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The green green grass of home
Patrick Barkham, The Guardian
They might look like hobbits’ dwellings, but low-impact developments could offer a solution to the housing crisis.
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Nearly 10 years ago, Tony Wrench stretched a rubber pond lining over a circle of timber posts and made himself a round home. By a field full of meadowsweet in a peaceful Welsh valley, Wrench and his partner, Jane Faith, live as unobtrusively as humanly possible. Were it not for a lazy trail of wood smoke, you could walk past the Roundhouse and not realise it was there.
And, as luck would have it, the 30ft diameter hobbit-style home has found itself in the midst of a radical experiment: last year Pembrokeshire county council and the Pembrokeshire Coast national park authority agreed to grant planning permission for low-impact developments (LIDs) in the council area – and even in the national park – if they met stringent criteria. It is an unusual policy that could encourage other planning authorities across Britain to rethink sustainable development: after all, these homes are affordable, carbon-neutral and can be built on green fields without environmental degradation.
(26 July 2007)
Radical Finns Persevere off BC Coast
Crawford Kilian
email this article print this story , The Tyee
Review: # Practical Dreamers: Communitarianism and Co-operatives on Malcolm Island by Kevin Wilson
Few British Columbians know about Malcolm Island. It sits off northern Vancouver Island, a 20-minute ferry ride from Port McNeill. The population of the island is currently between 750 and 800, and has rarely been over 1000. It has always attracted minorities: left-wing Finns, American draft dodgers, even Vietnamese salal harvesters.
The island has few resources. Logging and fishing bring in far less money than they used to. Young families can’t find work.
Despite all this, maybe because of all this, Malcolm Island deserves our attention. Its one town, Sointula, has made history for over a century. Founded in 1901 as a utopian colony of Finnish émigrés, it has changed repeatedly while remaining stubbornly itself: a community of cooperative individualists.
In 2005, Kevin Wilson published Practical Dreamers: Communitarianism and Co-operatives on Malcolm Island. Few books have examined a B.C. community in such detail.
Wilson describes how Finnish workers became fed up with the brutality and exploitation of James Dunsmuir’s Nanaimo coal mines. They trusted neither capitalism nor government, and dreamed of socialism on a small scale. To make the dream reality, they founded Sointula, “place of harmony,” on the south shore of Malcolm Island.
Their utopian colony imploded in just four years. But many of the settlers remained on the island as individual homesteaders, while scattering across the coast in search of seasonal work.
(24 July 2007)
It’s not easy to find accurate information on intentional communities that have lasted for a long time. Understanding what works and what doesn’t may be increasingly important for efforts at de-centralization. -BA
Everyday living – unplugged
Nick Rosen, The Guardian
Thousands of people are choosing to live in homes without mains electricity, gas or water. Are these the eco-townies of the future?
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I reckon there are 75,000 people living in nearly 25,000 off-grid homes in the UK. These are homes not connected to mains gas and electricity, water and sewage or even the phone lines that bind the rest of us into a system that wastes energy transporting it around the country, and loses up to 30% of water through leaks.
To get some idea of how many are living this way, I travelled round the UK for most of last year researching a book, How To Live Off-Grid. I met some of the thousands of normal families living this way, in everything from brick houses to yurts.
(25 July 2007)
Juicing down for global warming
Editorial, Christian Science Monitor
More electric utilities need to install ‘smart’ meters that show real-time costs and reduce power demand.
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Many power utilities are gearing up to install “smart” meters in kitchens or living rooms to show customers the cost of their electricity use – per minute and perhaps per appliance. During times of peak usage, utilities may even remotely adjust your home thermostat.
Having an instant electric bill on the wall, with dollar signs rolling like a gasoline pump, is designed to create sticker shock – and then, perhaps, a conservation ethic to help curb climate change. People might cut back their use of power-hungry devices, from clothes dryers to the TV “sleep mode.” They might, for instance, turn on dishwashers only after 10 p.m.
Some utilities hope to install “intelligent sockets” that communicate between appliances and the electricity provider. On hot summer days, when electric rates would be raised through “dynamic pricing,” those customers who voluntarily give up control of their usage – and it would have be voluntary – would be given rebates.
But can such watt-saving steps help save the planet? Yes, if they keep utilities from building more carbon-spewing power plants – especially the expensive kind that rev up only during peak hours. By many estimates, fossil-fuel power plants are likely to be the preferred source of electricity for years to come.
As it is, utilities can’t keep up with rising demand. One projection shows a 19 percent rise in peak-time electricity usage over the next decade while only a 6 percent growth in power capacity.
Something’s got to give. And it may be consumer lifestyles.
(26 July 2007)
