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Life at Findhorn by Jonathan Dawson
Copenhagen: A Community Perspective, Day 1
Jonathan Dawson's Copenhagen Blog has found a new home, click here to view.
Glamourising the Nettle
Dissatisfaction with indigenous foodtuffs is a growing problem for those among us who believe that it is important to increase our local food security...
The question of food security seems to be very alive in the community at the moment. This is an area where I think it is fair to say that there has been a pretty high level of satisfaction with our efforts over the years.
Our Earthshare scheme was the UK’s first organic, community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, providing weekly local, fresh veggies to the equivalent of 200 families every week of the year. (CSA is a now widespread model in which the subscribers divide the harvest between them, thus sharing the risk with the farmer.)
Moreover, the 2006 ecological footprint study of our community found that our food footprint is about one third of the national average due to the relatively high level of local, organic, seasonal and vegetarian food in our diet.
However, it has become clear in recent months that all is not as rosy in the garden as appears at first sight and that there remains much to be done.
An internal study found that while 32 per cent of the vegetables served in the community kitchens are organic and 27 per cent are locally-sourced, only 18 per cent are both. Most of us were surprised and a little shocked by how low these figures were.
They can be explained partly because of the large number of mouths that need to be fed – remember that we host in the region of 3,000 guests per year in addition to the resident community; partly because of the higher cost of local, organic food in a global market so heavily weighted towards large-scale, industrial production systems; and partly because of an appetite for foodstuffs that the local climate and soils cannot provide.
Dissatisfaction with indigenous foodtuffs is a growing problem for those among us who believe that it is important to increase our local food security. Christopher, one of the mainstays of our gardening team over the years, notes: ‘for every cabbage that gets sold in the community shop, we sell 20 aubergines’. The Mediterranean diet is going global.
This is certainly a factor in the reduction over the years in the number of subscribers to Earthshare. It is currently around 20 families short of its optimal level.
Every so often I hear of a community in France or Italy boasting of the fact that it has decided to increase its consumption of local, seasonal food. 'They really want recognition for that,' I think? Let them try it here!
So, in this context, we need to be clever in our efforts to increase production and consumption of food that truly nurtures us without depleting ecosystems on the other side of the world.
The main avenue we are exploring at the moment is the introduction of greater food storage and processing facilities – and the Climate Challenge Fund mentioned a couple of blogs ago may just be a useful source of funding for this.
Doesn’t root vegetable pâté with chives sound so much more appetizing than another plate of beetroot and parsnips? Doesn’t a good, local apple and blackberry pie beat the pants off any fancy, Mediterranean fruit picked before it is ripe and squished by the journey?
Meanwhile, in the week’s Rainbow Bridge (our weekly community newsletter), I note that we are receiving a visit from Frank Cook from Schumacher College who has studied with ‘herbalists, shamans, vaidyas, sangomas, green witches, doctors, professors and medicine men’. Great stuff!
Frank will be giving a talk on ‘Community as Food and Medicine Security’ and leading afternoon workshops on identifying and eating wild weeds and food fermentation techniques. I will certainly be attending both. We need all the help we can get in our efforts to glamourise the nettle and the humble broad bean.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
8 September, 2008
Photographer: Adriana Sjan Bijman
Life in the Goldfish Bowl
For good or bad, television cameras have become an unavoidable part of life in the ecovillage...
Another camera crew is in town at the moment, shooting another film about life in the community.
We have become a good deal more careful about who we let in with movie cameras following the debacle several years ago with the three-part Channel Four series, The Haven, that made us look and feel rather foolish. Our naive hope had been that the film would try to depict something of our philosophy and work in the world. In fact, it turned out to be a fairly standard 'reality TV’ romp that was interested primarily in seeking out the whacky and the tacky.
Still, even though we exercise more control than we used to, a good number of film projects continue to get the nod. We are no strangers to cameras moving among us as we meet, eat and go about our daily business.
The question of privacy in the context of research, training and demonstration centres that also happen to be people’s homes is a common one for ecovillages. The community at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Wales (a founder member of the Global Ecovillage Network), for example, mostly moved off-site when their visitor numbers grew to today’s levels of 70,000 per year. Just too much human traffic to make any sort of normal home life possible.
The theme is taken up in Violet’s letter this week in the Rainbow Bridge, our weekly community newsletter. Violet is a gorgeously irreverent teenager whose letters provoke regular frissons of delight as she dares say the things that most of us too-careful adults keep carefully under wraps. In this respect, Violet has one great advantage over the rest of us; she is fictional. The address on this week’s letter reads:
"Violet’s bedroom (What is like a goldfish bowl in summer) Feeld of Dreams"
Violet has no doubt where the problem lies:
"I blame all the programmes on British telly what tells you how to bild a house or sell a house or clean a house or make a house better or sell or swap a british house for a house in spain and make money too. I mean where else in scotland can you see a big fancy ecohouse near a yurt near a barrel house near a rusty old caravan. We got like everything."
We have nothing like CAT’s volume of through traffic. Nonetheless, with around 3,000 paying guests a year doing programmes plus several thousand more wandering around looking at the houses, the goldfish bowl metaphor can sometimes feel all too appropriate.
For most of us, most of the time, this is simply part of the package that comes with the choice of living in a social and ecological laboratory. In fact, more often than not, my feeling is one of pride that folk tend to be so interested and impressed.
Violet seems to have a different perspective. Her letter this week concludes: "Chow for now fans. I just got to go and moon at some folk who have been starin at our house too long."
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
20 August, 2008
Great Time To Be in Scotland
Jonathan Dawson talks about the Climate Challenge Fund and the gust of political fresh air sweeping across Scotland...
It is a great time just now to be in Scotland. There is a tangible sense of freshness, excitement and opportunity in the air. Most surprisingly in this age of disenchantment and cynicism with all things political, a significant source of this new energy is developments in the sphere of mainstream, party politics.
In short, we have a new, fresh SNP administration in Holyrood that almost overnight seems to have propelled politics in Scotland out of the tired, grey sleepwalk of the semi-conscious sound-bite into new and fresh approaches that seek to truly address themselves to the challenges of the new world we are transitioning into.
This is not to say that the Green dawn has arrived – there are far too many cases where given the need to choose between ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’, the administration has plumped squarely for the latter.
Nonetheless, the gust of political fresh air, fresh thinking and truly radical approaches that is sweeping the country stands in stark contrast to what is happening south of the border. Given this context, the Glasgow East by-election result seems almost predictable.
One of the most interesting and exciting new innovations is the Climate Challenge Fund, a 3-year, £18.8 million programme (that was launched at the Positive Energy conference we hosted here in Findhorn at Easter) to provide financial and technical support to Scottish communities undertaking initiatives to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
 This last weekend at the Big Tent eco-gathering in Fife, a senior member of the Scottish Sustainable Development Commission (that is one of the partners responsible for the administration of the Fund) came to explain in detail how the fund will be implemented.
(Already, the Fund has committed itself to providing grants to Transition Support – an organisation set up to help Transition initiatives get off the ground – and the Going Carbon Neutral Stirling programme.)
We have had festivals like this for years. Motley gatherings of permaculturists, ecovillagers, peaceniks and representatives of assorted causes talking, apparently, primarily to each other. Now, all at once it seems, we are being joined by local government officials, parliamentarians and even cabinet ministers!
In a blog earlier this year, I mentioned that I had been to two events around Easter organized by green activists – Positive Energy in Scotland and the Ecocities, Ecovillages and Transition Towns conference in Dublin, both of which were addressed by their respective Ministers of the Environment, both dialoguing comfortably with the eco-literate audiences present in a language that all were comfortable with.
The Big Tent gathering was preceded by a one-day meeting of folk interested or already involved in Transition initiatives across Scotland. A good number of the 90 or so folk participating – far more than we had anticipated – were local government officers, some there in a private capacity, some representing their authorities. All were exploring how local government could best support the emerging transition initiatives.
The speed with which the doors of power – and of official financing – have flown open still comes as something of a shock. The team manning the Findhorn exhibition stand at Big Tent and events like it now need to be able to respond not just to enquiries of spiritual seekers and would-be eco-house builders but also, increasingly, to politicos, professionals and planners wanting to explore how our models can contribute to societal transformation.
This enriches us all. It forces us to think more deeply than we sometimes have in the past about our strategy for contributing meaningfully to the emergence of a just, equitable and contented low-carbon society.
Specifically, since applications to the Carbon Challenge Fund can come only from communities, it invites us to create conscious and rooted alliances with our neighbouring towns and villages in a great sharing of dreams, expertise and perspectives.
This is all for the good.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
31 July, 2008
Wedding and Windbills
Is the credit crunch going to have an impact on guest numbers at eco-villages? Rhiannon Hanfman reveals this and more.
Last week I drove my friend Judi Buttner to Loch Ness to officiate at a wedding. Judi is the Findhorn Foundation’s official marriage celebrant and can legally perform weddings not only in the community but anywhere in Scotland. The Foundation has, for at least ten years, had its own celebrant so that community people who do not, as a rule, want a traditional church wedding could have the kind of ceremony they prefer without needing to go the Registrar’s office to formalise it.
She is very busy these days with engagements throughout the Highlands, hence the trip to Lock Ness. More couples and not only those with an alternative outlook want to create individual ceremonies that incorporate words that are meaningful to them. I have been to a number of these events and each one is different and all are moving in their own way. This particular wedding took place on a boat in the middle of the loch in the shadow of Urquhart Castle. It was a very small and informal affair with family only, nevertheless the bridal pair was decked out in full wedding kit. Unusual as the venue was, some conventions do persist.
While waiting for the ceremony to begin I was chatting with a young woman who was one of the crew and learned that the number of visitors to the Inverness area is down on last year by 300 a day. Why, is no mystery. The cost of fuel, the credit squeeze and economic shambles we are in are keeping people away.
As a result of that conversation I was curious as to whether the Foundation was also experiencing low guest numbers. Fortunately, it seems not, or at least not yet. The numbers are pretty much the same as last year. This is good news for us but it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the economic downturn will reduce guest numbers eventually.
I wonder, however, if the reverse may not happen. When times are tough, people begin to question accepted truths like, for example, the superiority of free market economics, and will look for alternatives. An eco-village model such as Findhorn provides alternatives on many levels. The free market is increasingly becoming unsustainable and people may want to look for something that is.
 Only yesterday, I spotted an interesting alternative in the front garden of my friends, George Goudsmit and Mary Inglis. There was a large metal object that looked like a cross between a bird and a modern sculpture, turning gently in the wind. George, who runs AES, a solar heating company in Forres, explained to me that it was a wind turbine designed to operate on the roof of an ordinary house. He and his neighbour hope to promote it and had placed it in the garden to see what interest it generated.
It certainly got my attention. Single-dwelling windmills have already been manufactured but some have the unpleasant side effect of making the house shake when they are going flat out. Apparently this turbine does not do that. What it does do is produce about 500w of electricity. The cost is reasonable too. George thinks it could pay for itself within three years. It’s encouraging to learn of a green energy option that doesn’t cost the earth.
It’s a bit of a ramble from weddings to windmills and sustainability. The common theme, if there is one, is change — change of status, change of lifestyle, change in the world. In the community we talk about change as a good thing, generally. The changes afoot in the world at the moment are challenging and it remains to be seen how we meet them, individually and collectively. The thought I am left with is that in the I Ching the hexagram symbolising ‘danger’ is the same as ‘opportunity’.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
18 July, 2008
Ageing Naturally
Growing old as a member of an eco-village has its perks, writes Findhorn resident Rhiannon Hanfman...
Following on with the theme of the ageing population of Findhorn and (everywhere else, really) I would like to approach it from the perspective of one of 60s generation who is now in her sixties. Since it was we who instigated the cult of youth and coined the phrase ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’, we can hardly complain if there are those who now feel that there are way too many old people around, and that this is somehow a bad thing. It is the natural order of things that the old make way for the young, who in turn will become old and make way for the next generation. What is different now, however, is the timing of it. People are living longer and staying active longer.
Is this a bad thing? Perhaps, if you are young and want to find your place in a world full of oldies who won’t get out of the way.
Over that past two decades I have seen the demographic pattern change in accordance with the state of the community. When the community was young, most of the people were in their twenties and single. They were enthusiastic and energetic. They didn’t mind roughing it or sleeping six to a caravan because, hey, they were building the new age and having a ball doing it. Most didn’t stay long and moved on. Those that did aged along with the community.
When I arrived in the 80s I, like almost everyone else, was in my forties. There were a handful of older people, a few young people and even families with young children. We bemoaned the fact that we were a middle-aged community, and even worse, that there were hardly any men. I would say that no more than 20 – 30 per cent of the population was male. It seemed at the time that men weren’t that interested in spiritual journeys and self-exploration. The focus of the community at that time was personal growth, which appealed predominantly to forty-something women.
In 1990 I left for five years. When I returned things had changed enormously for the better. The energy had shifted to environmental concerns like building energy-efficient housing and creating the eco-village. Whereas when I left there had only been the Foundation, there was now a vibrant outer community surrounding it. The boundaries were dissolving as people who shared the Findhorn ethic but didn’t want to join the Foundation arrived. They created their own projects and businesses. As a result, there were more men, more young people and more families. The demographic is now far more normal, but there is still the issue of a large ageing population here as elsewhere. We have to get used to it and begin to see it as an asset rather than a problem. Believe it or not, the old do have something to offer.
We all have to get old somewhere, and some of us are doing it at Findhorn. It’s an excellent place for that, and the reason is that age doesn’t matter. In all my time here it has never been an issue in the friendships I have formed or the work I have done. For example, I designed the Foundation brochure for four years. I was sixty-two when I got the job, although nobody asked. Would I have obtained a job in graphic design, a field that is dominated by the young, in the ‘real’ world? I doubt it. And where else would I be invited to a 30th birthday party and seriously be expected to come?
There are a lot of older people here but they are active and engaged and don’t view the community as a retirement home. There is an easy flow between the generations that happens here that I like. The varied perspectives and strengths of people at different stages of life’s journey complement one another to the benefit of all.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
8 July, 2008
New Age Old People's Home
As in society as a whole, the wealth of the boomer generation is provoking a crisis of access for youth. How do ecovillages ensure they don't just host an older population?
One of the early Findhorn luminaries, David Spangler, once famously said that a major challenge for Findhorn would be to avoid becoming a New Age old people’s home. I notice that I have been recounting this anecdote over the years with a certain self-satisfaction, sure in the knowledge that this is a fate we have managed to escape.
After recent visits to a couple of ecovillages where youth truly are in the driving seat, all at once I find much less for us to be smug about. In truth, it really does feel like we face a significant demographic challenge.
Nor is this the case in Findhorn alone. With some notable exceptions, I would say that the European ecovillage family in general is ageing, with the proportion of young people among ecovillage residents unhealthily low.
This insight comes as something of a shock, not least because it carries a strongly personal dimension. Like many others, I have failed to recognise that I myself am ageing.
A youthful 52-year old I may be – but still, 52 is some distance from the young man I can all too easily imagine myself still to be. Now, as I begin to find myself referred to as an ‘elder’ of the ecovillage movement, this realisation is becoming sadly inescapable.
Two main reasons appear to lie behind the marginalisation of young people within many of today’s European ecovillages. Neither of these, thankfully, seem to have much to do with a decline in the appeal of an idealistic communitarian vision – all the indications are that young people remain engaged and excited by the concept.
The problem seems to lie more in the realm of practicalities. On the one hand, rising land prices in a context where a growing number of ecovillages are experiencing some degree of privatisation of assets is simply driving the young out of the market. As in society as a whole, the wealth of the boomer generation is provoking a crisis of access for youth.
On the other, most of the juiciest niches in our now mature communities – many of which are 30 or more years old (Findhorn celebrates its 46th anniversary this year) – are more or less full. Our early pioneering days, illuminated by now fading photographs of gangs of young people in great smiling work parties, now lie far behind us.
In this context, it is really encouraging to see our young people pick up the challenge and embark with zest on the task of injecting some vital youth energy back into the community. Most recently, this has manifested in the launch of a series of evenings under the banner of Café Culture.
Michael Mitton (who last appeared in this blog under the guise of Scotland’s Young Thinker of the Year), Elliott and Lucy from NextGEN (GEN’s youth council) have set up these evenings as an opportunity for Findhorn’s young people to get together in the evenings, to make music and to share their ideas and inspirations.
These evenings have been successful and well attended, with issues addressed including affordable housing, work opportunities and the idea of a youth community centre.
It is inspiring to see our young people find their voice and, in the best ecovillage tradition, engage with our current situation as an opportunity rather than a problem. May they help us rediscover and nurture the youthful spirit in all of us.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
27 June, 2008
Fire in its Belly
The models and solutions on offer at Findhorn are not off-the-peg selections aimed at bored shoppers in the sustainability saloon...
Last week’s blog saw me down at the Green Heart of Hawick festival, celebrating GEN’s recognition that the battle for sustainability would be won on the streets of our villages, towns and cities, with ecovillages more akin to research laboratories than models to be widely replicated.
And yet, as I come back from another working weekend away – this time in Sweden (of which, more below) – I realise that this is not the whole story.
Re-entering the community is to be plugged into a living, thriving experiment in sustainability – rather as if dry theories on carbon footprint reduction had leapt off the page of their own volition to form a vibrant 3-D reality.
As I walk back into Findhorn on Monday early evening, the wind turbines are merrily dancing in the breeze, generating enough juice for the community here with plenty left to share with the national grid. Food scraps from the garden are making the journey back to the farm’s compost piles – with such sandy soils, soil enrichment is never-ending work.
Visitors are leaving the just-opened exhibition in the Moray Arts Centre – as far as we know the UK’s only carbon-neutral arts centre, equipped with hyper-efficient lighting, geo-thermal heating and photo-voltaic panels that also export juice to the grid.
Meanwhile, in our main meeting area, a group of sixty community members – what!......on a sunny, Monday evening, is this entirely healthy? – gather to discuss the evolution of our decision-making structures as the community grows in size and diversifies.
This is no cold and sterile laboratory. The models and solutions on offer are not off-the-peg selections aimed at bored shoppers in the sustainability saloon. Rather, the research that Findhorn and other ecovillages around the world are engaged in has blood in its veins and fire in its belly.
Dare we imagine a world in which communities like this constitute not just the research stations but, for some at least, the models they will choose to call home? Why not?! As Oscar Wilde has it, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at’.
One such emerging experiment is a retreat centre in Sweden called Angsbacka, around which a small community intends to build a village on ecological design principles. It was here that I spent this last weekend, facilitating their process of creating a shared vision and transferring ownership of the site from private individuals to a cooperatively-owned association.
Angsbacka has the great advantage that it is already an inspiration for many in Scandinavia as a spiritual and personal development retreat centre; its No Mind festival in early July has drawn upwards of one thousand people every year for the last decade.
The aim now is to expand the initiative so that it also models and eventually teaches sustainable living on all levels.
There is a great hunger – especially among the young – for practical hands-on examples of sustainability in action. Angsbacka is one of a number of emerging initiatives across Europe and beyond that are seeking to respond to this hunger in a very immediate way.
Centres of research, training and demonstrations for the likes of Hawick, undoubtedly. However, who knows – as property prices tumble and cooperation replaces individualism in our energy-lite future, ecovillages may just also resemble the community model of choice for a growing number of people.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
6 June, 2008
Green Heart of Hawick
Jonathan Dawson makes a trip to an environmental fair in Hawick and explains a recent paradigm shift in the role of the ecovillage in contemporary society
I spent the weekend down at Hawick, a picturesque town in the Scottish Borders. The event was an environmental fair and conference called Green Heart of Hawick, put on by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Michael Shallis and his team.
 The fair had everything, from films (including Al Gore’s "An Convenient Truth" and the wonderful "Power of Community" about Cuba’s response to its peak oil crisis), talks from a variety of speakers and exhibitions of local initiatives such as eco-schools, tree-planting programmes, compost making, local food schemes, allotments and the like.
It is tempting at times to despair at how few basic skills we have retained in our communities as the economy has globalised, but in reality, fairs like this demonstrate that the great British art of amateur tinkering has kept alive many older and more traditional ways of doing things. As if to reinforce the point, towards the end of Saturday afternoon, the town’s streets filled with an army of mounted riders, tracing the boundaries of the town’s lands on horseback in an annual practice that dates back to the 15th century.
I was there by kind invitation to talk about how to build and nurture local economies and how Hawick might go about creating its own transition town initiative. I have referred to transition towns in several previous blogs; these are community-led initiatives that embrace the reality of energy descent as fossil fuels run down as an opportunity to create more convivial and resilient communities.
 So why, you might ask, was I advocating on behalf of transition towns rather than ecovillages? Why was I not trying to persuade the citizens of Hawick to model themselves on Findhorn?
Track back to February of this year, the most recent Board meeting of GEN – the Global Ecovillage Network – at the Los Angeles Ecovillage. There, a coin that has been wobbling on the edge for some time fell finally and firmly into the slot of our collective understanding.
This new understanding is reflected in the GEN Manifesto that emerged from that meeting. One section of the manifesto concludes: ‘…it may be of value for us to see today’s ecovillages less as ends in themselves and more as research, demonstration and training centres for sustainable community initiatives in conventional towns and villages worldwide’.
This is a substantial and significant shift in perspective. No longer, it suggests, is the good society that we promote to be created primarily by way of replication of the ecovillage model. Rather, the core purpose of these distinctive, charming, but somewhat artificial communities is to act as laboratories for the development of sustainability models of all kinds that can be scaled up into more conventional communities.
 This insight comes to me as a breath of relief. The extent of Findhorn’s distinctiveness cannot be overstated. How on earth would one go about replicating such a unique model – especially given the growth in land prices and tightening of planning regulations over recent decades?
Just as we are coming to recognise that greening Britain’s housing stock will be primarily about intelligent retrofitting rather than new-build, so the building of a more healthy and resilient society needs to happen in existing communities like Hawick.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
22 May 2008
Yes..........and
Jonathan shares about how people come and go at Findhorn and how often they leave a positive legacy behind them...
This week, as many others, our community newsletter, the Rainbow Bridge, carries news of one or more members leaving the community. In an ecovillage of around 500 souls, this level of turnover does not present too much of a problem.
There are still several people here who first came to Findhorn in the 1960s and a good number who have been here for 20 years or more, so there is little danger of a loss of institutional memory.
Compare this to a much smaller community, of around 20, where I used to live in Dorset. The high rate of turnover there left very few who had spent more than a couple of years in the community. As in many other intentional communities of this size, this threatened the stability and indeed the very survival of the community as lessons needed to be learned over and over again, amidst much often acrimonious process.
One of those whose departure is announced in this week’s Bridge is my friend, Hide Enomoto, who will be returning to Japan with his wife and daughter, Maho and Minato, after spending a couple of years here in Findhorn.
 Hide has been a graceful and gentle presence around the place. A life coach by profession – in fact, he has written the most authoritative book on the subject in Japan – he has been here to learn about community-level sustainability, with the aim of going back to Japan as a more effective change agent.
He has worked closely with us on the UNESCO-endorsed, month-long Ecovillage Design Education training programme we run here each autumn. In fact, I am unable to think of him without remembering one particular exercise he led in this training.
Deceptively elegant and powerful (in this respect, much like Hide himself), it invites those in dialogue to listen deeply to what the other is saying and to begin one’s reply with ‘Yes……..and’ (rather than some variation of the usual ‘Yes…….but’) – irrespective of how much one disagrees with what has just been said.
It sounds like there is a fair potential here for creating shallow and superficial consensus – no? And yet, provided your interlocutor is not truly off the rails, it is astonishing how effective this little device can be in building empathy, encouraging deep listening and identifying ‘both/ands’ where only ‘either/ors had previously appeared to exist. Try it!
Now, having recently completed a Transition Town methodology training and having richly learned from and contributed to our own community here, Hide heads off today on a tour of UK sustainability initiatives before travelling back to Japan, where he hopes to be instrumental in helping the ecovillage and transition towns models to land.
At the recent Positive Energy conference, I likened ecovillages like Findhorn to eco-monasteries – I remain fascinated by the parallels between today’s ecovillages and the Celtic monasteries of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries. Both, it seems to me, are centres of light and learning that while being somewhat artificial and difficult to replicate, are nonetheless powerful places of refuge and study where folk can come to regenerate and find inspiration and new knowledge to take back to their home places.
Seen in this light, Hide is following an ancient and venerable lineage. I have a strong hunch that the world will be a better place for his having spent time with us here.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
12 May 2008
Strange Times
What a puzzling time to be alive. In the world that surrounds us, beauty and the comforting familiarity of seasonal rhythms. The ospreys have returned from West Africa and are putting on a grand fishing display in Findhorn Bay.
The last of the winter snow still lies deep on the mountaintops, glistening and melting in the now warm spring sunshine. (I spent last weekend walking in the magnificence of the Highlands and am now sporting a deep sun-snow tan.) We wait for the return of the swallows in the next week or so and the long, northern evenings hold out the promise of the return of life in all its fullness.
And yet, news carried on the wind speaks of melting ice, food riots and starvation and, closer to home, fuel strikes and long queues and fights at the petrol stations. Meanwhile, oil expert Matt Simmons declares it to be entirely feasible that petrol will rise in price to $300 a barrel within the next five years.
All this focuses our minds sharply. Since the end of the Positive Energy conference a month or so ago, there have been numerous gatherings to re-watch DVDs of conference presentations and to explore what the building storm means for us as a community and for the bioregion of which we form a part. Plans for basic skills training programmes are hatched and a hundred plans to build resilience into our systems take shape.
 But how does all this news of the unravelling of the natural world and of global society land with the young people who are on the point of moving into their inheritance? Old enough to understand the implications but not generally yet in positions of power to be able to do much about it, how must the current unravelling feel?
We have with us at present a group of 13 students from US universities, here under the aegis of the Living Routes educational programme. I would say that among the strongest emotions they display is one of impatience and a desire to get stuck in, to ‘do something’.
So, while there is a general appreciation of the need for a sound theoretical understanding of how the world works — and how it can be made to work a whole lot better — I find with this group of students, as with none I have worked with before, a real urgency to engage on a very practical level. They demonstrate a highly commendable desire to use what power and control they do have to make a difference in their own backyard. So it is that today, they are hard at work beautifying the area around an old RAF bunker (the land that the community sits on used to be part of the neighbouring air base). This involves clearing it out, disposing responsibly of the rubbish and creating ‘seed-balls’ — flower seeds folded into balls of the earth they dig out of the bunker that they will then distribute around the area at the end of the day.
 This is formally part of their educational programme — their ‘service learning’ project, where they have an opportunity to create something of beauty for the community. Through the summer and autumn, we will remember their smiling faces as the woods teem with colour and fragrance.
This may seem like a fairly paltry response to sheer scale of the challenges that lie before us. And yet, all journeys begin with the first, small steps. To identify that over which one has control and to choose to exercise that control to create beauty is a fine first step. The woods this morning felt alive with the positive energy of young people choosing to make a creative difference in their own backyard. They will carry the memory of the morning in the cells of their bodies — and all will be the richer for it.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
25 April 2008
The Transition Town Concept
Jonathan Dawson suggests that ecovillages are moving toward encouraging Transition Towns, which allow sustainability to be incorporated into mainstream society.
A great thing about living in such a large community (I know that the 500 or so souls who call this place home may not seem like a major conurbation to any Londoners reading this blog, but it is large by the standard of most ecovillages) is the scale of diversity that it affords. The place often feels like a small village that believes itself to be an unusually dynamic, medium-sized town, with so much happening on so many different fronts.
An interesting recently-launched initiative involving a number of community members is the creation of a Transition Town group in our local town, Forres. The Transition Towns concept is elegant and powerful and may just be the saving of us all.
For participating communities, it involves a three-step process:
First, acknowledge the strong probability that in the near future, our communities are going to have much less cheap energy available to them than at present.
Second, recognise that pretty much all our systems — for food production, clothing, house-building, making a living — are more or less completely dependent on the availability of cheap energy sources.
Third, embrace the reality of energy descent as an opportunity to re-design our communities and entire societies along more human-scale, inclusive, equitable and convivial lines.
Now, you could say that this is what we have been doing here for decades, that Findhorn already is a Transition Town (or rather, Transition Village that believes itself to be a town). However, the point about the Transition Town concept — and what makes it so alive and popular at present — is that it offers a way for everyone to get involved in the work of creating sustainable communities, not just those choosing to live in ecovillages whose core purpose is finding ways of living lightly on the earth.
 A key weakness of the ecovillage model in today’s world is that it lacks an effective replication strategy. Almost all of the large and well-established ecovillages like Findhorn were created in the 1960s and 70s at a time of low land prices and lax planning regulations. While some new ecovillages are forming, they are few in number and tend to face prodigious difficulties in finding affordable land and in winning planning permission.
So it is that our month-long ecovillage training programmes have, for the most part, shifted from being courses in how to create ecovillages into immersion experiences in ecovillages (from which participants emerge inspired and better resourced to be able to get stuck into building sustainability back in their home places).
We have an ecovillage training programme in Findhorn at the moment — 25 or so people from across Europe come here for a month of deep exploration of the four key elements of sustainability: technology, economy, spirituality (or world views) and the social dimension of sustainability.
I teach the economy module and, as ever, find myself divided between focusing on the specificity of creating and nurturing ecovillage-level economies or on looking more widely at the challenges and opportunities facing local economies in society at large. This time, as is generally the case, the predominant demand was for the latter. I find myself with increasing frequency pointing course participants to the Transition Town rather than the ecovillage model as the vehicle for their new-found enthusiasm.
I see ecovillages like Findhorn as having many parallels to monasteries. Does this sound sad and gloomy? This is not the way I experience it. Think of Iona and the other great Celtic monasteries created by Colomba, Brendan, Patrick and others. These were centres of light, dedicated to keeping alive the flames of learning and beauty during a dark age in European civilisation.
The role of ecovillages in the wider push towards sustainability is still unclear in this age when the traditional door to organic community development from the ground up is all but closed off. However, if our contribution is to be no more than as centres of deep experimentation, removing ourselves a little from the world in order to better be able to dream it anew, and then to manifest and communicate that vision through training, this is a lineage that I embrace with pride.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
17 March 2008
The Dog that Turned Green
Communities in Scotland and Brazil raise questions about carbon trading
I have just watched an excellent movie called The Carbon Connection. The film focuses on two communities, in Scotland and Brazil, which find themselves on opposite sides of a carbon trade deal.
The town of Grangemouth near Glasgow lives cheek by jowl with a huge BP refinery that has bought the right to continue polluting by buying carbon credits through the planting of eucalyptus stands in Brazil.
The scale of the pollution in Grangemouth is scarcely imaginable given the proximity of the human population. The fumes are so bad and mysterious that one of those interviewed said her dog even occasionally turned green!
Meanwhile, in Brazil, the principal impact of the thirsty eucalyptus, as far as local people are concerned, is to dramatically lower the water table, emptying their wells and killing the plants on which they depend.
 The two communities are taught how to use hand-held cameras and the film records their stories, the films they make to send to each other. It is profoundly moving to see communities talk to each other rather than through the distorting lens of the global media and to so deeply empathise with each other’s plight. Both communities thought their situation serious until they saw the problems faced by the other.
So, what has this to do with a column called ‘Life at Findhorn’? Its relevance derives from a debate happening within Findhorn and indeed the wider ecovillage movement over the concept of carbon credits.
On watching The Carbon Connection, one might come out thinking — "well that’s it then, carbon trading is simply a bad thing, end of story". But it is not that simple. In truth, there are many carbon trade initiatives that deliver solid and tangible benefits to communities — and ecovillages have great potential to be vehicles for just such transactions.
Ecovillages in Senegal, for example, are being funded to replant their mangrove forests and to introduce solar cookers. Now, as it happens, this work is not being funded through carbon trading, but it perfectly easily could be.
We could easily set up a mechanism whereby, for example, participants at the Positive Energy conference (http://www.findhorn.org/positiveenergy) we are organising here in Findhorn at Easter — who collectively will generate a fair amount of CO2 getting here — could be invited to make donations to fund such work in Senegal, or indeed in our own tree-planting or renewable energy programmes.
Perhaps, as seems so often to be the case, the key question is that of scale. Perhaps community-to-community, ecovillage-to-ecovillage schemes of this sort could work in ways that are life-and-Earth-affirming, enabling those of us who are heavy carbon consumers make the transition to a low-impact lifestyle while transferring resources in helpful ways to the global south?
Or are the dangers of muddying the message too great? If we say, "well, some carbon trading can be OK", will not the corporate spin-doctors respond in much the same way as they did with climate change denial — sowing the seeds of confusion as a smokescreen to permit business as usual? Especially so given that the great majority of carbon trading today is on a huge scale and probably resembles much more closely the BP/Brazil trade than the ecovillage model.
Can we run the risk of diluting the core message that we all need to dramatically reduce our carbon consumption as soon as possible?
Should we waste this opportunity to tie our gradual energy descent into the transfer of resources to sister communities across the south?
This is a live and open debate. We rejoin it at the Positive Energy conference. Why not consider joining us? — there are still some places available.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
29 February 2008
The LA Ecovillage
Jonathan Dawson blogs about an alternative Findhorn, in downtown Los Angeles...
I want to devote my blog this week to an extraordinary development unfolding in a poor, multi-ethnic, working-class neighbourhood some 6,000 miles from here — in inner-city Los Angeles.
Why on Earth would I do that in a column called Life At Findhorn?! Well, first because we are part of a much larger global family, one of whose members, the Los Angeles Ecovillage, is engaged in quite wonderfully distinctive and inspiring work. Second, because I have just returned after spending ten days there, participating in the annual board meeting of the Global Ecovillage Network.
In terms of the general flavour of LAEV, in retrospect the die can be seen to have been cast right at its inception. It was the early 1980s and the original idea of the founder, Lois Arkin, had been to create a new-build intentional community outside town.
 Then the Watts riots happened and LA burned in the heat of racial conflict. Lois decided that the priority was to work within rather than without. So, she located herself in the small corner of Koreatown — today very multi-ethnic but with a strong Latino flavour — where she finds herself to this day. The intentional community of around 30 of which she is a member sees its mission in terms of helping bring back to life the entire neighbourhood in which they live.
The two large, Mediterranean-style houses in which most intentional community members live feel like nothing more than great beehives, with a continual traffic of people in and out. On my first morning in the community, a group of kids from a local community centre working on a video project were filming within the courtyard, asking us about GEN and its relevance to neighbourhoods like this.
Later, great boxes of locally-grown, organic vegetables were delivered and community members set to work dividing them into boxes to be collected by members of the food cooperative. More people coming in and out, most stopping to exchange news and chat.
Several of the evenings I was there, there were also public speakers in the community’s main lounge, with the events open to the general public.
Then, there is the traffic out. One community member is working installing PV solar panels on properties throughout the city. Another goes out regularly to man the phones for a fund-raising drive by the local, independent radio station.
Others are off to work at the Bicycle Kitchen (an initiative born in LAEV but that has now moved out into the neighbourhood due to a lack of space), a workshop in which young local people are taught how to repair bicycles.
Community members have been involved in creating mosaics that now decorate the street, planting trees, sculpting a playful and beautiful cob bench (in the shape of a dragon), installing permeable pavements that allow rainwater to run down to the water-table below, helping design a small local park along permaculture lines and, most spectacular, working with local children to create a colourful mandala in the middle of the street.
Community members seem to spend a lot of time in this mandala — community meals, meetings, workshops, discussions — while the traffic slows and gently wends its way around them. This is part of a conscious effort to ‘re-educate the traffic’, as Lois puts it. One poster within the community shows a road filled with cyclists on one of the periodic Reclaim The Streets days. The poster declares: ‘We are not blocking the traffic — We are the traffic’.
It is great, if all too rare, to see an ecovillage get stuck in in an urban context, really working in cooperation with their neighbours and helping transform and humanise an entire neighbourhood.
Now, however, the initiative is under threat — and this is where you, dear reader, may just be able to help. The LA school department is planning to locate yet another school in the neighbourhood — there are several there already. This would entail demolishing 35 affordable housing units (all too rare in the city) and even more bussing in of kids from other parts of town.
The ecovillagers are fighting it tooth and nail and have set up an online petition asking the authorities to find another site. If you feel inspired, visit http://www.laecovillage.org and sign up.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
22 February 2008
Away with the Fairies
Spring has sprung at Findhorn, and memories of nature spirits are re-awakened
Spring has arrived, it seems. The daffodils are pushing up in my garden. Normally I would be pleased — new life, growth, all of that — but the spectre of global warming dampens my enjoyment. It feels too early. I am concerned about global warming though worrying about it will not keep it at bay — and I am also glad that the days are getting longer, the air is warmer and the flowers are coming up.
It is very beautiful here and I feel, as many of us do, that I am lucky to live in such a place. Many people are drawn to Findhorn initially by the Foundation, the community or the ecovillage — but often they stay because of the land.
 There are parts of Scotland that are more rugged and dramatic than this. The landscape is quite gentle, consisting of farmland, low hills, gorse-covered dunes and of course, the Moray Firth and Findhorn Bay. Most of the drama occurs in the sky in the sunsets and cloud formations. There is, nevertheless, something very compelling about this place.
In the early days Dorothy Maclean believed that she received messages from the nature spirits, the entities that she called devas. Each plant species had one. The Sweet Pea Deva was her first contact. She also named devas with a larger remit such as the Landscape Angel, the energy that presides over this particular spot. In the founders’ minds all places had an angel that gave it its particular character. I find this particularly easy to understand when it comes to cities. The Angel of London is clearly not the same kind of creature as the Angel of New York. In any case the Findhorn Landscape Angel is a powerful presence.
It may seem that the area is special because the community is here, but one can also see it another way — the community is here because the area is special. The mundane explanation is that the community is here because this is where the Caddys and Dorothy ended up homeless and jobless. They would have said otherwise, that they were guided here because this spot was selected by God as part of a greater plan.
Whatever you may think about nature spirits and devas, belief in a real consciousness in nature was central to the Findhorn ethos in the early days. Back then there was no doubt in the community that successfully creating a flourishing garden on a sand dune was a direct result of communicating and cooperating with nature spirits. The rationalist would say that it had more to do with the fact that we have a nice little microclimate here — that is warmer and drier than is usual for this far north. The rationalist would argue that along with heavy composting, this accounts for their success. It was probably a bit of both — Peter listened to the fairies in the garden and read books on the subject.
Today we don’t talk so much about the nature spirits. Now it is all about energy efficiency and carbon footprints. We have become more down-to-earth and practical, and are adopting scientifically based technologies, like the living machine; a method of using plants to cleanse wastewater. This is as it should be. We need to be practical if we are to help preserve an environment in which we can not only survive but that provides us with the sense of connection and spiritual nourishment that we need to be healthy and whole.
Just recently, some people here celebrated Imbolc, the Celtic festival of Bride in which the goddess emerges from the darkness of the earth in her maiden form and heralds the beginning of spring. Others, like your regular contributor, Jonathan Dawson, are busy organising a conference on going carbon neutral that will be held next month. Both ways of relating to nature are present and thriving here and that’s a good thing because both are needed.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
19 February 2008
Blazing a Trail
Approaches to leadership evolve, and one man's vision for an art centre enriches the whole community
In recent weeks there has been a series of meetings organised by the Foundation and the New Findhorn Association (NFA), on community building. The theme of the latest was Leadership. I did not go to this meeting, so I will not write about it — but it has got me thinking about leadership in the community and how it’s perceived.
Leadership is a word that comes up often here. It features in the titles of workshops and meetings — and is generally a topic of interest. This is perhaps not surprising as we don‘t have really have leaders in the generally understood sense of the word. The Foundation has a management group who make decisions about budgets and policy and so on. Their function is basically administrative which is not the same thing as leadership. This is not to say that members of Management aren’t leaders, but it doesn’t necessarily go with the territory. In any case, Management’s writ does not run outside the Foundation and the majority in the community are not Foundation staff members.
In the early days, leadership was very straightforward. Peter and Eileen Caddy with Dorothy Maclean founded the community through following divine guidance. Eileen got the guidance from a higher source and Peter, to whom God did not speak but who had utter faith in the validity of what came through Eileen, carried out whatever that guidance suggested. The style was autocratic but appropriate for the time. Without Peter’s intense focus, the community might never have been built.
This changed when Eileen received guidance that she should no longer give guidance to the community. Her inspirational messages could be found in her books but she no longer gave practical directions to the community. It was now on its own and had to experiment with new forms of leadership.
Today the concept of leadership has evolved into the idea that anyone can be a leader. It is not dependant on position or popularity or divine authority although inner authority is a necessary part. For me, leadership is demonstrated when someone has a clear vision that they firmly believe in and then take the necessary steps to bring it into being. If the vision is a good one and the timing is right, support will naturally follow.
 A good example of this is the Moray Art Centre. Until very recently the arts at Findhorn were housed in a few shabby pre-fabricated bungalows, which apart from the pottery, were little used. Randy Klinger, a painter who lives here had a vision for a proper art centre, one that would serve not only the Findhorn community but also all of Moray. There would be studios, exhibition space and room for craft shows, classes and lectures. It would be a focal point for the arts in the area. It would not be cheap.
Randy had no money himself and the Foundation was unable to help, but he held to his vision even through times when support was lukewarm, found supporters and funding and the Art Centre is now a reality. Not yet completed nor totally paid for, it is already active and providing a venue for the arts at Findhorn.
I find it very inspiring to see how one person, without financial resources, without sanction from any other ‘authority’ has a vision and makes it happen. That is real leadership.
An inspired individual is one thing but the question that comes up for the community is, how do we, as a collective, demonstrate leadership. Guidance, group process, being the change we want to see — these are among the elements that go into the ongoing work of defining and embodying that elusive quality known as leadership.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
01 February 2008
The Whiskey Barrel House
Rhiannon Hanfman explores a sustainable house and garden like no other
In this community of varied and unusual dwellings, my favourite is the house of my friend, Craig Gibsone. Craig; an artist, potter and Ecovillage trainer has lived at Findhorn since the 60s. He started building his house sometime around 1986 and been has constantly adding to it ever since. It's still not finished. Maybe never will be.
This house is one of the cluster of barrel houses that has received national recognition as an example of innovative building. These houses are made from very large whiskey vats, hence the name. Moray is malt whiskey country and these huge wooden vats discarded by the distillers are perfect for making round hobbit-like houses. Within the cluster there are simple one-barrel houses and more elaborate two-storey barrels. Craig’s is the most interesting and is comprised of two barrels held together by an octagonal structure. It is a warren of rooms and passages and a sense of barrels within barrels. Built to no specific plan it has grown organically as Craig has extended and added bits. It feels larger than it is due to unexpected rooms leading from other rooms and various nooks and crannies. If asked how many rooms it has, I really couldn’t say. The place defies anything as precise as counting.
 In addition to the whiskey barrels, almost every other part of the building was once something else. Craig believes that it is composed of around 73% recycled materials. All furnishings are 100% recycled. Nothing new has been bought. This house is not only eco, it is also very beautiful in a funky kind of way and has a unique character. It is heated by solar and wood with electricity backup if needed. So far it hasn‘t been needed. Though we all complain about the weather here, it is really very mild compared to other parts of Scotland. Rainwater is collected for various uses.
Craig has an artist’s eye for finding beauty and value in things other people might consider rubbish. A badly painted mirror that someone had put on a skip caught his eye. He cleaned it up and found a beautiful 19th or possibly 18th century mirror. The place is full of stuff like that.
The sense of one area leading in another continues into the garden. There one really can get lost. It’s a permaculture garden and to an eye accustomed to well-weeded, tidy rows of flowers or vegetables, it’s a mess. It is, however, a mess with purpose. The philosophy of permaculture is to let nature do most of the work. Once plants are established they take care of themselves. The garden becomes self-seeding, self-composting and self-sustaining, just as in nature. The yield is as good, if not better than a conventionally maintained vegetable garden. Chickens help keep the ground clear and weeded. When they have cleared one patch they get move to another.
I love this house for its originality and the way it blends with nature rather than impose on it. It is a unique expression of the aesthetic and individuality of its creator. I couldn’t reproduce it and I wouldn’t want to, but it does inspire me to want to create a dwelling that is as eco-friendly and as reflective of my individuality as this one is of Craig’s.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
22 January 2008
Guiding the Game
Standing in for Jonathan Dawson, Rhiannon Hanfman tells us about a game that has become an important part of Findhorn
When Jonathan asked me to fill in for him again, I had just come out of a workshop called The Game of Transformation.
This workshop is possibly the most imaginative and original workshops offered by the Findhorn Foundation.
 The Game of Transformation is just that — a game. Dice are rolled, pieces are moved, and players move towards an objective. The difference between this and other games is that the objective is not to win but to increase awareness and gain self-knowledge.
The idea of a game facilitating spiritual development is not new. I remember stories like Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, where mysterious monks in remote monasteries play games with incredibly complex and arcane rules. This is something like that but it’s a lot more fun.
Nevertheless, there are complex and arcane rules so every game has five players and two facilitators or guides. The guides are known as Game Overall Directors, or G.O.D. I am one of them. One guide writes everything that happens down in a chronicle for the players and the other facilitates the process.
The game was the brainchild of Joy Drake, who lived at Findhorn in the 70s. She thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a game that we could play on long winter evenings, like Monopoly but with more consciousness. She worked on the idea and, with the input of many others in the community, something began to emerge.
The process was creative and experimental. Different things were tried. Some worked, some didn’t. In the beginning it was a light-hearted exercise but it soon became apparent that something deeper was going on. The game seemed to develop a spirit of it’s own. This presence or energy became known as the Game Deva.
The Game Deva is mercurial, humourous, one minute frivolous, the next profound. It’s a bit of a trickster that leads you down some awful road and only at the end can you see why you had to go that way. It is a joyous, life-loving spirit. At least that is how I experience it.
The Monopoly analogy fits but rather than acquiring property and wealth, players acquire self-knowledge and self-acceptance. The game symbolically re-enacts the journey of life and each player enters the game with a purpose or intention. They are ‘born’, and are gifted with free will and intuition with which they can create their game. On their life path, they experience insights and setbacks; miracles and dark nights of the soul; opportunities to serve, appreciations and nature experiences, pain and joy.
 How can a game, however complex, facilitate spiritual development and personal growth? I think it is this: we play games in much the same way as we live our lives. We react in the same way and make decisions in the same way. In our real lives much of this may be unconscious but in the structured environment of the game, patterns become apparent and what we do is reflected back to us very clearly. This can be a real eye opener.
The game in its various forms has been part of the life of Findhorn since its inception. In addition to the original version we use in workshops for guests, there is an abbreviated version, the Box Game, that is frequently played by departments within the Foundation to clarify their issues and by individuals for any number of reasons. The Angel Cards that are used ubiquitously here came from the game.
The game absorbed me completely last week as it tends to do and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love guiding the game and feel it’s a privilege to see my five players blossom and change so profoundly in such a short space of time.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
15 January 2008
What was the first ecovillage?
Pondering the beginnings of communitarian living
 The whole holiday period seems, on reflection, to glow in the illumination of candle-light. This far north, the nights are long and dark and a deeply intimate energy settles over the community during the solstice period — all lit with the magical light of bonfires and candles.
On the solstice itself, each of us walked a spiral, candle in hand, walking our way out of the old year into the new and drawing an angel card for the year. The angel drawn for the community as a whole was Awakening.
A highly creative group of people here on a programme over the New Year wove us into a theatre piece they had created tracing the turning seasons of the year, performed in magnificent costumes up in the woodland and illuminated with great home-made lanterns.
 Occasional forays up into the mountains cut short by the dying of the light not long after lunchtime. Great bonfires beating back the evening’s biting cold. And everywhere, singing, games and conversation in the intimate glow of candle-light.
This is a fitting image for the ecovillage ethic, which has always been about the lighting of candles as an alternative to cursing the darkness. Moving beyond the politics of protest to model a positive vision of the ideal society.
Not long ago, I was asked at a public meeting “Which was the first ecovillage?” My initial impulse was to name Sólheimar, the celebrated Icelandic community created in 1931. However, I allowed my mind to soften, to release the specificity of the modern connotations associated with the word ecovillage and to look for something older. What was the first community, I asked myself, which would have called itself an ecovillage had the term then existed?
Eventually, after reflecting on various communitarian initiatives at different moments in history, I plumped for the Celtic Christian monasteries of the sixth and seventh centuries off the west coast of Ireland and Scotland. Iona, Skellig Michael and the like. These were small, decentralised, generally mixed-gender communities, only occasionally celibate, and dedicated to loving the land, celebrating the sacred and keeping alive the candle of love and learning in a time of profound darkness across Europe.
(I have since learned from reading the intentional communities scholar, Bill Metcalf, that the lineage goes back much further, until at least Pythagoras’s community in Crotone in the fifth century BC.)
This image of keeping alive the candle of love and learning in a period of gathering darkness does not feel to me too fanciful.
Beyond all such reflections, this is the season — with daylight hours shrunk and the mercury tumbling — that tests the resolve of the would-be marathon runner. Yesterday evening, I ran through the gathering twilight, throwing up a slushy spray as I went. So far, so good. I find my appetite undimmed.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
7 January 2008
Christmas at Findhorn
As the temperature at the Findhorn eco-village drops to double-digit negatives, the residents prepare for carol-singing, parties and a dip in the North Sea.
In my seven years here, I don’t remember it being as cold as it has been this last week. The temperature has dropped into double-digit negative and the ice-sheets extend way out into Findhorn Bay. At night the shifting ice sets up a creaking, cracking cacophony out in the darkness of the bay while the over-wintering geese rail and keen in response. A wild and eerie winter soundscape. The short days are cloudless, with the world fair sparkling in the diamond light.
If I could be here in Findhorn just once in the year, it would be at this time. It is the one period when the guests on programmes and courses, never entirely absent, drop to a trickle and we reclaim the community centre as our own. This year, we have taken out the tables from the centre of the dining area and replaced them with a circle of sofas — an oasis of comfort and intimacy appropriately located at the very heart of the community.
There is a host of rituals that mark this turning point in the year as no other. The season began last weekend with the Winter Gathering, an annual concert of story-telling, dancing and carol-singing that we organise and offer to our friends in the neighbouring towns and villages.
Also already under way is Angels and Mortals, a game wherein each of the players is assigned one mortal to look after for the ten days up to Christmas Eve, anonymously showering them with little gifts and blessings. Each one is both giver (angel) and receiver (mortal), with the anticipation growing up to the denouement of the identity of the angels on Christmas Eve.
This weekend for the Solstice, the Hall will be decked out with candles and on the floor, a great spiral made up of branches cut from our pine forest. We will each have an opportunity to walk the spiral, reflecting on the year gone and considering that to come. Then comes the drawing of angel cards, one for each of us and one for the community as a whole. Each of these cards carries a quality — love, patience, wholeness, synthesis and so on — that may be of help in our journey through the year ahead.
Then the excitement of Christmas Day, one of only two occasions in the year (the other being Rabbie Burns day) when meat is served in the community centre. Rabbie, of course, is celebrated in haggis — Christmas with a big fat local turkey. On Boxing Day, a sizeable group of us walk up in the Cairngorms, thawing out in the evening over thick turkey soup.
Then there will be the Polar Bear run, a speedy dip in the North Sea on New Year’s morning followed by a sauna.
All the while and in-between, a host of gatherings, meals, parties, evenings of games, long walks on the beach and up the Findhorn river, carol singing, meditations and vigils. And barely a television in sight.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
20 December 2007
Returning to Findhorn
The Findhorn eco-village has had to work hard to avoid becoming a 'New Age old people's home', but it seems to have paid off
 Let me introduce you to Michael. Now in his early 30s, Michael spent the first 18 years of his life here in Findhorn before heading off to the US to seek his fortune and see how the world might look when viewed through different lenses.
Barely a day passed, however, when he did not think about the community where he grew up. And, in early 2002, just in time for the Findhorn community’s 40th birthday and the launch of his mother’s book, ‘In Search of the Magic of Findhorn’, he came back — and decided to stay.
Michael’s journey runs parallel to that of a good number of his peers and now, a happy group of the generation of children he grew up with here has moved back and today plays a variety of important roles in the community.
Michael notes two significant changes in the community compared to the one he left in the mid-90s. First, as it had grown in size and complexity over the previous decade, it had become easier for young people to stay on and find a niche for themselves in the community. Several of our enterprises — notably the shop, bakery and Bakehouse restaurant — actually favour young people in their employment policy.
On the other hand, and also part of the process of enlargement and diversification, the body at the heart of the community, the Findhorn Foundation, had shrunk back to its area of core expertise, namely the provision of educational services.
In the process, many activities that the Foundation used to finance and manage had been shed, delegated or sold off into private or cooperative community enterprises. One of the activities thus shed was the funding of a coordinator for the Youth Project, the core focus for youth activities in the community and also often attracting children and young people from neighbouring communities.
 As a result, on his return Michael found that young people were less consciously held by the community than previously and that intergenerational conflict and misunderstanding were on the rise. He also noted a strong demographic imbalance, with a large gap in the community’s population between the ages of around 18 and 40.
This was symptomatic of wider trends in the community as a whole. For, with the Foundation clearly defining its remit in terms of the performance of its core educational business and the welfare of its hundred or so employees, it became ever clearer that we were lacking an overarching governance body for the entire community, a majority of which did not and never had worked for the Foundation.
The Youth Project was just one of a number of areas of areas of activity that were in danger of falling between the cracks. Who was responsible for recycling, for care of the elderly, for decision-making and conflict facilitation outside of the community of Foundation employees? Who, in short, was to manage the community’s welfare state?
As you would expect in this place, necessity became the occasion for a fresh bout of creativity and the New Findhorn Association was born with membership open to and encouraged for all members of the community. Michael was one of a number of young people who got involved in helping to steer the NFA in the direction of more actively holding the young people and giving them a greater voice in community affairs.
 Today, the NFA funds two part-time youth positions — one a project worker, the other a youth advocate who sits on the NFA council. There is a growing range of youth-oriented cultural and educational programmes. Findhorn is one of the core nodes of NextGEN, the Youth Council of the Global Ecovillage Network. And, if we are still not demographically representative of the population as a whole, the 20 – 40 year-old age group is no longer as sadly sparse as it has been.
Work, of course, remains to be done, a key challenge being that of providing reasonably well-paid and responsible jobs for our youth. But a corner seems to have been turned. One of the community’s pioneering figures suggested years ago that a real challenge facing us was to avoid the trap of becoming a ‘New-Age old people’s home’. If we have succeeded in at least postponing that dread fate for the time being, we have much to be thankful for to Michael and the other young people who have been so active over the last five years or so.
And the latest news from Michael? Well, he has recently come back from the most recent gathering of the Young Scotland Programme, a week of debates and presentations on themes of importance to Scotland’s youth. And, on the back of a keenly and passionately argued speech on the potential for renewable energy to transform our society for the better, he has returned glorying in the title of Young Scottish Thinker of the Year.
Bravo.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
10 December 2007
Marathon Man
Jonathon Dawson discusses the financial problems at Findhorn and the village's unique way of dealing with them.
 Jonathan relishes a life away from the fast lane — well until he runs the London Marathon
It was with a happy thud that a package landed on my doormat this week providing me with the news that my application to run the London marathon next spring has been successful. (Applications outnumber places available so heavily that it is possible to wait for years to get the thumbs us. This is just my second year in the queue and I am well chuffed.)
So, I am set for a winter of pounding out the miles. Oh, but what a training ground I have in the six miles of sandy beach arching round to Burghead at the opposite end of the bay. With the snow-covered peaks of the Highlands to the north glistening in the clear winter sunlight, this feels more like play than work.
One of the attractions of ecovillage living, in theory at least, is that it provides an opportunity for downshifting, living more simply, working less and leaving more time for the pleasures of life. The theory is great — and that, I guess, is the way it works out for some folk here.
Personally, I have never worked harder or put in more hours in my life than over the last four or five years. Yet, only rarely do I feel anything that could remotely be described as stress or burn out. I do sometimes wonder how both these observations could be true — but true they both do seem to be.
Several factors appear to be at work. First is the sheer diversity of work that I, in common with most people here, are engaged in. You know the dreaded dinner-party question — ‘What do you do?’. A strong sub-text to this question is ‘one-word answers only are accepted. Doctor, nurse, teacher, plumber ... that’s the kind of answer we’re looking for.’
This is symptomatic of the professional monoculture imposed by our current profit-oriented economy. Each of us has a multitude of gifts that would enrich our communities — being funny, a good listener, a great reader of stories, having the gift of music, playing with kids, a wonderful cook, having great hands for shoulder massage, green fingers ... the list of our talents for generating real wealth is almost endless. But rarely, in the modern world, is there space and time for such an economy of reciprocity to flourish.
Here, this is a garden that we seek to nurture. People generally define themselves more widely than in main street and derive income from a range of different activities. Moreover, volunteering is rampant. An important step in the process of becoming a long-term member of the community is ‘learning to say no’. Such is the pleasure taken in simply serving and being recognised as a willing and valuable member of the community, that the habit can become addictive, irrespective of the lack of financial reward.
 A second factor is that most people here have to greater or lesser extents found a way of aligning their values and their lifestyle. Ethical dilemmas, of course, continue to abound as for everyone else in our society. In a world where ethically-sourced products that deplete neither natural nor social capital are consistently more expensive than those that do, this is bound to be so — especially when earnings are so low for most in our community.
Nonetheless, there is relatively high job satisfaction as most find their work to be meaningful and of value. As a result, the lines between work and play get blurred and it becomes ever more difficult to classify one’s activities as one or the other. Is spending time with my students out of class, some of it spent discussing their research projects, work?
What about giving a talk on ecovillages to a group of visiting dignitaries, or taking a turn leading one of the Sunday afternoon tours of visitors who just want to find out what we are about? What about helping to move rocks from the roof of the Universal Hall so that maintenance work can be undertaken? Truly, if this kind of activity really constitutes work, bring more of it on, that’s what I say!
One final and very practical factor that explains why we can comfortably fit so much into our days is the lack of commuting. With most able to move between home and work on foot or by cycle, great swathes of time that many others spend in traffic jams become liberated for meditation, singing, networking, gardening, designing and organising conferences, cutting logs, running on the beach — whatever is one’s work/play of choice.
Indeed, ‘traffic jam’ time is my own preferred moment for running on the beach. When the tide is low in the early morning, and the beach is empty save for the occasional seal or dolphin or the odd flock of sea-wading birds, work feels like an alien concept.
By the way, I will be running to raise funds for the Global Ecovillage Network that does splendid work in bringing the ecovillage experience to a wider public audience on an entirely voluntary basis. If you would like to sponsor me, do please get in touch by email: http://www.jonathan@gen-europe.org
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
29 November 2007
Economic Worries and Divine Intervention
Jonathon Dawson discusses the financial problems at Findhorn and the village's unique way of dealing with them.
 So, last week, I left the Findhorn Foundation dangling over the edge of a cliff (in the form of an £800,000 debt) and torn between divine guidance and economic discipline as escape strategies, with its bankers getting twitchy. In fact — I am afraid it is always thus with cliff-hanging episode-enders — the camera angle made the situation look more perilous than it actually was.
Though by 2000 the Foundation had run five straight years of deficits, a good chunk of this debt was incurred in one single necessary expenditure — the rewiring of its one of its two campuses, Cluny Hill College in the neighbouring town of Forres. Moreover, the Foundation had several million pounds worth of property assets and was never in any serious danger of going under.
Nonetheless, the very real liquidity crisis and the string of operating losses did raise important issues that went right to the heart of the community’s self-definition.
As explained in last week’s blog, guidance has always been core to the community’s decision-making processes. This has led us on many merry adventures that we would have been most unlikely to have embarked upon had we been governed by left-brain rationality and economic logic alone.
For some, this colourful and cavalier history appears to be seen as proof that we are, in fact, exempt from the humdrum rules of the market. A number of senior members of the community, for example, left in protest when in the mid-70s the Foundation bought the hotel that now houses Cluny Hill College because it took out a bank loan to do so.
Such a course, so the argument went, was proof of a lack of faith in the community’s ability to manifest the cash necessary for the purchase. Since the decision to buy had been the result of guidance, so the logic went, we should have trusted that the cash would come in.
Similarly, by the late 90s, there was a voice within the community that the path out of our financial difficulties was by way of guidance and manifestation rather than self-imposed economic discipline. The former was presented as representing ‘abundance’ as opposed to ‘fear-driven’ thinking.
 The then head of the Foundation’s management team, Mari Hollander, sees the period as an important turning point in the development of the community. Accounting systems and practices were improved, with each of the Foundation’s departments becoming more like cost-centres, with awareness for balancing costs and income. The Foundation received a few generous donations and sold several substantial property assets to members and supporters of the community.
Meanwhile, Foundation members rallied to the cause. A good number tithed and, where they could, deferred payment of their income to ease the squeeze.
In parallel, detailed decision-making, which had previously been in the hands of all the Foundation’s co-workers, was mandated to a management team — where it remains to this day. This team consults with a council of co-workers that sets strategic priorities on all key issues.
A five-year plan to get back into the black was designed. The goal was achieved in two years and the Foundation has made operating profits for each of the last five years.
Mari took a no-nonsense approach to the need for greater efficiency and financial savvy: “If we are to manifest our needs, we need to know what they are. If we are subsidising departments, we need to know.”
This is a down to earth wisdom that allows for the possibility that the divine may be found in the balance sheets as well as in the meditation sanctuary. That economic rigour and guidance allied with manifestation may be bed-fellows rather than in competition.
The trick, it seems to me, is to be aware of the financial bottom line but not necessarily to be driven by it. To leave space for the miraculous to happen, and to see economic intelligence not with suspicion but as a potential tool in facilitating the process. Do we have the balance right? Who knows? This is an ongoing and lively debate within an ever-evolving community.
An old traditional story has it that as the storm waters rose ever higher, a house-owner climbed up onto the roof of his house to escape the flood. Three times, rowing boats passed offering to take him to safety. Each time he refused to jump on board, declaring his faith in the Lord who he knew would come to save him. He drowned and went to Heaven where he asked God why He had let him down.
“I tried three times!”, God replies.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
16 November 2007
Divine Guidance in Public Toilets
Jonathan Dawson explores the mysterious and unconventional origins of Findhorn.
A sure sign that we are indeed becoming a village is that the community has its own weekly newspaper, the Rainbow Bridge (named after the bridge linking mortals and the gods in Norse mythology).
 ‘The Bridge’ is a 50-odd page compilation of reflections, dialogue, letters, information and advertisements for upcoming courses, job adverts, houses to let — the usual kind of stuff you would expect to find in any local paper.
However, the inside front page is unmistakably and distinctively Findhorn. Here, every week, we have ‘Guidance Through Eileen’ and a short inspirational piece drawn from the writings of Dorothy Maclean. Dorothy and Eileen (Caddy) were two of our founding elders.
This week’s pieces are on the subject of love: ‘Love is the key that opens all doors. Love is the light that lightens all darkness’, Eileen’s piece begins. At this point, we seem to be deviating from the staple fare of the weekly village paper.
The weekly guidance in The Bridge forms a very direct and tangible link with our roots. For the first wayward seed that was to blossom into today’s community blew up on this windswept stretch of Scottish coastline in response to divine guidance channelled through Eileen.
Eileen had strong and clear access to ‘the still, small voice’ of God and the early years of the nascent community were strongly driven by the guidance she received, implemented with some rigour by her husband, former military man, Peter.
(In a comic twist and as if to dispel any possibility of spiritual preciousness arising, Eileen was by now meditating and seeking guidance in the caravan park’s public toilets, where she retreated to get some peace from the noisy caravan she shared with her young family.)
 In fact, in those early years, the founders had not even conceived of the idea of creating a community. This emerged only over time by way of guidance received by Eileen, such as they should build a community centre capable of feeding 200 people.
Since hands were few, financial resources scarce and no-one could imagine the logic behind such guidance, this seemed like an unlikely venture to embark on.
However, so sure was the founding group’s conviction that Eileen’s guidance was divinely inspired that they set to work at once. Miraculously and against all the odds, the right people with the right skills arrived on cue and the necessary money poured in.
One of my own pivotal moments in deciding to come to live here was looking at the ‘before and after’ photos that compare the Findhorn Bay caravan park in the early 60s and the early 70s. The first set of shots shows little more than a few isolated caravans on sandy duneland leaning disconsolately into the apparently unrelenting wind.
A decade later and the same landscape had been transformed into a riot of flowers, bushes and trees, framing a series of elegant wooden bungalows. In between, pictures of great gangs of happy-looking people digging trenches, building houses, planting trees.
A decisive moment in the community’s history arrived in the early 70s with Eileen returning from a meditation with the guidance — ‘no more guidance, you each have to access your own’.
 This was wise guidance indeed, for it enabled the community to make the transition gracefully beyond dependence on powerful founding figures into a more mature and self-governing body. (This transition is a rock upon which many young communities and other initiatives of all kinds have foundered.)
Guidance remains central to our decision-making processes. The community was built on deep faith in an intelligence beyond the mind to which we all have access.
So it is that to this day, after issues of import have been considered, discussed and pondered, we enter a silent meditative space, allowing ourselves to open to a wisdom that is not accessible to the rational mind.
In my experience, this is a most useful thing to do on every level. It slows us down, softens the tendency of the mind to polarise and to see things in black and white, opens up possibilities of both/and where only either/or had previously been apparent, creates softness, defuses conflict.
But what happens when people of good faith seek guidance and emerge with different — and apparently incompatible — answers?
Of more urgent and practical importance, how does a community based on the primacy of guidance over the humdrum rules of the marketplace respond when the figures do not add up and it begins to slip heavily into the red?
This is no hypothetical question, for by 2000, the Findhorn Foundation found itself almost a million pounds in debt, with its bankers twitching nervously.
The competing claims of guidance and the need for financial solvency played out — and continue to play out — in the most fascinating way. I will return to tell this story in next week’s blog.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
7 November, 2007
Web of Life
So, we have come full circle. In my first blog, almost exactly a year ago, I began by looking up into the northern skies to watch the geese fly in from the Arctic to their over-wintering grounds. Now, they are back, lacing the high blue autumnal skies in exquisite sweeping arcs, filling the air with the wildness of their cries.
I made it clear in that first blog that I was making a conscious choice to begin my exploration of what it is to live in an ecovillage not with the visible hardware of sustainability — the wind turbines, eco-housing, waste management facilities and so on — but rather with the quality of our relationships, with other people and with the rest of creation.
The primacy of relationships and of community — the software of sustainability — seems even more paramount to me today. As I look back at over a year’s output of blogs, I can see that the researching and writing of these weekly vignettes has helped me come more awake to the richness and diversity of life within the community and to the multiplicity of ways in which it seeks to serve.
When travelling, representing Findhorn or the Global Ecovillage Network, I am often asked what is ‘Findhorn’s position’ on this or that issue or question. I almost always reply that, in truth, there is no one single position — that the Findhorn community is hugely diverse and one could often find as many views on questions of importance as there are members of the community.
This is a huge strength. Reflecting on almost all of the various initiatives that I have referred to over the last year — the green burial ground, the EarthShare organic CSA box scheme, the recently-opened Moray Arts Centre, the Living Routes educational programme that brings undergraduates from US universities here to study, the wind turbines, the Eko community currency, the link with the Kitezh orphan’s ecovillage in Russia, the cluster of ‘whisky barrel houses and so on — almost none can in any sense be said to have been created by the Findhorn community as an entity.
Rather, pretty much all of these initiatives have been the brainchild of individuals or small groups of individuals within the community. There is no master plan! Inspired, anarchic creativity comes closer to the mark. In this sense, the Findhorn community can be seen as a yin holding vessel that permits the proliferation of yang programmes and projects.
I think that this has been key to our continuing vitality. This is always a challenge for mature organisations; as operations become larger, more complex and inevitably more bureaucratic, how to retain freshness and inspiration? The way I see it, what is happening here is that while some of the more mature organisations within the community are passing into dignified middle-age, the raft of new, visionary initiatives being born keeps alive the spirit of vitality and inspiration.
I would argue that the aliveness and robust good health of the community lies close to the heart of this proliferation of new initiatives. Over and over again, I note that the dominant response to increasingly serious challenges, especially on the climate change and peak oil fronts, is one of determined (and often even optimistic) engagement. This comes so much more easily to a community built around a core of shared values that consciously seeks to be of service to something larger than itself.
So, another year has turned. Another intake of Living Routes students dazzles us with their creativity and sweetness. Another group of 30 or so social and environmental activists from various parts of the world — including Burma, Gambia, Chile, Argentina, India and Nepal — has joined us for our annual month-long Ecovillage Design Education programme.
And, high up in the skies, the geese sing to us of the long, slow turning of the Earth, whose children we all are. The pulse that sends them down to Findhorn Bay in their clamorous throngs every autumn is the same pulse that ties us all in to the web of life.
In the words of Mary Oliver:
“Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
30 October, 2007
Peripheral Anomalies or Centres of Inspiration?
As recently as four or five years ago, my undergraduate students and I devised a game as a way of keeping ourselves cheerful. We created our own newspapers, filled with stories that we wrote ourselves, reflecting the kind of material that we wished was covered in the press. It was a way of grounding our visions of a more ecologically conscious and engaged world.
At least in terms of content, these colourful and creative clipped-together newsletters bear an uncanny resemblance to what you can buy today at the newsagents. Apparently out of the blue, our papers (not all, for sure) are presenting us daily with intelligent, joined-up thinking and writing, linking disturbing events in far-off places with their root causes in the over-consuming West. And, just occasionally, as in our own self-created newsletters, there are reports of inspirational models and of community mobilisation in the pursuit of wiser and happier ways of living our lives and providing for our needs.
It is easy to forget just how quickly things have turned around, the urgency with which the serious media are suddenly engaging in the sustainability debate, reflecting rapid shifts in perspectives in society as a whole.
Superficially, all this seems to be great news for the ecovillage movement. After all, so many of the things that we have been banging on about for years — renewable energy, carbon footprints, downsizing and the merits of simpler, more community-based lifestyles — are suddenly grabbing the headlines.
The truth, however, is more complex. For, while as little as ten years ago ecovillages were clear ‘market leaders’, albeit in a marginal niche in which competition was almost non-existent, today sustainable community initiatives in more mainstream contexts abound.
In parallel, a combination of factors — rising land prices, tighter planning regulations and a more individualistic society — are closing off the conventional route to ecovillage formation. Almost all of the well-established ecovillages such as Findhorn were created twenty or more years ago.
In business parlance (paradoxically, given the fact that in terms of foreseeing how society would evolve, we very much backed the right horse), the ecovillage brand is finding itself squeezed.
The question we face now is, given the difficulties inherent in creating new ecovillages and recognising that no more than a small minority of people are likely to choose to live in those that already exist, what in today’s changed world are ecovillages for?
Are we peripheral anomalies in a society that is increasingly mobilising in the face of the challenges ahead or do we retain some distinctive contribution to offer the greater cause?
Last week, a speaking engagement in Hereford afforded me the opportunity to undertake a tour of sustainable community initiatives in the south-west of England in pursuit of some answers to these questions.
The first and lasting impression was of the sheer range, diversity and vitality of initiatives that are sprouting up and of the new and sometimes unexpected alliances that are pushing them forward. The levels of excitement made me wonder whether someone has perhaps recently slipped something into the south-west’s water supply!
Too many fascinating initiatives to describe in any detail, but here are some of the highlights of my week. The Bulmer Foundation http://www.bulmerfoundation.org.uk established by the west country cider firm, is engaged in a coherent and well-put-together programme to promote sustainability in Herefordshire, including local food production, sustainable land management and a first-rate educational programme.
In Totnes, Stroud and far beyond, the Transition Towns movement http://www.transitiontowns.org is emerging as a model that is mobilising communities in the design and implementation of strategies for a low carbon future.
The emergence of a UK co-housing network http://www.cohousing.org.uk — I had the good fortune to spend time at the Stroud co-housing project, one of the movement’s UK pioneers.
The wonderful Thistledown environmental education centre near Stroud that combines beautiful sculpture with nature walks and educational materials on traditional, local farming practices http://www.thistledown.org.uk
The Association of Sustainability Practitioners http://www.asp-online.org representing a hub for clusters of wide-ranging sustainability initiatives in Bristol and beyond.
Perhaps most surprising and inspiring of all was a presentation at the Bristol Schumacher Lectures by Nicky Gavron, Deputy Mayor of London, describing the astonishing range of carbon-cutting achievements already recorded in the capital and the scale of ambition for the future, including a commitment to reduce emissions to 40 per cent of current levels by 2025.
Answers to my questions are still in gestation, but I do return inspired and confident that places like Findhorn still have much to offer.
At present, I see our distinctiveness residing in three broad areas. First, to a society that still tends to look first and most easily to technological solutions to the challenges we face, ecovillages assert the primary importance of strong communities and relationships (both among humans and between humans and the natural world).
Second, ecovillages represent the apogee of citizens taking power into their own hands. There exists a can-do mentality that is likely to be important as we move into uncharted waters ahead where the state may be less able to provide for our needs.
Finally, places like Findhorn are simply incomparable as classrooms. Within these living microcosms of sustainability, with their closed loops and happy synergies, students simply ‘get it’ in a way I have never experienced before.
The interdependent nature, both of our challenges and of the role of ecological design principles in helping us transcend them become clear, tangible and exciting.
It is as centres of inspiration and education, and also perhaps as occasional refuges, that our gift resides.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
22 October, 2007
Sex and the Ecovillage
Jonathan Dawson continues to reveal what it's like to live in an ecovillage discussing the thorny issue of communal sex and other issues...
There is an amusing mismatch between the perceptions that many people have of life in an ecovillage and the actual day-to-day reality. This is reflected in the kinds of questions that communards tend to get asked when out in more mainstream society.
‘Don’t you mostly all sleep in dormitories (or yurts!)? I don’t think I could handle that.’ ‘How do you manage with so little personal space?’ ‘How much pocket-money are you given?’
And there are often questions that delicately and circuitously seek to gain insights into sexual life in communities — questions that often hint at fevered imaginings of what communal sexuality as a lifestyle might look like.
Sorry to disappoint. In many respects, Findhorn feels not so different from many other villages. There are some shared living spaces, but no-one lives in dormitories. Most people have a reasonable amount of private space and any shortage in this department is more than compensated for by an abundance of community spaces — theatre, craft workshops, community centre, saunas, hot tubs and so on.
Everyone earns salaries, many of which admittedly are not generous, but reflect what I suspect may be approximating long-term sustainable levels of purchasing power if we are to live within the planet’s means.
Most interesting of all (once again, sorry for the let-down), I am not sure I have ever lived in a place that is more sexually restrained. This, I think, is for two reasons. First, sexual energy is powerful and explosive, capable of generating both joy and suffering. In our conscious efforts to create a community of love and compassion, I suspect that most people here choose not to engage in casual sex at least in part out of a desire not to contribute to the suffering of others. They tend generally to leap after having had a long and considered look.
The second reason for restraint is altogether more down to earth. Relationship breakdown and its aftermath can be messy and painful, as former partners develop new liaisons while still living nearby and in view. This breeds caution.
However, whether their reasons are based in reality or not, it seems unlikely in the foreseeable future that most people will choose to live in ecovillages such as Findhorn. As a sustainability practitioner, this opens up the question for me as to how ecovillages can be of most service and relevance to the wider sustainability movement of which we form part. If, as seems likely, ecovillages will remain a minority, if not marginal, pursuit as a lifestyle choice, how are we to remain a vibrant resource to the growing surge of sustainability initiatives sweeping the country?
This last week, I went in pursuit of some answers to this question. A speaking engagement in Hereford, and just two days later the Schumacher Society lectures in Bristol, gave me a structure around which to plan a week of visits to sustainability initiatives involving government, business and civil society.
To explore the various themes that emerged during this last week deserves more space than I have here, so I will return to it in next week’s blog. However, I want leave you with an image that came to me during the week as I explored the astonishing wave of imagination and creativity that is building.
The image is of the waters of globalised economic activity dropping (in the face of steadily rising energy prices) to reveal initially isolated islands but eventually whole archipelagos of islands of sustainable models that currently lie just below the water-line. These are the community-owned agriculture and renewables schemes, the farmers’ markets, the alternative currency systems, the earth-based eco-education centres, the closed-loop waste-recycling businesses and so on that folk are currently working on up and down the country.
This is a time not for despondency about powerlessness in the face of the prevailing ugliness and waste — but for excitement at the shape of the new emerging from below the waves.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
15 October, 2007
A Life Devoted to Children
Jonathan Dawson reports on the Russian eco-village which has made it its mission to look after orphaned children...
A great thing about living here is the steady stream of seriously cool people passing through. This week, among our guests — as participants on a one-week course — are two wonderful young women from the Kitezh/Orion foster family ecovillages in [ http://www.kitezh.org/ ]Russia, the two Marias — Krivenkova and Shibaeva. Their stories are quite extraordinary as are those of their home communities.
In the early 1990s, well-known Russian television presenter Dmitri Morozov was a man with a mission. Fired by a vision to create a new community-based model for caring for orphans, he left his fashionable and comfortable life in Moscow for the remote countryside — much to the horror of his colleagues and friends.
He succeeded in enthusing a small band of like-minded friends and headed off into the wilds of rural Kaluga district, about 300 kilometres south of Moscow. There, they set up camp in a primitive three-bedroomed cottage, with no indoor toilet — six people including two orphans. One of these, for part of the first winter, was Liza Hollingshead whose Ecologia Youth Trust, based here in the Findhorn community, has since acted as a conduit for funding, expertise and friendship between our two communities.
To say that the odds were stacked against them would be to vastly understate the scale of the challenge they faced. Yet today, Kitezh is a thriving community comprising nine families, including 24 children, most of whom are orphans or from backgrounds of severe abuse. They eat in a communal dining room, teach and learn in their state-accredited community school and live in beautiful, if somewhat eccentric large wooden houses. All of the buildings have been constructed by the community members themselves with support from friends and volunteers.
Not satisfied with touching the lives of the orphans and other young people within its care, the Kitezh community has the wider aim of influencing policy on orphan care nationwide. Supported by a grant from the UK Big Lottery Fund, over the last three years Kitezh members have been travelling far and wide in Russia, talking to university staff and students, management and staff of orphanages, politicians, educators, foster parents — all who would listen — about the importance of providing a humane and loving environment for orphaned and abused young people.
Meanwhile, Kitezh has been developing substantial theoretical as well as practical expertise as a centre of excellence in the care of orphans. It now provides training to orphanage staff and foster parents from Kaluga region and beyond.
The community’s profile within Russia has risen with astonishing speed. Dmitri Morasov has been awarded the Order of Honour (equivalent to an MBE in Britain) and two other foster parents have been recognised with awards made by the Kaluga regional government. Television cameras are often about the place shooting footage for news items and films.
Then, three years ago, the Kaluga regional government helped the community find and buy land close to Moscow for a second community — Orion. Watching home videos of the building of Orion — around ten buildings have so far been erected — is deeply moving. There are gangs of young people, many of them orphans from Kitezh, some of whom have now moved to Moscow to work or study, working together with huge zest and enthusiasm. Among them is a small team of people from Findhorn (among whom Lisa Shaw, who featured in a previous blog - Getting creative at the Wind Park) providing expertise on the building of a biological waste-water treatment system.
In fact, this footage reminds me of nothing more than similar images from the pioneering, heroic days of the building of the Findhorn community. The same great work-teams, the same joy on the faces, the same conviction that they were creating a place of power and beauty.
Prominent among the young people in this footage is Maria Shibaeva (or Masha as I know her, her nickname.) I first met Masha when she was a student on an ecovillage training programme I taught here three or four years ago. I remember her as being young, shy, tongue-tied and very prone to blushing.
Today, Masha, at the ripe old age of 22, is the manager of the Orion community. She is in the final stages of studying for her psychology degree, goes on speaking tours around Russian universities and has over the last couple of years adopted three young orphans. Oh, and she still finds time to go out with hammer and nails to help erect the new buildings.
Maria Krivenkova meanwhile, is a veteran of 24 who has chosen to live in the Kitezh community where she is a teacher and mother of one young orphan boy. What is so impressive about these young people, and all the many others like them at Kitezh and Orion, is that they have chosen to move beyond the life of 9-to-5 carers to integrate life and work, natural child and orphan, home, school and community into the rich and seamless tapestry that is Kitezh and Orion. This is truly an awesome act of love and service. It also, clearly, makes them very happy!
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
5 October, 2007
Shut Up About the Deckchairs!
In his latest entry, Jonathan Dawson stresses on the need for a collective 'peak moment'...
One of the ports of call during the last two weeks that I have been away was the 6th international conference of ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) in Cork. This is the body, founded by former oil geologist Dr Colin Campbell, which more than any other has brought to public consciousness the imminent peaking in the availability of cheap fossil fuels.
'Fun' was hardly the word for it, but it was good to be in the company of people who have clearly understood the pivotal role of cheap energy in creating the highly abnormal and completely unsustainable global society in which we live today. Unsustainable precisely because the cheap energy on which the whole edifice is built is getting more expensive by the month — and is set, bar the odd blip, to do so indefinitely.
Within the peak oil community, the experience of realising this very simple but paradigm-altering truth is coming to be called ‘peak moments’. People at the conference were exchanging stories about their own peak moments, when their focal point suddenly shifted from the pattern of the deckchairs on the fore-deck (the stuff of political and philosophical discourse over the last couple of centuries) to the iceberg of resource (and especially energy) depletion towering over the ship.
It is within the context of this radically altered understanding of what the current moment of history is all about that the eco-village phenomenon comes to make sense. It is lovely to arrive back in Findhorn to see the wind turbines cheerfully twirling to the tune of the brisk, autumnal northerlies; the vegetables being taken from the gardens to kitchens, passing the food-scraps from the last meal making the reverse journey; self-builders working away on their energy-efficient homes; hand-carts coming in from the forest laden with logs being put in for the winter.
However, the point is that these are not primarily the cute and eccentric behaviours of over-privileged urbanites who have chosen to escape the grind of the cities (though there may just be a touch of that as well!)
Rather, the whole experience — here and in a growing number of eco-villages around the world — can only be understood as a profoundly sane response to the imminent energy crisis. (Of course, it is not only eco-villages that have got the message. I return from Cork with serious and intelligent energy descent plans from, among others, the cities of Brisbane and Portland, Oregon and the town of Kinsale in County Cork.)
I chose to travel to and from Ireland over land (and sea) which, apart from being enormously more agreeable than flying, also gave lots of uninterrupted time for comfortable reading. On the return journey, I read ‘Making Globalisation Work’ by former World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz.
Now there is a man, if ever I saw one, who is in need of a peak moment. The book is full of admirable — sometimes inspired – proposals for tweaking the current system to make trade work better for the planet’s poor. However, there is no recognition that the energy needed to continue to ship stuff around the world might not be available — or could be spent without climate-changing emissions.
I have been struck on recent working visits to Sierra Leone and Senegal by just how few private motor vehicles were on the road. The answer soon became clear: the governments were purchasing much of the diminishing oil imports (diminishing because of increasing prices) just to keep the lights on, if only sporadically. Meanwhile, the spark that ignites the flames in Burma is……….yes, a doubling in the price of oil.
As a civilisation, we are in big need of a collective peak moment. Let us embrace the inevitability of expensive energy and use it to our advantage, creating more decentralised and human-scale communities that live well within their means.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
September 2007
Getting Creative at the Wind Park
My observation as an educator is that we generally need to engage physically and through ritual to facilitate this kind of deep transformative learning
 There’ve been creative goings-on down at the Wind Park. This comprises our four wind turbines at the edge of the community that enable us to generate and sell about 40 per cent more electricity than we use at the Park, our main campus.
Mural artist, Lisa Shaw, was down there last week with young people who came to Findhorn on a course, using the base of the turbines as great canvases to paint upon. She has been doing this with various groups of young people, including local primary school children, over the last year or so. Now, three of the four turbines are covered in beautiful painted images relating to various sustainability-related themes.
Is this of any more than incidental importance? Does it represent anything more than an ephemeral beautification of our machines?
I am persuaded that it emphatically does.
I teach students in various classes in the community, up to undergraduate level. We always include a visit to the Wind Park. I remember the first time this was suggested to me some years ago, my first reaction was to dismiss the idea: ‘sure can’t the students see them perfectly well from here in the classroom — why would we waste a round trip of 45 minutes or so just to see them from close up?’
 And yet, when I relented and agreed to the visit, the effect on the students of seeing them up close was clear and obvious. Quite simply, they ‘got it’ in a way that sitting in a classroom discussing renewable energy technologies had not allowed. Somehow, the effect of being really up close, feeling just how tall and elegant are the turbines, hearing the swish of the blades cutting through the air, just touching and holding them had a profound effect.
I spent some time working with a meditation teacher in India. One of the many gems she shared that has really stuck with me was the observation that in her tradition, they use the verb ‘to understand’ to denote not new conceptual learning, but only when that learning has been integrated and has effected a change in how the learner sees and acts in the world.
My observation as an educator is that we generally need to engage physically and through ritual to facilitate this kind of deep transformative learning. I work a lot on sustainability and global justice issues where we cover many disturbing subjects such as mass extinctions, poverty and malnutrition and the growing impacts of climate change.
 When the learning is limited to intellectual engagement, I see that while the students are present and alert, the problems remain strangely abstract and removed from their experience. Somehow, the learning does not quite stick.
However, when I set up the learning in a more experiential way — have them, for example, speak imaginatively of the ecological havoc being wreaked in the voice of another species directly affected or that of a human being not yet born — the difference is often electrifying. The empathetic heart opens and they become deeply engaged and transformed.
This is the work that Lisa is doing with her murals. She is helping people here and in other projects she is involved with in Russia, Bolivia and India to engage in a direct and physical way with the world around them. By helping them embed experiences of beauty and sustainability in the very cells of their bodies, she is helping the young people she works with to deeply understand their place as threads in the web of life.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
September 2007
Sprats and Mackerels
Are poverty alleviation and human rights work worth the carbon cost?
Just back from a return visit to Sierra Leone. I was working once again with MAPCO, the indigenous organisation engaged in poverty alleviation and human rights work that I spent time with in March. This time, I was helping them develop efficient monitoring and evaluation systems, to better enable them to track the impact of their work.
This feels like good and valuable work. And yet, how does this kind of activity sit with the whole carbon crisis? I pondered this on the flight out, while pouring over Mark Lynas’ excellent piece (http://www.newstatesman.com) on the protest camp at Heathrow (In fact, when I had first seen the dates of my trip to Sierra Leone, I had been excited at the prospect of spending time at the camp. However, the more I read about the camp, the more difficult I realised it could be to move freely in and out — so, having signed a contract for the work, I prioritised the trip).
I have far more questions than answers on this whole question. Work like that I was up to in Sierra Leone is about building the capacity of pro-poor organisations and helping them develop tools for promoting the economic wellbeing and resilience of the poor through small enterprise development. I am one of many to have made a career out of this kind of work.
In addition, I am one of a number of people from within the global ecovillage family to have created a sustainability curriculum drawn from ecovillage experience — what we have called the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE). This training programme, that has been embraced by UNESCO as part of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, transfers life skills that will be of the essence as we head down the energy descent curve.
At present, the core EDE faculty finds itself doing a fair amount of international travel as we build the capacity of trainers in different places to deliver this educational programme. ‘Using a sprat to catch a mackerel’ is the analogy I have heard used to justify the use of carbon in this way to leverage a greater long-term benefit.
The issue of air travel poses a major dilemma to the ecovillage movement as a whole — certainly to the Findhorn ecovillage. On the one hand, a significant portion of our income derives from participants coming on our courses. The proportion of those coming from the UK has risen steadily over the years and now stands at about 50 percent. Sill, a good number of those continue to come through Inverness airport.
The sprat-mackerel analogy, however, still holds good here; many leave transformed, refreshed and better equipped to get stuck into good community development work of many shades and varieties when they get back home.
On the other hand, we are a highly international community. At any one time, between 15 and 25 nationalities are represented in our resident community. This generates a lot of what George Monbiot has memorably called ‘love miles’ — travel to meet up with friends and family on other continents. My wife is a New Yorker — I understand the dilemma.
The Findhorn community’s ecological footprint analysis gave us record low scores on most consumption categories (food 32 percent of the national average, home and heating 21 percent, car mileage six percent and so on). In one category alone, air travel, did we exceed the national average — by a factor of two and a half.
It is clear that government policy needs to change: a halt to new airport development; removal of taxes on aviation fuel and other externalities associated with flying; inclusion of air travel emissions in greenhouse gas emissions targets. Our top priority needs to be campaigns towards these ends. The time is rapidly approaching for us to decide where we want to call home and to sink our roots there.
In the meantime, as we effectively use our sprats to catch mackerels, is there not a case for continuing to undertake strategic international work — made possible by air travel — to strengthen the capacity, spread the skills and build the networks we will all need in the low-carbon world that is opening up before us?
The world of business shows little inclination to restrain its appetite for air travel. In this context, should those of us engaged in sustainability and global justice work unilaterally forgo the many advantages that continuing (at least in the short-term) access to air travel provides?
As I said at the beginning, more questions than answers.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
August 2007
We Refuse to be Enemies
How 100 people are making the world a better place
Freshly back in Findhorn after a couple of weeks of gatherings of the European ecovillage family in Italy. Still getting used to the heavy, grey-green light and the leaden skies after the light, blue airiness of the Mediterranean.
Every year at our General Assembly, GEN-Europe (the Global Ecovillage Network) presents the Ecovillage Excellence Award to one of our members on the basis of specific achievements over the previous 12 months. This gives us an annual opportunity to celebrate one of our number and to get a little press coverage for the ecovillage family as a whole.
This year’s winner, the ecovillage of Tamera in southern Portugal, deserves a special mention. The community has a strong focus on peace work and is highly internationalist in nature. Community members have organised peace pilgrimages in various conflict zones, most notably Israel and Palestine. Several years ago community members undertook a pilgrimage in the Holy Land in cooperation with both Jews and Palestinians and put on several performances of a theatrical piece they had created — We Refuse to be Enemies.
Over the last couple of years, Tamera has also developed a close working relationship with the Colombian ‘peace village’ of San Jose de Apartado. In the face of pressure from both government and insurgent forces in Colombia’s bitter civil war, San Jose has declared itself a neutral zone dedicated to peaceful development and has refused to collaborate with either side.
Tamera has developed technologies that collectively it describes as comprising a Solar Village and it is helping transfer many of these to San Jose. Plans are now afoot for the creation of a global peace campus, with training and demonstration sites worldwide, including San Jose and various initiatives in Palestine and Israel.
Back at the community base in southern Portugal, the Monte Cerro project — a three-year experiment in creating sustainable and peaceful community and involving an international group of over one hundred people — has entered its second year. Tamera has also planted tens of thousands of trees over the last several years — and kept most of them alive through Portugal’s worst ever drought.
This is a prodigious (if still incomplete) list of achievements for a community of around one hundred people. I remember last year discussing with one of the numerous young people who are in senior management positions in the community about the various projects that were in the pipeline at Tamera. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked her where the financing was coming from. ‘Oh, we have no idea’, she replied cheerfully: "But it will certainly come!"
Ecovillages are becoming progressively more difficult to create and grow. A combination of rapidly rising land prices, more restrictive planning regulations and an ever more individualistic society simply make the process that much more challenging. Would it have been possible to create the Findhorn community had we started the process in the last ten years? I have my doubts.
In the face of these constraints, the ecovillage initiatives that make it through to maturity tend, like Tamera, to be those that are rooted in deep vision and commitment. It is as if those involved simply have no choice in the matter. They are prepared to endure the challenges and sacrifices involved because their vision is simply too powerful to be abandoned.
Given the nature of the challenges that face us as we move into a world framed by the twin threats of Climate Change and Peak Oil, the news from Tamera is encouraging. Fired by strong vision and deep commitment, people are capable of achieving the most remarkable feats.
In the words of anthropologist, Margaret Mead, we should “never doubt that a small, committed group of people can change the world … indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
July 2007
From Megacity to Ecovillage
Learning Brazilian style, with a little bit of song and dance thrown in for good measure....
Very exciting developments in the ecovillage movement in Brasil. As part of an Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) course I am here in Sao Paolo teaching sustainable economy to around one hundred eager participants. This is a programme of Gaia Education, whose director, May East, herself a Brazilian, lives in Findhorn.
It is already very encouraging that 100 urbanites from one of the world’s great megacities should be so interested in the ecovillage model (in fact, far more were turned away than could be accepted — there were over 430 applications for the course).
Even more striking is the fact that it is the municipal administration that is hosting the course, in the recently established University of the Environment and Peace Culture (UMAPAZ) in conjunction with several nascent ecovillage developments in the city. The city administration is also paying expenses and airfares for the teaching staff, including three of us who have come from Findhorn.
The truth is that the ecovillage concept appears to be striking a deep chord here. It does not take long to get a sense of why this should be so. This is a culture that is unashamedly expressive and fun-loving. Singing and dancing come easily and men and women alike hug freely.
One gets the impression that Brazilians have a healthy understanding of the limitations of the technical dimensions of sustainability — the kind of stuff that we northern Europeans tend to be so focused on, like wind turbines, hybrid cars and the like.
For sure, these things are important. But without a vibrant human community at the centre, these machines begin to look like little more than a lifeless shell. Who wants to belong to any revolution that does not dance? — samba, by preference. The participants in the Sao Paulo EDE are in search of a path with heart and the ecovillage model is providing just that.
This is not to say that these are not serious students. Classes are generally in the evenings and the bulk of the students roll in from their day jobs hungry for engagement. Attention is focused and questions intelligent, right up until the final song and dance at 10.30pm.
This is applied learning: periodically, we break into 10 working groups where the participants explore how course concepts can be applied to their case studies. These are real life projects working with the landless, creating community schools and other sustainability initiatives in and around the city that many of the participants are personally engaged with.
Further confirmation of the easy marriage between the Brazilian way of being and the creative, holistic ecovillage model comes from another recent initiative.
La Caravana is a ‘mobile ecovillage’, an itinerant community of dancers, singers, poets and assorted performers that has been travelling around Latin America in a small fleet of multi-coloured trucks for the last decade.
Its core work, dressed up in the outfit of a clown, is the serious business of teaching about permaculture and sustainability through the medium of the arts.
Two years ago, Brazil’s minister of culture, the internationally-acclaimed singer, Gilberto Gil, described La Caravana as "the most original socio-cultural project in Latin America". Today, La Caravana is funded by the Ministry of Culture to travel the country, mobilising and empowering a network of more than 500 ‘Living Culture’ projects (community-based cultural organisations) established by the Ministry in 2003.
At the heart of the ecovillage concept is the truth that the journey towards sustainability is at least as much about creative expression within human-scale communities as it is about technical fixes. Is it really any surprise that the Brazilians are finding this so easy to grasp?
Jonathan Dawson
Brazil
June 2007
Manifesto for Truly Sustainable Communities
Raising the standard in ecovillages
Two things caught my eye in the New Statesman over the last week. The first was the emphatic thumbs-down by Sian Berry, UK Green Party speaker, to Gordon Brown’s new ‘ecovillages’ idea — the proposed pilot projects that will inform the design of five new ‘eco-towns’. She imagined they would “end up as sought-after, trendy developments whose residents, in practice, commute miles to work, shop in supermarkets and rarely walk or use the bus”.
The second was the policy advice given by a series of progressive think tanks and individuals to our prime minister in waiting.
Since I live in an ecovillage that goes a long way towards meeting the government’s carbon-reduction targets — we have the lowest footprint of any community in the UK that has been scientifically measured at around one half of the national average — it feels worth exploring why our reality is so different from Sian’s (entirely legitimate) fears and what policy guidance might emerge from our experience.
So, here goes!
Per capita car mileage in the Findhorn ecovillage was found by our ecological footprint study to be just six per cent of the national average. This is primarily because we generate so much employment on site — in the region of 200 jobs — that very little commuting is necessary. In addition, the community runs a fleet of small buses to ferry residents and guests between the two community campuses — that are around five miles apart – and there are many informal car-sharing schemes.
Policy implications? Promote mixed-use planning zones that integrate the residential with the commercial and industrial in a convivial mix, thus reducing the need to commute and provide advice and incentives for car-pooling.
Our ‘Home and heating’ footprint is 21 per cent of the national average — partly because our four wind turbines make us net exporters of electricity and partly because of the highly energy-efficient design of many of the houses. My near neighbour, John Willoner, had a total heating bill of £48 for calendar year 2006.
Policy implications? Encourage small-scale, community-based generation of electricity. This will involve greatly simplifying the regulations, assessments and studies required for small-scale projects that are currently broadly in line with those required for creating large wind farms: our pre-planning costs were in the region of £100,000 — far in excess of the cost of the actual turbines!
A predominantly vegetarian diet based primarily on local and seasonal produce gives us a food footprint 32 per cent of the national average. Policies to promote local procurement of food for schools, hospitals and other local government facilities could do much to promote a low food-mile diet, with extra employment generated in the agricultural sector.
Finally, an important reason why our community economy is relatively strong and able to generate so much employment is that we have our own community currency — Ekos. These, necessarily, keep purchasing power local, since the notes can only be spent in businesses in the community as well as several in the neighbouring village. In this sense, they are ‘un-travellers’ cheques’!
The promotion of community currencies to run parallel to national currencies would do much to regenerate local economies, enabling people to walk or cycle to work and school. As with the wind turbines, significant simplification of the regulations is required: much our largest item of expenditure in launching the Eko was lawyers’ fees.
None of this is rocket science. It is all sufficiently simple that we have been able to manage it with a minimum of official assistance.
Now, it may be said — in fact, all too often it is — that all of this is of little relevance since ecovillages like ours are so different from how most people live. Ours, after all, is a predominantly urban society. However, this is to miss the point. We have chosen to work on a small scale in a rural context since this makes it considerably easier to develop and prove the models. Having done so, the trick is to scale them up.
This is being done nationwide with gusto and imagination. We are seeing a proliferation of CSAs (community-supported agriculture box schemes) linking up cities with neighbouring farmers, urban carpools, community currencies and even, as in Dundee for example, some city-based, community-owned wind farms.
What is lacking is a clear vision and strategy at governmental level. Weaving cities back into the fabric of their bioregions and reviving local economies is both achievable and necessary if we are to meet our carbon-reduction targets. But, there will be commercial interests to face down.
The challenge facing our prime minister in waiting is not that of identifying policies to create truly sustainable communities — these are already out there in abundance — but the political will and imagination to champion and implement them.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
June 2007
An Evening of Effective Democracy
A mid-week meeting is called. The subject is planning — specifically, how we are going to develop the new stretch of land in behind the Universal Hall that is likely to gain planning permission in the next year.
On the surface, hardly the stuff that wild nights out are made of!
In the event, 70 people cram into the community centre — before the meeting has begun, there is floor-sitting space only. We begin with a rousing song. There follow four short presentations from community members. A number of significant differences in perspective and approach are evident.
Questions at this stage are limited to those seeking clarification.
A ‘heart-keeper’ has been appointed to hold awareness of the quality of communication and attention. Every once in a while, as we begin to get lost in the heady discussions, she sounds a meditation gong and we take a minute or so of silence. Some close their eyes, others look as though they are processing new ideas and insights — the aim is to create a space in which to relax, breathe and remember that all is well.
We break into small groups to give everyone a chance to speak their thoughts and then we reconvene in the full circle for debate. The key fault-lines and challenges are now becoming clear.
Will decisions about development be made by the 90 or so community members who have bought shares in the company that owns the land or by the community as a whole? How could a community of 500 or so engage in decision-making at this level without slowing the whole process to a crawl as we seek for a high level of consensus?
Should the housing development be undertaken by the Community Development Company that has recently been formed — i.e. by the collective body — or by individuals or groups who would be invited to buy the plots?
What mechanisms could we use to ensure that a good proportion of the housing units are affordable to rent or to buy? Could housing cooperative or housing association models work for us?
Perhaps most important of all, how can we ensure that a good proportion of the escalating property values remain within the community (that collectively makes this such a desirable place to live) rather than with those who are able to afford to build their own homes? What would this mean for those selling up and relocating to somewhere else where property prices have also increased?
Arguments and counter arguments flow. Communication is clear and direct. Assumptions are questioned and assertions challenged. The meditation bell brings moments of silence. There are murmurs of approval for one woman who suggests that we recognise that most of us, to greater or lesser extents, carry most of the voices being aired within us: ‘Not much value in creating beautiful houses if we treat each other like shit’.
This is the kind of evening that effective democracy is made of. I have seen countless meetings like this in rural Africa, with villagers sat round a fire in the evening discussing community affairs. Here is where communities move way beyond neat principles of justice and equity to explore the messy business of applying these principles to the imperfect and compromised world in which we live.
In so doing, we develop muscles — of patience, of quality listening and of compromise. We also develop the practice of grappling with tough ethical questions rather than leaving these to the ‘professionals’.
Television, of course, has put paid to mass participatory democracy of this sort in the West.
I am a profoundly political being and have always voted in elections — indeed, I have been an active canvasser in many of those. However, democracy at the community scale feels more real somehow.
My wish is that as we head down the energy descent curve, locally-based decision-making structures along the lines we have kept alive here will re-emerge as people truly engage in empowered self-governance.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
May 2007
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