community organizing around sustainability.

After the class we built a strawbale office/residence center on the new land of the Bage Permaculture Institute, for its director Joao Rockett. As far as is known this was the first strawbale home in South America.  It turned out beautiful as you can see in the photographs.  The southern region of Brazil is subject to frosts and cold winters so building with straw was a good choice for warmth, and because pulses are grown in the region.  The builders from the class were all determined to build their own ‘strawbale’ when they returned home.

The building was plastered with local mud, and the roof was thatched using local Santa Fe grass. Course activities also included construction of a composting toilet for the resource center.