Article 02 · Green Project

Three Frontiers of Regeneration: Autonomous Settlements for Extreme Environments

CSNN moves from diagnosis to demonstration: three planned settlements are intended to prove that comfortable, healthy life can regenerate the environment—even under extreme conditions.

H.E. Biserka Rothschild — Director, CSNN Germany
H.E. Frank Heinz Egon Pfaff de Rothschild — Director, CSNN Germany

CSNN is launching a series of articles presenting various methods and solutions for a rational approach to counteracting the thoughtless destruction of the environment.

Water, soil and air are being poisoned, while resources of many kinds are being needlessly wasted.

And the benefit for people exists only in the imagination, because with worthless and in fact harmful food, polluted air and poor-quality water at their disposal, they can only become ill more comfortably and more severely, and consequently die sooner.

This situation is driven by a thoughtless and irrational pursuit of profit by a narrow group of people, aided by people who are unaware and stupefied.

Information alone about how to counter the total destruction of the environment wisely and rationally is not enough.

That is why we want to demonstrate in real life how people can live comfortably even under very difficult conditions—not only without destroying the environment, but actually improving it.

Together with our Partners, we initially plan to create three settlements in places that appear unfit for healthy survival.

If it is possible in such locations to ensure a healthy and comfortable life for residents, not only without any pollution or destruction of the surroundings, but with positive environmental effects, individual solutions will spread much more easily in people’s minds.

Especially since the three locations mentioned are only the beginning of such efforts.

In each subsequent case, even better results will be possible thanks to experience, incoming new solutions and expanding cooperation.

We have many ideas and solutions for different geographical, climatic, natural and resource conditions.

We believe that the most difficult should be chosen first.

01 · Desert

Desert.

Can desert life be made not only comfortable and healthy, but also beneficial to the environment?

Can a selected area be transformed into an autonomous garden that is also self-sufficient in food?

All measures undertaken so far to make life flourish, for example in desert Arab countries, have taken the path of least resistance, generating not only high costs and mountains of toxic waste, but also creating great dependence on technology vulnerable to being shut down.

And yet there are solutions and technologies that make it possible to minimise dependence very substantially and, with great benefit to the environment, enlist plants, microorganisms, certain minerals and more as partners.

At present, Oman seems to us the ideal place to establish such a settlement in the desert, because its culture of water—and more—goes back millennia.

02 · Ocean

Ocean, sea.

It is commonly assumed that one cannot live comfortably and healthily “on the ocean”.

And yet there are people who live that way.

They are the Bajau people, known as sea nomads.

Admittedly, their life is not comfortable, but this could be changed very easily by integrating solutions from different fields.

An intriguing challenge is to make such a solution not only provide a comfortable, healthy life, but also produce a vast surplus of healthy protein and clean water.

Naturally, without polluting the environment.

There is a multitude of additional possibilities, but whether they are incorporated depends on local conditions and the expectations of the authorities.

In this case, the location for such a challenge suggests itself.

Singapore lacks space (extreme density) and faces very high costs.

It must import practically all its food and water.

And this solution offers many other very interesting possibilities.

03 · Cold frontier