Archive for July, 2008
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
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The Times Online and the Sunday Times (of London) carried an article on both the utopian and the practical aspects of community living. The article features an existing co-housing developments in the UK, Community Project of South Downs. Benefits such as shared child rearing, help in times of health crisis, and shared resources are mentioned. Some drawbacks of life in a co-housing development are also mentioned, such as additional planning required for new development. The Times writes:
Visiting the Community Project on a sunny summer's day, it is easy to appreciate the appeal. The setting is idyllic - the buildings look out over a green valley, narrow paths wind between rambling undergrowth and abundant vegetation, while three horses in a paddock swish their tails lazily against the flies. Come teatime, the place is swarming with children conducting water-gun fights and larking about.
"It's awesome for kids," says Jed Novick, 49, a lecturer in journalism who moved here two years ago with his wife, Gilly Smith, 45, and their two daughters, Ellie, 12, and Loulou, 9. "They have such freedom and independence here, within safe walls."
Such a lifestyle appeals to many people, and the article also mentions the potential for the development of more co-housing projects in the future. A training center for would be co-housing founders, Threshold Centre at Cole Street Farm. The Times writes:
Fancy the idea of living communally? You could always found your own cohousing community. Alan Heeks, an ex-businessman with an MBA from Harvard, set up the Threshold Centre at Cole Street Farm, near Gillingham, Dorset, with a group of six like-minded friends in 2004, and runs regular workshops for those interested in cohousing. The basic principles are the same, although there are differences: the eight members share everything from home-grown vegetables to the washing machine, and are required to give 5% of the value of their property to the project when they sell.
Given the balanced article, I am suprised at its name, "Cohousing is the new name for commune living". Perhaps "commune" isn't such a charged word in the UK as it is in the US?
Read the full article here.
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, communes, UK
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
With oil prices on the rise, conserving energy is once again a hot topic in the news. Several articles have appeared recently on "green" living at intentional communities.
Boston.com, WFAA-8 (the ABC affiliate in Dallas/Fort Worth), and the Baltimore Sun are among the news outlets running an Associated Press article highlighting market trends toward "green" building. Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, a co-housing development that just began construction in New Hampshire, is used as an example of what to expect in the future. They report:
Recent market research by McGraw-Hill Construction projects that the green building market could account for $20 billion in sales, or 10 percent of the overall homebuilding market, this year. Those figures are expected to double within five years.
Starting next year, the U.S. Green Building Council will begin applying a version of its Leadership in Energy Environmental Design rating system to entire neighborhoods rather than single buildings. A pilot program launched early last year attracted so much interest that officials accepted more than 200 proposals, twice the number they sought.
Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm is not part of the pilot program, but its 29 homes are being built to the council's highest certification standards.
Read more here [boston.com], here [WFAA-8], or here [Baltimore Sun].
Another green community is generating attention in Israel. The Jerusalem Post featured an article on Kibbutz Lotan's green environmental strategies, and communal social ethic. The eco-friendly policies are highlighted as a central feature of this kibbutz:
Everyone seems to share a commitment to the creative ecology that's become Lotan's hallmark. Its famous Center for Creative Ecology, with its recycled water-wetlands, the bird reserve, straw-bale building construction technology and a host of other recycling projects have attracted favorable attention the world over. Even the UN recognized Lotan's Ecovillage Design Education curriculum, a part of its Green Apprenticeship Program that attracts students for 10-week stints, housing them in straw-bale geodesic domes.
The article delves into some of the specific eco-friendly techniques implemented at Kibbutz Lotan.
In 1986, Lotan made the critical decision to go green. "I was a big recycler from the beginning," Alex says. "The kibbutz itself didn't start until later. Our first effort was to separate out organic waste for composting - and we immediately got into trouble. The regional authority came to empty our garbage cans, and they were empty. 'We're not coming in!' they warned us. They learned to love us - we reduced our waste by 70 percent. After that, we started getting more creative, recycling all kinds of things."
Water is among the things they recycle, not just once, but over and over. "For drinking water, recycled filters from the Eilat desalination plant are used in a reverse osmosis desalination plant that Mekorot - the national water company - maintains. Every house has two faucets: one for RO drinking water; the other for salty water, pumped from the aquifer. Everything that grows is watered with salty or recycled water. When water is short, you have to be creative."
In terms of building materials, creative doesn't begin to describe it. Here, buildings, benches and artistic flourishes of all kinds are constructed from recycled waste. Old tires packed tight with non-degradable plastic containers form the base, which is then covered with rock-hard "cement," local mud mixed with straw. It dries, and then several coats of Lotan's secret ingredient - used falafel oil - are painted on as a sealer. The result is incredibly beautiful. If it weren't for an occasional "truth window" - exposed parts showing the inside - it would be hard to believe what's underneath.
I imagine that a geodesic dome built from straw bales is a sight to behold! Read the entire article here.
On the other hand, not every community labeled as "eco-friendly" is actually such. Buzz Blog reported on the UK's plan to build carbon-neutral "ecotowns" in February. The UK government's plan is to build town centers around sources of renewable energy, so that they have less of a carbon footprint. Opposition to this plan has cropped up from rural residents, who are upset that their rolling countryside and views of farms will be ruined by these new towns, and that they will have many new neighbors. Further, they argue that towns remote from work sites will increase commuter miles driven in cars.
The Christian Science Monitor reports:
... the innovative plan is pitting urbanites' vision of green utopia against the ire of rural England, whose residents are loath to let their pristine environs be despoiled.
"This is completely the wrong site," says Pete Seaward of Weston, a village in Oxfordshire shortlisted as an ecotown. He holds up a scenic picture of a local lake. "If they're saying that it is 'eco' to build on and fill in a lake like that, they are dreaming."
Ron Field, chairman of the parish council at Ford, another site on the eco-village shortlist, adds that there is huge local concern that this is just another ruse to allow developers to make money.
"We don't want it because it's plunked in the middle of a small hamlet in between two coastal towns which they spent millions and millions of pounds trying to regenerate," he says.
"They're building it on 600 acres of green field land which is used for growing food crops to feed the people that live in our area, and it's all done as far as we can see for money."
I find it hard to believe a lake would be drained to build an ecovillage, and wonder whether these are exaggerations on the part of villagers irate about something else. I wonder whether there is any other analysis of these "eco-towns".
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, ecotown, ecovillage, green, Israel, Kibbutz Lotan, market research, New Hampshire, Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, UK
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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
Community founder and author Kat Kinkade passed away in July at the age of 77. Kinkade was involved in the founding of Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn, and published two memoirs of life at Twin Oaks, A Walden Two Experiment, and Is it Utopia Yet?. Several US newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, published obituaries of Kinkade, highlighting her involvement in the communities movement.
Both articles highlight these accomplishments, as well as Kinkade's move in and out of the communes she helped form. The New York Times wrote of Kinkade's involvement in the early years of Twin Oaks:
It was not easy. The farm's well ran dry, cows starved over the winter and rammed-earth bricks did not generate the kind of revenue that the founders had hoped for. Pot-smoking hippies who drifted into the commune found themselves at odds with work-ethic missionaries like Ms. Kinkade, whose blunt practicality and executive talent - rare qualities in the counterculture - helped the stumbling colony achieve not just self-sufficiency but something resembling prosperity.
"She was the Hillary Clinton of Twin Oaks," her daughter said.
Ultimately, Twin Oaks succeeded, and Kinkade put her energy into founding other communities. The Washington Post wrote:
Unlike thousands of other communes that sprang up in the 1960s only to succumb to the perplexities of shared living, Twin Oaks gradually began to flourish, despite early hardship and dissension. It grew to almost a hundred communards, became a self-sustaining land trust of 450 efficiently managed acres and began to thrive financially when it signed a long-term contract with Pier 1 for its hammocks.
Although she was involved in founding two other income-sharing communities -- in Missouri and Virginia -- she told The Post in 1998 that communal life had not measured up to her expectations.
"My mother was disappointed that Twin Oaks did not turn out to be the model for what the rest of our society would be," said her daughter, Dr. Josie Kinkade of Louisa, Va. "When she found out that it was really just a nice place for some middle-class people to live, she was disappointed."
Although, I suspect that few kitchens in middle-class homes contain a cross-stitch sampler reading, "From each according to their need, to each according to their ability".
Read the full articles here [New York Times] and here [Washington Post].
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Related Posts Tags: Acorn, East Wind, FEC, Kat Kincade, Twin Oaks
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
Vermont Public Radio carried a news magazine about how intentional communities interacted with the surrounding rural culture in Vermont.
The program description states,
Our guest Tom Fels of North Bennington has just published a book on the network of communal farms that he was part of in northwestern Massachusetts and southern Vermont. Also with us is poet and teacher Verandah Porche, who still lives on the farm in Guilford where she settled with her counterculture friends in 1968. Together we examine how the commune movement shaped, and was shaped by, Vermont's culture.
Fels's book is distributed by Chelsea Green.
Both Fels and Porche talked about how there was a shift in local attitude toward the new communities as time passed. I am not clear on whether these were income-sharing communities per se, or cooperatevely run houses and farms. Porche notes in the interview, "in fact, it was the press who referred to us as a commune".
Porche also was able to observe changes in their acceptance in the local communities over time. A close farmer's fraternity, Vermont Grange, once turned away members of her community, but now accepts them.
Listen to the full story here.
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Related Posts Tags: Farm Friends, farming, rural, Tom Fels, Total Loss Farm, Verandah Porche, vermont
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Saturday, July 12th, 2008
The CBS News television affiliate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, WHP-TV, reports on the green features of Hundredfold Farm, a new co-housing development in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The television spot is more in-depth, mentioning the farmland preservation, energy efficiency, and on-site waste water treatment achieved by the community.
Hundredfold Farm is a co-housing community in Adams County. It is a neighborhood created at first as a way to preserve farmland.
The neighborhood sits in the middle of an operating 80 acre Christmas tree farm, which each homeowner, owns an equal part of. With seven homes complete, eventually 14 homes will sit on just six acres of the farm, preserving the rest of the land.
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The layout of the community is designed after a small village, where neighbors are a close by and close with each other. The idea for the farm was created 10 years ago. This is the first neighborhood of its kind in Pennsylvania.
Read the article (with video).
Hundredfold Farm was mentioned previously on Buzz Blog as a possible campaign stop of Barack Obama during the Democratic primary. It's unclear whether that stop actually took place.
It has also been featured on FOX 43 News of York, PA in a 2- part viedo series (1) (2)
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Related Posts Tags: farmland preservation, Gettysburg Pennsylvania, greenhouse, Hundredfold Farm, trees, waste water treatment
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
The Times Educational Supplement, a publication for teachers in the UK, has an article about the educational opportunities at Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland. The article starts with a brief nod to Findhorn's legendary gardens and faerie/angel culture but mostly focuses on the ecovillage's sustainability education programs. Here's an excerpt:
The Findhorn Foundation is a charitable trust earning income from activities as an education and conference centre, focusing on spiritual self-discovery, teaching how to live sustainably and a range of courses on the arts and healing.
The ecovillage, where community members experiment with new techniques for environmentally friendly living, won Best Practice designation from the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements in 1998. For more than 10 years, the foundation has engaged with the work of the UN as a non-government organisation, offering programmes in line with the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-14.
This community recorded the lowest eco-footprint in the industrialised world last year and is attracting the interest of politicians and others who would have given the place a wide berth until comparatively recently, according to Dawson. When he came here a decade ago, he felt it would have been political suicide for a local figure of substance to have been too closely identified with Findhorn as it was still considered a bit "away with the fairies". But he believes as the sustainability agenda has moved centre-stage, the way of life here doesn't seem quite so whacky to outsiders.
Read the article on Findhorn's sustainability education programs.
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Related Posts Tags: ecovillages, education, Findhorn, Scotland
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