CHRISTINE
We came back from our field trip and had lunch - as usual the food was excellent. After lunch to around 3 o'clock was island work. We made plans for what we are doing for our first year on the island.

ARIA
Almost everything went smoothly; the only problem we ran into was a slight shortage of food. We each need one unit of food per year...

JEFF
I did fishing and hunting...

MERIAH
We all did. Hunting and gathering only gives us one Food. We had to grow the rest.

ARIA
We planted some gardens (herbs, flowers, plants, and vegetables), built our houses, and completed other necessary jobs in order to begin our civilization. I planted a flower garden right next to my house.

JEFF
I cut down a quarter-circle more of green forest and planted a big garden. I used the wood to make a storage shed, so that I have someplace to keep extra food.

IVY
We noticed fish in the lagoon.
Meriah wove us a net and we made the lagoon into something like a fish farm.

ARIA
Ivy was the manager of
the wildlife in the lagoon.

MERIAH
When we added it all up, we had just enough food to feed everyone for the year.

CHRISTINE
We called it the Year of the Horse because we brought a horse over to our island. I named her Chrystal. She helps us with our plowing and carrying things.

ARIA
Zeus said we each need to burn a Fuel to stay warm and dry in the winter. Christine and I both scavenged our wood for fuel.

CHRISTINE
You have to have six forest circles to scavenge from. It's very time-consuming.

MERIAH
I scavenged wood too. But Ivy mined coal from the coal seam.

JEFF
I burned oil to keep warm. Zeus said my mud house leaks some. I don't think that's right. The native Americans in the Northwest used mud for their houses...

IVY
Like the native Americans, we decided we might go whaling. Whales will give us both food and fuel.

JEFF
We need a boat.

ARIA
I'll help you go whaling.
I'll help you build a boat.

CHRISTINE
During the first year I kinda felt left out, like I really didn't belong. Deciding not to just let things continue without me I asked Ken for some things that I could do for the next year. We decided I would raise some chickens, look for bees and honey, and begin to grow grass for fuel instead of wood.

MERIAH
I find it easier to live by myself then to have a bunch of people with me.

ZEUS SPEAKS

Commentary by Ken Eklund, moderator

The first year was really focused on plain ol' survival. The team has to get one unit of Food and one unit of Water per person during the course of the year... and they must collect one unit of Fuel per household to burn during the winter.

The challenge for this year was Food. Hunting and fishing and picking berries only produces one Food unit total. (You can get more if you want for the short term, but that depletes the natural stocks in the long term, and the team wisely avoided doing that.) The team planted gardens on cleared ground, but were slow to realize that they needed to clear more land and put it under cultivation to meet their needs. Only a late-season planting saved them from going a little hungry in the winter.

Their Water supply was more than sufficient, because they still have most of their natural vegetation intact, and because the weather was good, with plenty of rain.

They each burn carbon-based Fuels to heat their households in the winter, so they are releasing 5 "Carbon" units into the atmosphere every year. The vegetation on the island is plentiful, and absorbs more than that, so they don't have any climate change/global warming problems - yet.

On the whole, they are being very respectful of the environment. They scavenge wood rather than cut forest to get their fuels, for example, even though it is much more time-consuming to scavenge the wood. The girls also take care to observe their environment and ask about how a proposed action might affect the health of wildlife and ecosystems - I don't see as much of that going on on Jeff's island.

At the end of the session I asked everyone to imagine what their lives were like. Realistically, I said, you pretty much spend your time doing some hard labor - hauling water from a stream to your house or to your crops, hauling wood from the forest to your house, hauling rocks and hacking weeds out of the gardens, and so on. If that's how you like to live, I said, fine - but if not, you might want to think about ways to increase your quality of life next year.