The Healing Biotopes Plan (Tamera)

The founding charter of Tamera, an 800-person peace research village in southern Portugal, framing the community as Healing Biotope 1 in a planned global network of replicable peace research sites.

Tamera was founded in 1995 in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal by Dieter Duhm, Sabine Lichtenfels, and Rainer Ehrenpreis, after a 13-year incubation period in Germany known as the Bauhütte. Around 170 people live there now on roughly 330 acres. Tamera describes itself as a peace research village, with the working hypothesis that a model of nonviolent cooperation between humans, animals, nature and creation can be built and then replicated.

The Healing Biotopes Plan is the founding charter. Articulated by Dieter Duhm through the 1980s and written up most recently by Martin Winiecki, the Plan proposes a global network of Healing Biotopes: experimental research and learning centers that model a culture where humans, animals, plants and waters live together in full cooperation. Tamera is Healing Biotope 1. The community's purpose, the legitimacy of its experiments, and the criteria by which it judges its own work all refer back to the Plan.

The published version of the Plan is short, around four pages, structured as a sequence of questions and answers:

1. What is a Healing Biotope? Defines the concept, links the etymology of healing, wholeness and holy, and frames a Healing Biotope as a place where the world we create and the world that created us come together.
2. What is the Plan? States the practical work as concretely building these centers around the world, and names eight research areas: building community, healing sex, love and partnership, self-change and consciousness, raising children, cooperation with animals and all beings, restoring nature, regenerative decentralized autonomy in water, energy and food, and new economics.
3. How can a few Healing Biotopes change the world? Lays out Duhm's "Political Theory," which draws on cybernetics, system theory and holography to argue that change happens through morphogenetic fields rather than gradual reform.
4. How we are implementing the Plan. Names three commitments Tamera has made: build a first Healing Biotope, empower others committed to the Plan through education and outreach, and share the vision worldwide.
5. How you can help. Specialist support, donation, study and involvement, spreading the word.

The document closes with a literature list pointing to Duhm's Terra Nova and The Sacred Matrix, Sabine Lichtenfels's Grace, and Leila Dregger's Tamera: A Model for the Future. The Plan treats these as required reading to understand its claims.

A few passages carry the load.

"There is the world that we create and there is the world that has created us. These two worlds must come together. This is the goal of our journey."

Dieter Duhm, quoted at the head of the Plan.

This is the line the Plan opens with after defining the term Healing Biotope. The framing is cosmological rather than procedural or legal. The whole rest of the document rests on the premise that the problem to be governed is the separation between human-built systems and the living systems they sit inside.

"Ultimately, a Healing Biotope is a place where all beings live together in full cooperation and unreserved trust."

The Healing Biotopes Plan, section "What Is a Healing Biotope?"

The operational endpoint, stated as a single sentence. Trust between species is the test. A community that has worked out human governance but still relates to animals, water and land instrumentally has not, by this Plan, built a Healing Biotope.

"If there are even just a few societal prototypes on Earth that embody the sacred matrix in sufficient complexity and depth, we're likely to see an effective morphogenetic field of peace emerge to eventually replace the current field of violence. Wars will end because people will no longer be able to carry out violent acts in this field."

The Healing Biotopes Plan, section "How Can a Few Healing Biotopes Change the World?"

The most ambitious claim in the document, and the one that determines what kind of charter this is. Duhm's argument is that a small number of working prototypes generate a field that propagates without coordinated diffusion. This is why the Plan is willing to commit Tamera to a multi-decade experiment rather than to short-term political work. The strategic logic is field-theoretic.

"We've committed ourselves to: building a first Healing Biotope in Tamera, by researching the ethical, social, sexual, ecological, technological and economic foundations of a culture of peace; empowering those committed to the Healing Biotopes Plan through education and outreach; sharing the vision of Healing Biotopes around the world."

The Healing Biotopes Plan, section "How We're Implementing the Plan."

These three commitments are as close as the document gets to a procedural clause. Most constitutional documents specify how decisions are made; this one specifies which kinds of work the community is bound to do. Read alongside the rest of the Plan, the commitments function as a charter of obligations.

A constitution of this shape works differently from a procedural one. Where the Damanhur Constitution specifies citizen categories and the Twin Oaks Bylaws specify how Planners are elected, the Healing Biotopes Plan specifies the question Tamera is trying to answer and the commitments Tamera has made in answering it. The operational rules emerge from the Plan through a layer of working practices: the Tamera Forum (a structured group communication practice already cataloged in the Library under Frameworks), the recent Codex of Tamera (a near-procedural working document for community life), the morning meditations, the political team meetings, the seasonal reviews of the project's direction.

For a researcher building a comparative library, Tamera is the case where the constitutional document is the vision rather than the procedure, and where the test of the constitution is whether the daily life of the community can be read back as an answer to the question the Plan asks.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. Five archive interviews ground this entry: Sabine Lichtenfels (co-founder), Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Aida and Uri. None of them quotes the Plan directly when describing why they live at Tamera. They describe Forum, the political team, the work with water, the work on consciousness. The Plan is what the work rests on; the language people speak in is the working practices the Plan produces. That observation is itself a data point about how this kind of charter functions.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is asking what it would mean to be a demonstration site rather than just a home, and whether those two things are compatible, Tamera's experience over thirty years is one of the more serious attempts to answer that question.

Tamera itself in Alentejo, Portugal is the primary living example of the Healing Biotopes Plan in practice. The 170 people living there are not simply implementing a governance document; they are trying to function as proof that peaceful coexistence between humans, animals, water, and land is possible under conditions of social crisis. Their Global Campus brings international visitors through structured educational programs, which means the demonstration function is ongoing and public, not just aspirational language in a founding document.

ZEGG in Germany shares the same founding lineage, connected through Dieter Duhm and the intellectual tradition that produced the Healing Biotopes Plan. Seeing both communities gives you a picture of how a shared founding vision develops differently in different places and with different people over time.

Within the Global Ecovillage Network, a number of communities explicitly frame themselves as demonstration projects for sustainable living rather than simply residential communities. The Findhorn Foundation in Scotland has used similar "proof of concept" language about its community since the 1970s, describing Findhorn as evidence that spiritual principles can organize a working settlement. The comparison with Tamera is useful: both communities carry a demonstration mandate, but they ground it in very different theoretical frameworks.

Where the door is:

• The Healing Biotopes Plan is available on Tamera's website and is worth reading before you visit rather than after. It is not long, but it is dense, and the visit makes more sense when you have the document in your head.
• Tamera's Global Campus visitor program offers structured stays ranging from short visits to multi-week educational intensives.
• Dieter Duhm's book "Terra Nova" is the theoretical foundation beneath the Plan and gives you the cosmological argument that the governance document assumes you already accept.
• The question worth asking your own community before you draw on this: do you see your community as a demonstration project for a wider social change, or primarily as a home?

One caution that matters here: the Healing Biotopes Plan is explicitly a response to global crisis: war, ecological collapse, sexual violence, the failure of existing social structures. Its internal logic depends on that framing. If you read it as a governance manual and set aside the cosmological claims, the document's reasoning does not fully hold together. The governance structure and the vision of transformation are not separable in Tamera's framework. This is not a reason to avoid the document. It is a reason to read it whole.