{"id":1845,"date":"2015-11-15T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=1845"},"modified":"2025-12-27T13:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T13:41:07","slug":"people-block-fight-against-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2015\/11\/people-block-fight-against-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"People block fight against climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

While in New Zealand earlier this year I found myself part of a delegation heading for a conference just outside Motueka, at a place called Riverside Community. It was a coming together of various intentional communities from across the country to discuss self-sustainability and community living.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Englishman, a Spaniard, a Uruguayan, a German and myself composed our delegation. It sounds like the start of a joke and in many ways it was. We were there to represent a small community based in Golden Bay but, except for our aging Swiss leader who founded the community in the eighties, none of us had lived there for more than a week. We had no idea what we were doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An intentional community is essentially, to less sensitive ears, a hippy commune, but you would not get far calling it that. Much has been done to change perceptions of intentional communities<\/a> since their brief surge in popularity in the 1960s and nowadays most are (ostensibly) better organised, open door and strictly drug- and alcohol-free. Riverside<\/a> is one of the oldest in New Zealand, having been founded by Christian pacifists in the 1940s. The sort of climate that makes good wine is also very accommodating for intentional communities, as they remain numerous across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference took place over two days and was a mixture of dry, technocratic presentations about things like sustainable construction and more spiritual offerings like drumming lessons or yoga. A particular demographic was dominant. I knew very quickly I was not in it. Most of the people there were middle-aged or older, living remnants of the original hippy movement from the sixties and seventies, bearded, longhaired, clad in floral shirts and not a pair of shoes in sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018I feel like everyone here is a part of myself,\u2019 said one man wearing a toga during the rounds of introduction. \u2018This is part of myself,\u2019 he said, putting a hand firmly on his knee. He then put a hand on the shoulder of the person sitting next to him. \u2018This is also part of me,\u2019 he said, \u2018just in a different way.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Back to the future<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It was easy to see how people who care about climate change are stereotyped. It was easy to look at the people here, talking about yoga and their love of lentils with a tasteful Hawaiian idyll splayed across their torso and think of the whole thing as being stuck in a time capsule. The few young people there were mainly, like me, curious short-termers who wanted to learn more about ways to reduce our own environmental impact, but constantly finding ourselves bewildered by the nostalgia and spirituality attached to everything. Was climate change not a relevant issue for the modern world? Because of this many people come to regard intentional communities as curious novelties, an experience to be had, but never as a serious, long-term lifestyle choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having just listed a plethora of methods for ways to create cleaner energy sources, natural water filtering systems and constructing buildings from straw, our presenter paused to give a little aside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018You know, there is no shortage of solutions to climate change and achieving self-sustainability,\u2019 she said, \u2018but there are absolutely no clear solutions to the people problem.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If you have ever wondered why the political left is often so fragmented, or how on earth people with similar ideas wind up at each other\u2019s throats faster than those of opposite ends, you should live in an intentional community for a few days. It is where the expression of ego is at its most transparent and concentrated level. At my own community in Golden Bay, absolutely nothing was being produced by the gardens except for mint and potatoes, because the few long-term residents could not work together without constantly bickering about what should be planted and where. We were forced to hitchhike to the nearest town 20km away to restock on tins of food to sustain us once or twice a week. The irony of our leader blessing Mother Nature for providing our food every mealtime was not lost on anyone but him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But not all intentional communities or ecovillages are a failure. Riverside is a huge community that continually produces more than it needs, with the fact it has lasted for nearly 75 years a testament to its success. After lunch we walked around the property and saw for ourselves the rewards of their efforts: allotments lined with beautiful arrays of cabbage, potatoes, kumara and carrots; a dozen varieties of apples to pick from the orchard by the waterfront; polytunnels full to the brim of plump tomatoes. We ate very handsomely and always from locally made produce. It felt good (and far too unusual) to have seen and learned exactly where our food had come from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Findhorn experiment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Closer to home, the Findhorn ecovillage in Moray shows that our choice of lifestyle need not be between industrial wasteland or remote hippy hideaway. The village has the lowest ecological footprint of any community in the industrialised world and half that of the rest of the UK, although only 5% of produce is grown on site<\/a>. We do not all have to resort to crofting to have a lower environmental impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although primarily founded as a spiritual community in the 1960s, the real showstopper at Findhorn (and what makes it internationally renowned) is its architecture. The eclectic and sometimes random nature of the buildings is evidence of its continued development into sustainable housing. The first permanent houses were constructed from timber vat barrels from a local whiskey distillery, followed later by homes made from strawbale and tyres, before timber-frame houses with high insulation became the norm. The architectural choices vary from the hugely innovative \u2013 such as cellulose insulation developed from recycled paper<\/a> \u2013 to the modestly pragmatic, such as sourcing locally produced timber and using non-toxic paint. In recent years, however, Findhorn has begun releasing land for developer-led construction for the first time, to some controversy among locals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The People Problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Given the abundance of solutions for tackling climate change through self-sustainability, lowering emissions and creating green energy sources, and all without diminishing our quality of life, why have we yet to reach utopia? It all leads back to the one still unsolved question; what\u2019s the answer to the people problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Increasingly in the industrialised world, and particularly in Britain, we are becoming more isolated from one and other, less co-operative, and lonely<\/a>. With our increasingly individualistic tendencies, encouraged by an economic system that defines people as only one class of individual (the selfish one<\/a>), we are losing the ability to live and work together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humans are inherently social animals, but ones also prone to habit. We find ourselves, often through strokes of luck, on particular trajectories, and afterwards find it difficult to move on from them once it is clear they do us more harm than good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver.\u2019 wrote Buckminster Fuller in his treatise to our planet, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth<\/em><\/a>, \u2018but this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some time now we have been sailing on that piano top \u2013 and to find a new, safer raft will take more than any one of us alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo of Wilderland community by the author<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intentional communities, aka eco-villages, are, off course, well-intentioned. But even they tend to be undermined by human selfishness. The fight against climate change – subject of a global conference in Paris later this month – needs more than just collective action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":1876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18181,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845\/revisions\/18181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}