COMMUNITY:Saving the Earth might need global treaties and international co-operation, but Ireland's first eco-village hopes to demonstrate how it can be done on a local level. We've been reading about Cloughjordan for years – HILARY FANNINtakes a look as the first houses are ready for occupation.
I HAVE LITTLE in common with Scarlett O'Hara, the feisty protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's chick-lit-on-the-plantation tome, Gone With the Wind. Unlike me, Scarlett had a waistline with the circumference of a runner bean and fancied the pants off a bloke with a moustache. Okay, I had a waistline, once, but, I swear, the nearest I've been to full-blown whiskers is opening the tin for the cat.
But where Scarlett and I do coincide, and I suspect I’m not alone in this, is in our ability to procrastinate, to “think about that tomorrow”.
My biggest head-in-the-sand issue is the environment. I conveniently fall asleep during Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, I skip over news items about melting ice caps, drowning polar bears, frenetic tornadoes and scorched continents. And despite my all-too-frequent visits to the bottle bank, I'm about as green as the Kalahari, regularly finding myself jumping into the car and lashing down to the supermarket to raid the frozen-food cabinet because, suddenly, it's dinner time and my children are threatening to eat each other and I'm strongly considering eating the keyboard.
As for getting to grips with environmentalist James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (which suggests that the Earth is a vast self-regulating super-organism that will rebalance itself as it sees fit, regardless of how many of us are camping on its surface), well, don’t even go there.
I know, of course, what lies at the heart of my apathy: fear. Blinding, debilitating fear. Fear of the future, fear for my children’s future, fear for future generations. Listen, my four-o’clock-in-the-morning litany of terror – coastal erosion, famine, mass migrations, totalitarian governments, and so on – runs to about the same number of pages as it takes to see Scarlett abandon her petticoats, button up her breeches and take some decisive action.
“I can face all that terrifying stuff now and feel that I am doing what I can, I can be the change,” says Maria Fleming, a warmly engaging thirtysomething company administrator, mother of two young daughters and soon-to-be resident of Ireland’s first eco-village in Cloughjordan. Set in the rolling landscape of Co Tipperary, the village is a couple of hours away from Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick.
From Dublin, an inauspicious turn off the Limerick road meanders past Cloughjordan’s modest railway station. It is in an area where posters of the latest Brendan Grace gig adorn the lamp-posts, leading one to speculate that while this town may be home to a state-of-the-art sustainable community, some things never change. Cloughjordan is a gentle presence, where a couple of small modern housing estates shoulder up to a pretty Georgian square, a sedate old church dozes and there are a handful of shy bars and a musty, friendly supermarket with a coffee machine, softening red peppers and the ubiquitous pre-packaged muffins. But unlike other Irish towns, barricaded by husks of hastily built and empty housing estates, Cloughjordan is in the process of embracing, or rather merging with, the new community which is springing up, quite literally, in its centre.
Slap-bang in the middle of town, the eco-village has been planned around an impressive 67-acre site, where natural features (a stream, mature trees), an old granite wall and a coach house have been preserved and are now sharing their habitat with wood-chip boilers, solar panels and cutting-edge technology. The scheme, which has been in preparation since 2005, when the land was bought and planning permission granted, is now up and running: two-thirds of the eco-village’s 130 sites for low-energy homes have been secured, and a small number of houses are in the final stages of readiness for their pioneering occupants.
This is not just a bunch of well-insulated houses, however; it is an innovative and comprehensive attempt “to create a fresh blueprint for modern sustainable living”. Of the 67 acres, 50 are earmarked for allotments, farming and woodland; there will be a solar- and wood-powered communal heating system; each house will have a rain-water harvesting system and high-quality broadband; there will be centres for enterprise and for education on sustainable living; there will be playgrounds and pathways. Hell, there’s even talk of an amphitheatre and, get this, the community boasts “an edible landscape”, a stream banked with herbs and, lining the narrow, single-vehicle roads, fruit and nut trees.
Now maybe this is the way forward, maybe this is the template for our millennium (if, as a species, we can even dare to hope that far). Despite James Lovelock's gloomy recent prognosis, there is a budding sense that maybe it is still not too late to save the world. In the newly published A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, Nicholas Stern, the British government's adviser on climate change, lays out his survival plan, based on human ingenuity, low carbon and sustainable economic growth, which he believes can yet get us out of this mess.
I’m certainly not opposed to a tincture of nirvana, and can see many practical reasons for feeding from the trees – especially if you missed breakfast – but I find I do still have a bit of a problem with the associations flung up by words such as “community”, “sustainable” and “eco”. Much as my cage rattles with fear at the prospect of an environmentally chaotic future, I have a deep-seated antipathy to anything that involves untreated sheep’s wool, yogurt-straining, tin-whistling or men in sandals.
I suppose what I fear is that I’d find it tougher to negotiate a field full of docile sheep and a chat with the neighbours over a nettle tea and an organic flapjack than I would parlaying with the scrum outside a Friday-night bar or clanking around the mean streets of Dublin practising my look of brutish indifference.
On the day of our visit to Cloughjordan, Maria Fleming was sanguine and deeply patient with my prattling neuroses. In truth, she threw me a little. I was expecting my guide to be wreathed in dreadlocks and have shares in the Natural Shoe Store, but Fleming, smart, organised and efficient, refused to succumb to the stereotype. In fact, of the people I met on site, including some of the 27 families renting around the town while waiting for their “build” to commence and getting their children settled into one of the two national schools (one for the left-footers, one for the right), not one would oblige my prejudices. I was expecting to find myself up to my urban oxters in hippy-dippy moccasin-lovers, but nope, there wasn’t a sign of any of the Cloughjordanites knitting their own muesli or signing up for the bleach police.
While “nine-tenths of eco-villages are about creating a self-contained community”, according to former barrister John Jopling, Cloughjordan is an entirely different ball-game, building a community on a sustainable economic model rather than a spiritual one.
Jopling (74), who is also renting in the area while supervising the building of his new home, is an interesting character – a lawyer, author and active “social entrepreneur” who co-founded Ireland’s Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta). He has participated in a number of initiatives focusing on sustainable living and a participatory approach to democracy. Active within the various working groups that constitute the organisational structure of Cloughjordan, he speaks of the importance of being able to contribute to a chosen project and of having a continued engagement with society, rather than finding oneself in one’s 60s and 70s staring into the arid wastes of an empty retirement.
Drinking a mug of tea with Jopling and Fleming, while an impatient cat arches around the windowsill, the penny finally begins to drop with me that this is a diverse and highly organised community. There is no dominant demographic planting its flag (along with its radishes) in this village; there are young families, singles, couples whose children have left home, older residents, all sorts of people who are looking for a way to enrich their lives and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is in an attempt to grip the reins of their own destiny.
Importantly, the community has already fused with the existing town: a community farm scheme has been established, there are new businesses opening on main street (including a bicycle store and a bookshop-cafe selling eco-muffins without the plastic skins), and a town that was in danger of losing basic facilities, such as its ATM, is now basking in the glow of new business opportunities and an increasing population.
“Our children will be in the local GAA or the girl guides,” says Fleming. “They will grow up here, go to school here, play with other kids from around the area. This is not an exclusive community but an attempt to put ideas for sustainable living into fruition, ideas which are becoming more and more relevant.”
“Will you be washing your windows with vinegar?” I ask her, a little sourly, in a final attempt to burst her bubble (I like her by now, and I’m finding her equanimity challenging).
“Maybe, if the vinegar works. I’m open to change,” she retorts, chasteningly.
So? Could I do it? Could I swap my apathy for action, my comfortably familiar fear for low-emission dynamism? I don’t know, I really don’t know.
Cloughjordan demands a degree of involvement with community that may just be beyond my reach. Although it is not de rigueur to attend the community socials or to turn up for every meeting, it seems to me that you get out of the eco-village what you are prepared to put into it. Perhaps it is not a place for the essentially passive moaner whose concerns about the environment or what we have lost in terms of community come somewhere down the list after booking that holiday in Croatia and remembering to pick up the dry cleaning.
If, however, you feel you may be ready to abandon your annual package tour and your takeaway biryani in favour of a bunch of parsnips and the possibility of your grandchildren breathing without gas masks, you can always check out Cloughjordan for yourself. The village offers regular “Experience Days” when people are free to visit, walk the land, have some GM-free lunch and meet existing and prospective residents. (The next one is Saturday May 23rd, book in advance with Dave Flannery on 0505-42833.)
For those not shying away from the altar of change, the average price for a serviced site is around €86,000. Residents can design their own home or choose from a number of house types designed by ecological architects and, in theory, one could be up and running for less than the price of an average semi on some bleached-out estate clinging to the edge of a motorway.
There is an absolute determination from members of the community that the objectives of the village will be fulfilled, and on the evidence of what has already been achieved in Cloughjordan, one would have no reason to suspect otherwise. Interestingly, talking to various people there, it seems to be not so much the environmental issues that have stirred them to action as a wish to live as part of a sustainable, democratic, caring and inclusive community. They express concern that the nature of the project excludes certain social groups and say that, had they their time over again, they would address this and other issues more clearly as they set about creating this place. They add that now, after years of planning and consensus-led decision-making, they could write the book (or indeed knit the map) for other groups looking to emulate their initiative.
These are active, intelligent, forward-thinking people. I’m panic-struck by their poise. “Be the change you wish to see,” said Gandhi. Okay, okay, okay. My path to enlightenment may need to unravel itself a little slowly; I’m going to start the journey by planting a couple of peas in my own backyard. I’ll look forward to pruning them with an icy gin as the sun goes down.
Sustainable Projects Ireland Ltd, Main Street, Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary, www.thevillage.ie