Ecovillages in Scandinavia, Part I
From Ecovillages
By Etienne Gernez
In the spring of 2009 six other young people and I — Radu Burtescu (Romania), Micah Sewell (US); Kinia Adamczyk (Poland/Quebec); and Adrien Raybaud, Alexis Pawlak, Ben Miller, and myself (France) — went on the road for three months visiting ecovillages in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. We traveled 1300 km (808 miles) — mostly by bike, train, bus and hitchhiking — and took a camera and microphone to document our findings. We called the project One Step Beyond. We wanted to know not only how ecological practices in ecovillages could reach a wider audience, but also how people could benefit from these innovations and take “one step beyond” towards making their own lives more ecologically sustainable.
In the course at Hurdal I learned about a lot of good ecovillage ideas and methods. I thought, “These practices deserved to be more widely known!” So our One Step Beyond team assembled at Hurdal Ecovillage to begin our adventure in May, 2009.
In this two-part article I’ll describe some of the ecovillage innovations we saw, and use them to illustrate my belief that the closer an ecovillage is located to an urban center, the faster and more effectively its innovations will spread to the wider culture. Let´s start with how water is managed.
Utsikten Ecovillage, near Göteborg
The water supply at Utsikten Ecovillage is pumped out of the lake, mechanically filtered, and piped to each house. After being used in kitchens and showers it becomes greywater and is piped through a series of gravel beds in which certain water-loving plants are growing. Microorganisms on the root hairs of these plants purify the water passing through the basins. The water is mechanically filtered again, tested to make sure it has the same quality as when it was pumped out, and returned to the lake.
Imagine the benefit to the environment if all half-million inhabitants of Göteborg also used the same system Utsikten uses and released clear, clean water into the Kattegat Sea between Sweden and Denmark? And, given the snowball-effect of good ideas, why couldn’t this happen in other large cities in Sweden too?
Our traveling team had these insights:
(1) Utsikten can use its own natural infrastructure to use and recycle clean water from a lake because the commuity is far from any urban centre and its associated large-scale water treatment plants. And for the same reason, only Utsikten’s 40 inhabitants have access to simple water management practices that have no impact on the environment
(2) However, there is not necessarily less water pollution in a rural location, since agricultural run-offs can pollute water too.
So how to spread such simple good ideas from 40 to 500 000 people? I believe that if Utsikten Ecovillage was closer to Göteborg, this good idea would be more easily adopted.
Tuggelite Ecovillage, Karlstad
From the beginning Tuggelite residents experimented with wood-pellet furnaces, which is a relatively cheap and efficient way to heat homes, since wood pellets come from the waste of lumber mills and wood pellets are highly concentrated forms of energy. The whole city of Karlstad now uses a large wood-pellet furnace for central “district heating,” heating most of its homes and building. When I asked Albert Bachs, a Tuggelite cofounder, how he could improve his heating system, he said, “I simply have to connect to the central heating. The city’s wood-pellet furnace is much more efficient than our old one!” There are now many other cities of this size in Sweden using the same wood-pellet central heating system as Karlstad uses.
Tuggelite’s ecological methods have also spread nationally. The houses in Tuggelite were the first to use triple-glazed windows and this is now standard: every new building in Sweden is required to have triple-glazed windows.
These three ecological methods — heating with wood pellets, sorting and using organic waste, and triple-glazed windows) have spread from a mere 16 households to so many more in Sweden in less than 20 years.
Would the story be the same if Tuggelite was not in the middle of a small city?
Tuggelite's fourth ecological practice — and the one that most symbolizes (in my eyes) the spread of good ideas in a high-population area — is how they the use their Common House (community building). Their Common House is not used during working hours since most residents are out working or otherwise busy at that time. So the community rents the space to the municipality of Karlstad as a kindergarden for children living in adjacent city blocks. While these kids enjoy a car-free area, with plants growing in greenhouses and solar panels on roofs, Tuggelite is earning money to introduce them to the principles of ecological design!
Suderbyn Ecovillage, Gotland
Suderbyn is on an old farm property located just outside Visby, Sweden (population 22,000), the main city in Gotland (with a total island population of 57,000). After travelling widely and visiting many ecovillages Europe, South America, Australia, and India, Robert and Ingrid purchased this farm property because it is:
(2) Not too far from an urban centre to avoid dependency on cars and be able to benefit from public transportation! The whole Hall-Gustafsson family bicycles to work or school, and it is quite well connected by bus. In addition, their waste is collected by the municipality of Visby.
Robert and Ingrid have been traveling and researching ecovillage innovations for more than 10 years. In their library I discovered that many of these are described already in widely read books; for example, Bill Mollison´s permaculture design books, and Hildur Jackson’s book on conflict resolution in ecovillages.
“We realize that our approach is not attracting masses of people,” Robert observes. “I don’t think this because we don’t have a flush toilet. I think what scares people off the most is that in an ecovillage project we have to do things together, we have to create a community where people work together — as that’s how you can reduce costs and energy consumption.”
I believe their capacity to influence and convince others has to do with the scale of their project. And that is what the Part Two of this article (Sep/Oct issue) will be about.
Related articles:
- Svanholm Goes Carbon Neutral — Nov-Dec '09
- Our Whirlwind Aussie Road Trip, Part I — May '09
- My Ecovillage Adventure in Quebec — Nov-Dec '09
- Forming Our French Network of "Grouped Habitats" — May '09
