A Recipe For Successful Sustainable Living

Ingredients:

200 acre plot of land
16 people (firm but not overripe)

Bake carefully in an earth oven for 9 years, stirring horizontally regularly.
The longer you bake it, the tastier it becomes...

Wednesday 25th September, 2pm

This place is very cool. How I justify this, I guess is down to a mixture of the people there and the structure of the place. There are 11 full or becoming-full members, their 4 kids, 3 work-traders and us at the moment. The members are all in their 30s, the kids are aged 2-5. Their histories are diverse, but share a desire to live rurally, and developing living practices to be as self-reliant as possible.


What I find really interesting is that this position is quite a nuanced, and tricky, one. Radical, alternative, sustainable, utopian, whatever label you apply, there is a real sense of living the change you want to see in the world. And that is the tricky part. The manifestation of the dream, the utopia, can never be a perfect one and precisely how that is done, the translation of the image, the vision, into the everyday, and how people cope with that, is a process of compromise and pragmatism. This is what armchair activists call hypocrisy in a negative condescending sense.


For example, infrequently (not since I've been here though), the solar and micro-hydroelectric power sources are supplemented by a petrol generator. But they are off the grid. So here is an unsustainable practice that could be called hypocritical. Nonetheless, energy use is minimised and lifestyles are have been transformed towards those that are less energy-reliant. Sometimes power tools required to build the new common house, it's foundations, frame and roof are used. But minimally. This is a community of people that are not luddites - technology exists and it is harnessed appropriately - but there is a level of awareness of the resources required and used that you just don't get living on the grid. The meter that ticks away, as long as you pay the bill - usually by direct debit, so that you don't even see how much it costs, let alone be able to comprehend that energy use in fathomable terms - such as gallons of petrol, or hours of sunlight.

Cob making - stomping clay with sand and straw

None of the residents have been here since the beginning. One has been here for 9 years, when the community at the time settled on the land. The previous attempt ended in one guy living here, mostly on his own, for the previous 5 years. What is interesting about this is that although the mix of people changes, and the talents and energies and skills change, there must be something that evolves through this, what makes the place what it is.

The meeting room in the new common house

So my second justification for why the place is very cool is the structure of the place. The land is owned by a co-op, first off. The 'land council' oversees the maintenance of the land, and includes all full members, and also ex-resident members, and also the lady who bought the land and sold it to the co-op in the first place. The council operates by consensus, and is non-hierarchical. They meet quarterly.

Several unorthodox watering techniques are practiced here

Then there is the resident council. This includes all current residents (duh). This also runs by consensus, and is non-hierarchical. They have weekly business meetings, on Mondays, for a couple of hours. There are full day process meetings roughly monthly. And there are weekly sharing meetings, on Tuesdays, for 2 hours. This part I find really interesting. Here, they talk about what people have liked, what bugs people, and generally checking in with the group about what's going on in people's lives. I think this is a really crucial part to any successful community - having the opportunity to get things off your chest, and how you feel about things. Although they are aware that you can't separate business from emotion in quite such a way as is structured here, some overlap goes on but this is what works better for them, and makes sure they actually get a fair amount of stuff done.


The meetings are facilitated on rotation, and for each functional area of the community (e.g. garden, workshops, etc.) there is a focaliser (and backup). Each household has their own space, not owned by them but occupied solely, with enough distance between households. There are 6 natural build dwellings, ranging in small sizes, all cool as fuck. They are designed to the landscape and the climate, with an earthen floor that get winter sun but not summer sun, big South and South East windows, cob and straw bale walls, a fresco wall, visible timber frames, central hearths set into cob, etc etc. Oh they're so beautiful!

A small selection of harvested tasties

They eat lunch and dinner together every day, cooked and cleaned on rotation. And it's damn tasty. They are mostly pseudo-vegetarian - like me, they rarely eat meat and when they do it's local and organic. Last night I cooked hamburgers, flame-grilled mushroom burgers, steamed minty new potatoes, and tomato salsa. No quinoa, which has been in every meal for the last 3 days. Lots of raw food - fruit, vegetables, and in the States they call unpasteurised foods - milk, cheese, yoghurt, juice - raw. I can't recall whether we can get unpasteurised milk in the UK. But it contains loads of enzymes and bacteria that help the stomach, and nourishes the immune system. Kids fed on raw milk hardly ever get ill. And there's loads of fermentation going on. From soaking legumes (like beans) overnight in slightly warm conditions, to home-made sauerkraut, home-made yoghurt, those good bacteria are getting a good crack of the whip here.

The new chicken coop with clay waddle walls - lucky chickens!

Looking forward to the weekend, going back to Santa Rosa (right next to Sebastopol) to help out at the Handcar Regatta, before coming back here for a week... and my birthday, lest we not forget. Birthdays are made for hamming up, I say.