Could This Regenerative Kerala Homestead Signal A Truly Sustainable Off-The-Grid Future?

In the grand scheme of things, one acre is not much land. In fact, if you put an acre of land against India's 3.2 million square kilometre surface area, it might as well be a grain of dirt on the tip of a needle. But on a remote hilltop in the Western Ghats along the Malabar Coast in Kerala, a silent green revolution is taking place on a one-acre plot of land. This is Gaia Grid: a self-sustaining, regenerative homestead that proves how even one acre of land can begin the process of much-needed regeneration.

In the early 2010s, Harsh Valechha — the founder of Gaia Grid — was working as a financial consultant at the professional services firm Deloitte, learning about Bitcoin and Blockchain technology, when he felt a calling to conservation. It seemed to grow stronger with every step he climbed up the corporate ladder until eventually, he could no longer ignore it. In 2013, he left his job to pursue conservation full time. He gave away all his material possessions, and began volunteering with a forest community in South India until his volunteer-work took him to Haiti.

It was in Haiti, working with the local communities to plant food forests for a year, that the idea of Gaia Grid came to him. Soon after returning to India in 2016, he bought a one-acre plot of land in Kerala with the aim of building a food forest from scratch, with the help of a community of people from the world over. The entire project was crowdfunded from the very beginning and continues to be so.

Harsh thinks of Gaia Grid as a regenerative artwork. "My canvas is the land itself, and my medium consists of soil, seeds, and time," Harsh says. "Every day, I dig into this canvas, planting seeds and trees. I've spent days standing in the same spot, envisioning how this landscape might transform over the years, building this living artwork in my mind."

For the past eight years, he has lived on this reclaimed and rewilded land — weathering rain, storms, sickness, and "moments of euphoria". During this time, he has also cultivated close friendships with the indigenous Irula tribespeople, documenting their rich cultural heritage and history through photography. He has written about off-grid living, about love and loss, about what it truly means to be sustainable and how each person's definition varies. "As it should," he says.

In recent years, regenerative forestry and permaculture have emerged as holistic and sustainable approaches to land management and design that aim to mimic natural ecosystems to reduce waste, improve sustainability, and protect wildlife within the realm of ecological and environmental conservation. Gaia Grid follows the principles and philosophies of rewilding, regenerative forestry, and permaculture as means to an end: achieving self-reliance in terms of food, water, electricity, and shelter.

With the help of funding from The Pollination Project based in Berkeley, and a total of $15,000 raised from 500 donors from all over the world through crowdfunding, Harsh has been able to achieve this goal. Water and electricity are off the grid, shelters are made using local, sustainable, and often repurposed materials, and the land now has over 700 local, native fruit, nut, and hardwood trees planted by hundreds of volunteers over the past eight years. Harsh's dream is complete — almost.

Learn more about Gaia Grid here.

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