Subject: Findhorn Eco-Village Conference

From: Art Rosenblum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 11:43:54 -0400

pr 3
Date:     Wed Oct 18, 1995 10:22 am  EDT
From:     Art Rosenblum
          EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
          MBX: [email-masked]
 
TO:     * Aquarian Research / MCI ID: 308-6236
CC:       alt.community.intentional
          EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
          MBX: [email-masked]
Subject:  Sustainable Communities, Findhorn Conference (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 00:13:30 -0400
From: PNEWS <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list PNEWS-L <[email-masked]>
Subject: Sustainable Communities, Findhorn Conference
 
From: Devon Girard <[email-masked]>
 
  The following is transcribed presentations made by some of the world's
modern eco-villages, hosted by the Findhorn Community.
 
  Read and respond...take heart!!
____________________________________________________
ECO-VILLAGES & SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES:
MODELS FOR 21ST CENTURY LIVING
 
A conference hosted by the Findhorn Foundation
7th to 13th October 1995
 
Day 2: 8th October
 
Robert Gilman
Why Eco-Villages?

If we look at models of population growth and industrial output, and compare
predictions based on current behaviour, as compared to if we adopt
sustainable development, we find with the former that growth continues
exponentially to a point of breakdown and collapse.  If we make some
physically simple changes in technology, consumption and population, that
picture can change dramatically. However, these changes are socially not so
easy to make.
 
Each change is essential, however.  Even with no population growth, it only
postpones collapse by 7 years.  It's a 3-legged stool.  Which leg holds it
up?
 
So, why are communities important?  One reason is that they enable us to see
the effects of what we think and do very easily.  We also have to think in
terms of whole systems.
 
An Eco-Village is:
Human scale
Full-featured
A place where human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural
world
Supportive of human development
Something that can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.
 
For example, the Findhorn Foundation aims to be spiritually, culturally,
ecologically & economically  sustainable.  Another 3 legged stool is that
defined by our relationships: our relationship with the natural world, with
each other and with ourselves.
 
The best strategy for gaining widespread acceptance of an innovation, changes
at different phases.  Eco-Villages are mostly through the experimental and
the pilot project phases.  We are now into changing infrastructures.  The
Global Eco-Village Network (GEN) is an example of this.  We are not yet into
popularisation.  We're not ready for huge coverage by a press looking for
supports for the existing culture.  In the current phase, it is more
effective to find people who are motivated and help them do it better.  Don't
engage the critics - that can kill a venture.  Do that later.
 
I hope we learn here how to carry a twinkle in our eyes back into our home
communities - the urge to build something there.  This conference *will* 
be a
magnificent seed point.
 
Q - Will you comment on the politics of single family dwellings?
 
RG - We need to own up to the pathology of the ideal of separate farm steads,
which became urban sprawl.  Moving from metal boxes (cars) into brick or wood
boxes (house) without meeting anyone around.  We need to create something
between individual and homogeneous mass.
 
Participant - I see a need to do more than focus on infrastructure building.
We need to also press ahead with popularisation and beyond.

Peter Dawkins
Human Settlements: Microcosms within Macrocosms
 
Place and people can come together and create magic.  A lot of people don't
know that nature is conscious and can have joy in us as we can in it.   How
do we work with the vast intelligence of nature in a co-creative way?
 
I worked with people in a difficult and aggressive community in Glasgow.  I
found that if we took people out of it and put them into a different
environment, they were transformed.  They behaved differently and felt
differently.
 
Just as we have our centres of energy, so does the environment.  Energy flows
between them and sickness occurs when it gets out of balance, when it is
blocked.  Many structures are built on foci of energy, for the mutual benefit
of humans and the landscape.
 
Cathedrals and churches were often built on the 7 chakra model of human
design.  There are many places to illustrate these principles.  The pattern
of buildings and their use, on the sacred island of Iona and in Edinburgh,
for example.
 
How should we work with the spirit of a place?
* Attune to the spirit of a place and its purpose.
* Feel how it relates to the rest of the country and the world.
* Recognise, mark and enhance the chakras.
* Ensure landscape energy flows naturally and easily between them.
* Treat your house, village, place you stay, as a temple.

John Talbott
Findhorn Eco-Village
 
It is important to look at the working models of Eco-Villages. Thanks for the
praise, but Findhorn is not perfect.
 
I want to share the experience and flavour through music and slides.
Findhorn is 33 years old.  Peter, Eileen, their three sons and Dorothy
arrived in November 1962. The adults were all involved in spiritual training
of various kinds.  After a few months they started a garden in very difficult
conditions. Soon after that Dorothy connected with the Devas and they got
guidance on what to do. (Devas are the soul of a species.)
 
R. Ogilvie Crombie (ROC) then arrived and connected with the Nature Spirits
and Pan. Despite this extraordinary story it was hard to write them off as
fakes.  Eileen described her experience as listening to the voice within,
which everyone can do.  Dorothy added that nature is alive and well and
willing to cooperate.  We are not the only intelligence on earth.
 
The early days were about attuning, meditating and work in the gardens. Then
David Spangler arrived.  Eileen received guidance to build a large community
centre for 150 people, while there were only 20/30 people living here.
 
Arts started to flourish.  Education flourished. The guest programme
developed and became the main source of income.  The keynote was 'work is
love in action'. It was the best of times but also the worst.  We bought a
lot of property.  Financial management was poor.  The bank manager phoned,
threatening to close the place down.  Peter and Eileen split up. We 
entered a
difficult time in the 80s. A time of disillusionment
 
In the 90s we started to build our houses and remove the old, energy-wasting
caravans.  You need to have a social infrastructure and financial security
before you can start building.  There was also a lot of time spent dreaming,
thinking and visioning before we started building.
 
Findhorn is still a very fragile place.  It is always on the edge.
 
Q: How has the Eco-village been received by the local community?
JT: Mixed...Some good, some opponents. We are a treat to some people, while
others are afraid we will take over, especially recently. And more in
Findhorn than Forres.
 
Q: How about decision making here?
A: The community is changing fast.  There are now a lot of independent
members, not employed by the Foundation.  Generally we work with consensus.
If we can't reach consensus, we have another meeting where we need a 90%
majority to reach a decision.
 
Q: Financial structure of Findhorn?
A: Foundation employees get L185 per month plus food and accommodation.
Open Community members need to have their own source of money.  Now, we also
have the commercial arm of the Foundation, NFD and lots of independent
businesses which provide work.  We also have a LETS scheme which involves the
exchange of work.

Max Lindegger
Crystal Waters, Australia
 
We are situated on the east coast of Australia, 100 km north of Brisbane. The
climate is sub-tropical and we occupy 640 acres. We are 200 people, with a
planned limit of 300.  We have a mix of private and shared ownership.  
80% is
common land, with lakes, wilderness, agriculture and gardens.  Not
spiritually based although individuals follow a variety of spiritual
practices.
 
We started 10 years ago.  We are an 'aspiring' Eco-Village.  Governed by a
body of 7 who make most decisions.  Some are brought to the whole community
and the majority needed depends on the decision.  Our neighbours are
conventional farmers.  We get on with most of them very well.  It's not a
model to be copied.  It fits its environment and not others.
 
I'm interested in how communities grow or decline.  I saw my childhood
village in Switzerland decline to only a few old people.  Why is that?  When
we sit for a meal, almost anywhere in Australia, probably only the Macadamia
nuts are indigenous.  There is a close relationship between the
sustainability of a village or community, and the closeness of the
agriculture that supplies it.
 
It is also important to create places where people can gather - as a
priority. Not just to focus on sewage, roads, houses etc.  We built our own
access roads and made them narrow, because we wanted to show that cars are
relatively low in the pecking order.  If someone buys a house here, we give
them a 60 page manual about the house and its materials, and how it fits into
the area.
 
Our main meeting place is the community kitchen, which can feed about 100.
People have started gathering here a couple of times a week - it may become
our community gathering place.  We'll see.  We have some educational tourism,
mostly run by locals.

Albert Bates
The Farm, USA
 
The Farm started when Steven Gaskin was teaching in San Francisco and his
classes got big, then mobile.  It became a community on the road, sharing
funds, finding work, having babies.  They wanted land and the cheapest land
they found was in Tennessee.
 
We find a lot of our building materials in dumpsters and land fill 
sites.  We
needed to feed ourselves so we turned to agriculture.  It took us between 3
and 4 years before we became self-sufficient in food.  We had grown to 800
people at that point.  We had an economy of $1 per person per day.  We 
have a
tofu factory today and also make tempe.  We are now the world's largest
supplier of tempe innoculum.
 
We also have midwives and a birthing centre, with related intensive care
unit.  Our school got to 250 during our second baby boom.  We've started work
on a church/community centre.  We've been building it for 15 years now.
 
We heard about an earthquake in Guatemala over our radio and it changed our
way of life.  We took down medical supplies and discovered that they were
even poorer than we were.  And oppressed.  We always wanted to go out from
the Farm and so we decided to send people down there.  We began with
carpenters and started prefabricated building factories.
 
When we helped look after their kids, we ran into ethical dilemmas like, if
we help more people survive in an environmentally marginal area, are we
really serving?  With a change in government, we discovered that the
education we gave people there, made them more likely to get 'disappeared'
(ie killed).  So we had to pull out.  So then we set up a fair trade
organisation that fed money to women's cooperatives in Guatemala.  We also
set up a free ambulance service in the South Bronx.  It's a good way of
teaching Farm kids about responsibility.
 
Back at the Farm, things were not well.  We had borrowed money to do
commercial farming, eg in southern Florida.  Our population kept rising.  We
got to about 1,400.  We had an open door policy.  We had to look at that.
Our relation to the land also became more distant.  So we had to look at what
the land could support again.  We let half our land go wild, we did more
neighbourhood farming and we went in for mushroom farming.
 
We also have a $1.5 million business producing radiation detectors.  We set
up a remote monitoring scheme, which then contributed to a Greenpeace
project, which led to a nuclear waste dumping treaty between USA and Russia.
 
We found that we could make a living by having about half our staff on
non-profit projects, supported by the other half, who finance it.  It's a
happy place - a eutopia.

FINDHORN FOUNDATION
The Park, Forres, IV36 0TZ, Scotland
E-Mail:  [email-masked]
World Wide Web:  http://www.mcn.org/findhorn/home.html

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