EVT

Ok, so I'm filling in this blog from what happened several months ago, to present, and then the main focus will be on my time spent studying permaculture in Ireland - at the same place that Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns fame started the whole Energy Descent Action Plan thing, Kinsale. I'm hoping to live in a camper van for the two years, too - as a real challenge just to see how environmentally friendly I can be.

This post is a brief summary of the I spent at Ecovillage Training, at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, from the middle of February to the middle of March, 2009, and is also available on another blog focussed on environmental issues in Ottawa, Canada - Living Lightly.

Week 1 at Ecovillage Training, the Findhorn Foundation, Scotland (14 Feb)

The theme of this week has been "people care" and what better way to dive into that than by being part of a group of 30+ new friends? It has been an incredibly intense experience, with group discovery games, dancing, singing, and music; with permaculture, group dynamics, history, and looking to the future; with care, love, curiosity, and tenderness.

After the initial awkwardness of not knowing anyone's names, the group began some serious bonding, the Findhorn way - with a series of activities, long practised, that open us up, and peels back our usual defenses, allowing sharing, support and care to flow amongst the group. It is incredible to observe - I have been through the group discovery games before, during Experience Week (a wonderful one week program at the Findhorn Foundation - I would highly recommend it to anyone). How quickly a group of strangers can become a cohesive group of friends!

The program is an intense one, running for six days of the week, and usually three sessions per day - one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.
One stalwart of the community is that "Work is Love in Action"; meaning, everyone does KP ("Kitchen Party") once a week - that is, washing up! We also have one session of work within the community, and for this I am working in Cullerne Garden, a market garden a few minutes walk from the Park campus.

So, an intense program, split between really examining the countryside and the state of the world, working in gardens, "classroom" sessions about group dynamics while learning the dynamic of a new group, rituals, facts, the wisdom and curiosity of people participating in the activities.
Wow!

Week 2 (21 Feb)

Our second week of EVT has passed in a similar manner to the first: it has been incredibly intense, with the feeling that the week has lasted a month yet passed in a heartbeat. Filled with laughter, passion, awe, and experience.

The theme of this week has been "Fair Share" and so we have focussed on alternative currencies, community projects, community supported agriculture, and local food production. The whole group visited Cullerne Garden for a tour on Monday afternoon, and I returned for my work placement on Tuesday afternoon - in fact I spent the whole afternoon shovelling horse dung. A truly grounding experience!

Cullerne is an organic garden, and the whole of Findhorn Village and the Park are built on sand dunes. Much compost and manure spreading is done, to keep life in the soil. They call Cullerne a market garden, and grow most of the Foundation's leafy greens there. Most of the other vegetables are grown by EarthShare, which we visited on Wednesday.

EarthShare is a community supported agriculture project. Once part of the Foundation, it is now a separate organisation. They grow food for roughly two hundred boxes of food (to feed 3-4 people each) per week; about two thirds of this food is bought by the Foundation to feed the members.

So the group potted up chives, "riddled" potatoes, dug jerusalem artichokes, and lugged 25Kg bags of seed potatoes around! After that, the owners of the next farm over gave us tea, some of their delicious cheese, and a wonderful talk on the difficulties of being organic farmers. Thank you so much, Pam and Nick of Wester Lawrenceton Farm - you were a huge inspiration to the group.

Perhaps the highlight of the week was Thursday afternoon, where the entire group cooked dinner for the community at large - 32 of us in a kitchen generally used by 8. It was an afternoon of chaos, creativity, a couple of burned fingers, lots of flavour... and lots and lots of love. The outcome was fantastic - in this "hungry gap" before the spring produce is available, the community loves the diverse meal laid on by EVT every year. My bulging belly was a testament to how good the food was. Though, of course, it did raise issues - how lucky and blessed we are to have such plenty when others go without.

Every meal here is blessed before it is eaten, and it isn't just a token gesture - the people blessing the food really were thinking of those with less than ourselves. It is so sad to know that world food production could feed the human population, but that due to... well, let's just call it "the system," many are hungry.

As well as all of the above, we have had two birthdays in the group this week - many happy returns, Diego and Biz! Diego is leaving the group too, which is very sad - safe trip back to Brazil!

Week 3 (28 Feb)

Three weeks gone already! This week's theme has been "Earth Care" and consisted of two sections; the first, a good look at sustainable building, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the like - culminating with the group building a cob (which is basically moist earth and straw mixed together) cooking stove. The afternoon ended with torrential rain, but the stove is complete, and drying out. While we were building the stove, some of the group cooked pizzas in a cob pizza oven a previous Ecovillage Training group had constructed. They tasted wonderful!

For me the value of the first part of the week was that, in giving an overview, the session leaders were able to focus on what rules of thumb and key factors they had discovered throughout their lives. An invaluable insight, giving me a real sense of what to think about when planning projects in the future.

During the second part of the week, we spent a couple of days in Glen Affric, a couple of hours west of Findhorn. The charity "Trees for Life" works there to restore part of the Caledonian Forest - which now stands at ~1% of it's original area. They are working with the Forestry Commission (the British government arm that is responsible for forestry and timber) to link all the way from the east coast to the Isle of Skye in the west.

Suffice it to say that the two slide presentations we had reemphasized how badly the generations leading to us have ravaged our planet. Forests the world over are in single digit percentages of the area they once covered. We are in the middle of an extinction crisis - we are losing perhaps 150 species per day. The time to act is now...

On the positive side, our time out in the Glen was wonderful. We collected pine cones from native Scots Pines, the seeds of which will be grown and planted out in about two years time. There was snow on the ground so we were unable to plant any trees, but the group had a great time throwing snowballs. Best of all, we could see how quickly Mother Earth can heal herself when we allow her to.

One huge issue is that we have killed off all wolves, lynxes and bears in the UK - so there is nothing to prey on the deer that eat the pine needles.Trees for Life excludes the deer from areas using fences, and both plant saplings out, and allow those that would grow should the deer population be reduced naturally. Their philosophy is to allow nature to do most of the work, and just plant where the forest has been completely eradicated.

Out final week will consist of a design project, working in small groups... It's bound to be an interesting process!

Week 4 (7 Mar)

Week 4 was the final week of Ecovillage Training, and what a week. It began on Sunday with a sweat lodge, which was an amazing experience from start to finish. We started with making prayer bundles, collecting firewood (and planting trees to replace them), continued with taking stones to the fire, drumming, singing, sweating, and ended with sharing soup at the guest lodge. The following morning, I went for a jog followed by meditation - leaving me in a very calm, steady place.

Inside the sweat lodge was intensely hot, incredibly potent and very revealing, though I must admit the awareness I gained there, and outside lying on the cool grass, faded away quickly. Many participants, including me, felt a loss of ego during the process, emerging from the lodge disoriented and dizzy. Kara and others felt a very deep connection with the Earth and the other participants.

On Monday we used Open Space to form our groups for our design projects. If you have not heard of it, Open Space is a fantastic organisational tool that allows any participant with an idea to hold a space devoted to that idea, while the remaining participants circulate, talk, listen and contribute to the spaces they feel drawn to. It is very organic and flowing, and trusts that people will end up where they should be, and is designed around the understanding that, at conferences, people often get most from the coffee breaks!

Anyway, it was a chaotic process, but everyone ended up in a design project of interest to them. In order to gain a Permaculture Design Certificate, which is the most formal qualification of EVT, one must both learn Permaculture basics, then apply them in a design project, and finally present that project to the group. Kara and I filmed a short video about the Ethics and Attitudes of Permaculture as our project, starring our EVT group, a chicken hand puppet, and a very cute toy rabbit!

We began by designing, storyboarding and brainstorming on Monday afternoon; we filmed on Tuesday morning (being at our work departments on Tuesday afternoon!); we did two final pieces of filming and all the editing on Wednesday; and finally presented the film on Wednesday night! Talk about a crash course in video editing - I have never done it before. The film turned out well (though needing much polish before we release it to a wider audience), and we both got our PDCs.

Other groups designed permaculture gardens, whole ecovillages and settlements on areas of land they already owned or had an interest in; one group made a beautiful stone mosaic from local beach stones, and one group designed a new banking fund that would be much more holistic, geared towards investing in sustainable, transition (as in Transition Towns: see Transition Culture for more info) projects - while still generating a return for the investors. All very positive stuff, and great to see people using their strengths to create amazing ideas.

While we were filming we went back out to our cob cookstove - I think it turned out really well! We ended our time at Findhorn with some Homecare (that is, cleaning up the spaces we had lived in for the past four weeks), some sharing, and some very silly games that worked so well because of the closeness of our group after all the time we'd shared together.

Thank you to Craig, Gabrielle, and Biz for their care and support of us during our time with you; thank you to the other EVTers for their openness, willingness to participate, and passion; and thank you to Findhorn for the space where all of the magic we experienced could take place. Now we can see how Peoplecare, Fairshare and Earthcare are all equally important in building community, and we are already putting these principles into action in our own lives!