Today The Farm honors one of our pioneering members, Albert Bates.

Albert arrived at The Farm in 1972 off a thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail (trail name: “Peaksurfer”). Like his father before him and ancestors at least as far back as his great grandfather Issachar who crossed the Appalachians in the late 18th century to found two frontier utopian villages in the Ohio Valley, Albert has always been adventurous and outdoorsy.

Wintering in a canvas tent without indoor plumbing did not faze him. Neither did “Wheatberry Winter.” During his first months at The Farm, as a skilled equestrian, horsemaster and trainer, he was drawn to the Horse Crew, where he met and married Cynthia Adele Winkler. For two years, Albert farmed with horses, running cultivators, manure spreaders, rakes, and delivery wagons. He then joined the Farm Flour Mill and remained 4 years as one of the Farm’s millers, and occasionally as a mason on the construction crew, until a machinery accident disabled him and forced him to a desk job. More than 20 of the buildings he built on The Farm survive today.

 

In 1973, Albert became one of the first state-licensed Emergency Medical Technicians and was part of the group of 12 men and women who founded The Farm Ambulance Service.

Albert worked as a book illustrator in the art studio at the Book Company, where he launched The Farm’s first weekly newspaper, Amazing Tales of Real Life, which continues today as the Farm Freedom Press. Besides Albert being a graduate of the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University, Albert’s father was editor-publisher of a daily paper in California and an award-winning investigative journalist.

An abiding interest in the environment led Albert to co-found the 5-state Catfish Alliance anti-nuclear coalition in 1975. Jeannine Honicker prodded him to file a lawsuit to end atomic power in 1977.  The Honicker case went through 22 federal judges and 4 times to the U.S. Supreme Court and may have had a lot to do with the cancellation of nuclear expansion and switch to interest in solar and renewables in the late 1970s. Albert’s two books, Honicker v, Hendrie and Shutdown! Nuclear Power on Trial, tell that story.

The Plenty Shutdown Project became The Natural Rights Center, and soon the Farm had a small shop staffed by Albert and his law student interns bringing cases for atomic veterans, against the chemical plants in Mt. Pleasant, representing Native Americans in religious rights claims, and defending voting rights. When Albert won Gaskin v. State and restored the vote to 200,000 mostly black prisoners, he was invited out to Cockrell Bend prison and given an award in appreciation. The handmade denim suit he wore when he argued that case before the Tennessee Supreme Court now hangs in the permanent collection of the Tennessee State Museum. Thanks to Albert, Tennessee also became the first state to ban fracking, in 1982.

In 1981, Albert successfully won compensation for a Cuban family living nearby who had been attacked and badly wounded by the KKK. That led to the publication of his 4th book, Your Rights to Victims Compensation, a handbook for self-recovering restitution for injuries without an attorney.

An avid experimental tinkerer, in 1974 Albert worked at the Farm machine shop in the evenings, fashioning windmill blades, building solar collectors, and making home generators from Chrysler alternators.  He won a series of grants for experimental work on concentrating solar arrays, hybrid tree crops, and the solar car driven at the 1981 Worlds Fair in Knoxville. That started Albert's efforts to transition  The Farm from cars to bikes and electric golf carts. He founded the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology and many years later, The Farm Ecovillage Training Center (1994), where more than 6000 students have been trained in renewable, regenerative methodologies. Many of his graduates remained and became Farm members.

In 1984, when The Farm went through its fiscal crisis that led to the changeover and de-collectivization, Albert was elected to the board of directors and stayed on until all the debt was retired. Over loud opposition by the older power structure, he insisted on complete transparency, publishing his own weekly “notes” of every meeting, including transcribed dialog when meetings turned raucous. He was part of the Constitutional Committee that drafted the community’s first real bylaws. He served on the Membership Committee and Land Use Committee. In 1988 he launched the annual Drake Lane trash cleanup, an effort that continued under his watch for 30 years.

 

In 1986, Albert and a small group of old-time farmies founded The Farm Historical Society and began collecting and preserving artifacts and records from Monday Night Class, the Caravan, and the collective period of The Farm. Many of these are now in the permanent collection of the Tennessee State Museum. Others are preserved for a future Farm Museum. In 1996, Albert created the digital Hippie Museum, based in San Francisco. In 2018, The Farm Historical Society sponsored the creation of The Farm Archive Library.

In 1990, Al Gore invited Albert to move to Washington and become part of his Senate office team working on the climate issue. Because of his son Will’s health issues at that time, Albert declined the offer. Later that summer Bill Clinton was nominated for president and selected Gore as his running mate. Albert was given a ticket to the presidential box at the inaugural.

Instead of moving to D.C., Albert started attending international meetings to strategize a climate solution. He visited ecovillage experiments in Russia in 1991 in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Seeing ecovillages as a soft path to transition to a post-petroleum world, he helped found the Global Ecovillage Network in 1996, later serving as both its president and chairman of the Board. During his tenure, GEN grew from some 20 experiments to more than 20,000 ecovillages world wide, and gained consultative status at the United Nations.

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In 2007, Albert's Global Village Institute spent $150,000 to launch the Local Economic Development and Green Education (LEDGE) Initiative to revitalize the economy of the Middle Tennessee region through innovative local green businesses. With the Ecovillage Training Center's Jennifer English as program director,  LEDGE developed the Financial Permaculture Institute as a Hohenwald-based business incubator, which included three internationally attended and recognized Summits. Transition Hohenwald, the 25th Transition Town in the USA, was born from a LEDGE initiative called Sonnenschein. In the Spring of 2008, local students, under the guidance of Sonnenschein, drafted a Lewis County Proclamation for Transitioning signed by the local city, county, and Chamber of Commerce. Sonnenshein hosted three green power festivals, a Sustainability Forum, multiple tours of alternative homes, an alternative vehicle exposition, a master planning design course, a green building tradeshow, a climate action film series, business luncheons, a monthly Green Evening Cafe with a local Green Business award each month, annual local food cook-offs, a Hohenwald community garden, a local Permaculture Design Certificate training for 22 local residents, and a summer internship called Permayouth. Jennifer went on to co-create the Green Living Journal, Greener Tennessee, Greener Nashville, and host the 2008 and 2009 Summit for a Sustainable Tennessee with the Tennessee Environmental Council and Tennessee League of Conservation Voters.

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Albert served several terms on the boards of the Tennessee Environmental Council and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and in 2009 helped to found  Gaia University. That same year Albert and his Gaia students organized the Continental Bioregional Congress at The Farm. He was awarded  International Diplomas in Permaculture Design and Permacultural Education.

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In 2007, after a trip to the Amazon, Albert wrote The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change (foreword by Vandana Shiva) and has been the go-to biochar expert ever since. In 2015, he wrote The Paris Agreement (foreword by Rex Weyler); and in 2019, Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth (with Kathleen Draper). He has now written more than 20 other books, including children's books and graphic novels, with translations into many languages and several book awards.

 

During the pandemic years, he began working on a prototype “Cool Lab” in the Caribbean — a microenterprise hub that marries drawdown to the sustainable development goals, using permaculture, animal-integrated agroforestry, ridge-to-reef ecosystem regeneration, waste-to-biochar plus energy, and myriad carbon-removing products and services.

On The Farm and off, he has taught more than 50 full-certification permaculture design courses to students from more than 60 countries and trained more than 50 permaculture teachers in Mainland China. He has taught in war zones at great personal risk. He has taught refugees in camps how to build natural buildings with found and recycled materials. He is assisting GEN's efforts to aid war refugees in Ukraine, Gaza, and the West Bank.

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In February, activists, celebrities and friends gathered in a Hollywood theater to honor Albert Bates as the 2024 Eco Hero of the Year.