“I have always had this strong urge around environmental conservation,” says Co Carlow native Eamon O’Hara. He’s speaking from his Lot Valley home in one of France’s most sparsely populated departments scattered with historic forests and medieval villages.
O’Hara moved here with his wife and two children more than 15 years ago from Brussels to a village near Cahors, and wrote a book about his family’s adventure.
Swapping a busy city life at the heart of the EU bubble for la belle vie in rural France at first sounds counterintuitive for someone setting up a Europe-wide organisation, but in many ways it matches the ecological and community focus of Ecolise.
O’Hara formally co-founded the European network in 2014. Ecolise supports community-led initiatives on sustainability and climate change. However, for O’Hara the idea had been percolating for years; first as his masters thesis in 2009, which led to a research paper and then a 2013 workshop with key organisations.
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While O’Hara’s big passion is for climate action, he doesn’t see himself as a typical eco-warrior. “I was never an activist in the community, that’s just not me,” he says.
O’Hara’s experience in community-led development in Ireland with the LEADER programme (a rural development scheme funded by the EU) brought him to Brussels in 2001 but also gave him an advantage. “I had a very good grasp of the issues faced on the ground,” he says.
A childhood spent near Muine Bheag in the picturesque Barrow Valley in Co Carlow gave O’Hara an innate appreciation of the environment and rural communities. “I have always had this strong urge around environmental conservation,” he says. Growing up on a farm fostered a strong awareness of the environmental damage done and “a desire to heal” the land from past activities like large scale reclamation of bogs.
But coming from agriculture also means he understands the need to “involve everyone in that conversation”. “It’s not helpful to just say, we need to restore bogs without looking at how it impacts people who live and work in an area,” he says.
[ The disappearing world of French village lifeOpens in new window ]
As climate action became a bigger part of his work in Brussels, which included climate and environment agency the EU Life Programme, he “started to join up the dots, linking climate action with grassroots local development”.
“An idea started to emerge” about setting up a European network to bring together different movements and initiatives that are “off the radar”, especially in Brussels. There was an “appetite” among those groups to be less marginalised and have more policy influence at an EU level, he says.
O’Hara began establishing this network “to give more visibility to small community-based local projects and to support policy initiatives that were evidence-based”.
It was having children that “forced a certain reflection” and had a big impact on his life direction. “When you have kids you think about what kind of world you want them to grow up in,” he says.
Living in France was his family’s attempt to redesign their lives and gave him the space to pursue his passions. “What felt important to me was protecting nature and the environment for future generations, including tackling climate change,” he says.
This change gave O’Hara the work flexibility needed to formally set up Ecolise.
Social hub
O’Hara and his wife brought a bit of Irishness to the area by setting up a community cafe in their village a few days a month that acted “a bit like an Irish pub”.
It hosts an annual St Patrick’s Day event and this social hub has helped them to knit themselves into the local community. “The French really love Irish culture and Ireland.”
It is small acts by communities that sit at the heart of the more than 50 organisations across Europe that are in the Ecolise network. These include ecovillages, energy communities, community-supported agriculture, and local sharing economies.
O’Hara cites a sustainable food project in Liege, Belgium. Here the community commits to buying food from the farmer in advance. This gives locals access to organic food at an affordable price by removing intermediaries, O’Hara explains. This project has been scaled at a regional level.
Not far from O’Hara’s French base, a local community has set up a solar energy park. Now these villagers are advising several other communities, he says.
“It’s a small scale but a scale that works, a human scale that works in a local context where local people are the owners,” says O’Hara.
This replication of projects is key to Ecolise’s aim: “Awareness raising and trying to inspire action by telling the story of existing initiatives and showing what is possible,” says O’Hara. Influencing EU policy is another key aim for Ecolise and while it has a base in Brussels, O’Hara and much of the team work remotely across Europe.
Good ideas are one thing but getting them off the ground can be a challenge. Securing seed funding for small groups was one of the gaps identified by O’Hara. To counter this, Ecolise has set up a regenerative community fund, giving grants for climate action projects. This makes available “very early seed funding without too many strings, with training and access to a network”, O’Hara explains.
The latest round gives grants of up to €4,000 to 50 communities across Croatia, Finland, France, Portugal, and Spain. O’Hara hopes this will soon expand to 50 projects in other countries, including Ireland.
While there is a lot of “doom and gloom” on climate change these projects show the “other side of this”, he says.
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