About this dispatch
What Soil and Peace is, and how it is carried
This blog is a dispatch from the ground.
I am Michel Garand — sixty-four, Canadian, thirty-one years in Germany. In June 2026 I left Brandenburg for the Ukrainian Carpathians, to live and work as an independent volunteer in Verkhovyna and to report the work as it happens.
It continues a testimony that began on the Baltic — a walking practice that closed on June 18. A different country, a different register, the same thread: that the work which heals soil and the work which makes peace are one work, done with people rather than for them.
What you will find here are dispatches, daily or weekly as the days allow. The work comes first, lived before it is written. No programme, no product, no campaign — a record, kept honestly.
The work happens in a country at war, around a real household. Some things are deliberately not on these pages — exact places below the valley, daily schedules, anything that could put the people who host this work at risk. The war is the ground here, not the show.
Soil and Peace is the practice. Erdpuls — a body of work in sustainability literacy, citizen science, and reciprocal economics — is the entity behind it, now forming as Erdpuls gUG. I carry the work unpaid; my subsistence is held by a small solidarity circle, not by anyone the work answers to.
How that bridge is funded is set out in one place — the support page — and never written into a dispatch. Where the roughly €1,200 a month goes is named in full. Nothing is hidden.
Questions: stewardship@ubec.network.
© 2026 Michel Garand | Soil and Peace
CC BY-SA 4.0 | stewardship@ubec.network