Neo-Terra's Team
Tania Slawecki, Ph.D.
Tania is a materials scientist whose present work entails investigating the structure of water and the efficacy of therapeutic electromagnetic devices at Penn State’s Materials Research Institute. While Director of Penn State's Center for Sustainability (2001-4) she won a PA Growing Greener grant to design and construct a living machine for wastewater treatment at Penn State, and (with dedicated student help) established the 8-acre Projects Site east of campus. The site included a biointensive mini-farm, winter-season food production, passive and active solar structures, structures constructed using salvaged materials and various earthen architectural methods (plastered strawbale, light clay construction), the Penn State Power Lion (1.6 kW portable photovoltaic array), an on-site graywater treatment system and pond with windmill aerator, and a wind-power generator integrated with the PV array and Renewable Energy Homestead. As an Assistant Professor in the Science, Technology and Society Program in the College of Engineering, she developed and taught two senior-level courses (Green Design & Technologies and the hands-on Projects in Sustainable Living) and a 200-level course in Integrative Medicine. [See also:
www.personal.psu.edu/tms9 ]. After seven years of university teaching, she decided in 2006 to focus on further developing the technologies she introduced in these courses.
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Gene Bazan, Ph.D.
Gene has spent a large part of his last 30 years working with educational, environmental, civic and business organizations here and abroad on projects, funding, and board and staff development. Dr. Bazan has taught at three universities, in the U.S. and abroad. At Penn State, he helped create the Center for Sustainability and design the first Projects in Sustainable Living course. He was the lead consultant and author of "Saving the Farm, Saving the Farmer: Securing a Future for Agriculture in Chester County". He has given numerous workshops, talks and tours in Central Pennsylvania over the past dozen years on organic gardening. His university training is in Electrical Engineering & Economics, and his Ph.D. is in City & Regional Planning.
Together, this husband-wife team is dedicated to living more lightly on Earth and to advancing our understanding of what constitutes sane and healthy living. They have been gradually retrofitting their 1938-built home to learn what it takes to salvage structures that have been poorly designed to begin with! Gene and Tania presented a workshop at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's annual conference in 2006 on “Implications of and Alternatives to Petroleum-Based Farming” (Documents tab). In February 2008, they presented an invited workshop on the operation of their backyard biointensive minifarm: "Year-Round Backyard Mini-Farming: Food with the Least Fossil Fuel and Footprint." It was so well received that PASA invited them to give it again in 2009 and 2010 (Backyard Minifarm tabs A & B). In 2011 they gave another workshop at PASA: "From Farmhouse to Eco-House: Retrofits and Building New" (Farmhouse-Ecohouse 2011 tab).