Sustainability Centre Blog

Autumn in the South Downs

2011-10-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

After a beautiful Indian summer - here for a couple of weeks in early October, Autumn has now arrived. The leaves are beginning to turn and fall, the sun is still shining and the days - though shorter, are beautiful. I love this time of year. - A perfect time to get out and enjoy the beautiful countryside all around the Sustainability Centre. So if you are wondering what to do in half term - why not pay us a visit!
Our volunteers have been working hard outside - strimming the wildflower meadow and sorting out the vegetable garden!

My first month here has been great - with lots to learn about and lots to do. This is such a busy place!

We have had lots of school groups here staying in Wetherdown Lodge on our South Downs Experience residential, others have come for a day or two. All of them going home having learned more about how to live lightly and have fun too.

We have also had campcraft events with some business groups doing team-building.

A two week Residential Permaculture Design Course finished last weekend - a great group of people who gave us lots of ideas for projects for the future too. We are already planning dates for the next course - so if you are interested in finding out more please get in touch.

We are also running courses on Woodland Management, Hurdle Making & Coppicing in November and December. A day long course doing Festive Willow Craft in early December will get us all in the festive spirit and maybe we can make something as a Christmas Gift. Talking of gifts - if you, like me dread the pre Christmas season and hate shopping, you could always think about giving a course gift voucher and treat someone you love to a place on one of our courses next year. I can't believe I am talking about Christmas already - its not even November!

Next time I will tell you more about some of the people who live and work here. They have given me such a lovely warm welcome.

Back to School

2011-08-31T03:09:00.000-07:00

We all remember that feeling of going back to school after the long summer holiday. It may be that you are in a new classroom, with a different teacher, perhaps the dinner hall has had a lick of paint and you are wearing your special new 'back to school' shoes. For me it has always been a time of change and a time to knuckle down to fruitful new challenges.

There is a distinct nip of Back to School in the air at the Sustainability Centre. The education and accommodation teams are preparing for a very busy September of school bookings and the last summer holiday campers are making the most of their final few days. I am also into my final week as manager and I am looking forward to the new challenges that await me in my new life. And yes, for those of you that have read my yurt blog entries, we are moving into four walls with real plumbing. We have loved living here in our beautiful yurty home and now we are ready for a change. The yurt will remain, however, and will become the home of Ash, Gina and their kids.

We are also bidding a fond farewell to fellow yurt-dweller and horse-logging pixie Raina. Raina has had a very positive impact on the adult courses programme including developing our suite of OCN accredited courses. Raina and her chair bodging partner Pete (aka the Artful Bodger) are now dwelling in the woods somewhere in the wilds of Gloucestershire.

Christine Seaward will be starting as our new CEO in late September. Christine brings with her a wealth of experience in the public sector and in running local campaigns. She has been a friend and colleague of the Sustainability Centre for many years and I am very confident to be handing over to such a capable, good humoured and knowledgeable manager.

So it's goodbye from me! And a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have supported, helped, loved and challenged me along the way. You know who you are.

New Blood

2011-06-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noted that we have been doing rather a lot of recruiting recently! It is an exciting time at the Sustainability Centre as we welcome new staff and skills on to the team.

We are delighted to welcome Rachael Arden as Volunteer and Community Coordinator. This is a new post and an exciting new project that will both develop our volunteer resource and intiate a range of practical projects around the site. We have been aware for some time that, although we have many dedicated and skilled volunteers, that we haven't been making the best use of our amazing volunteer base. Samantha Britton will also be joining us as maternity cover for Polly who is expecting twins in September, hooray! Sam comes with a strong background in sustainability and will be a great addition to the team.

Last, but not least I hope, I will be moving on to a life in the Welsh hills at the end of August. I have had an unbelievable four years at the Centre as both a volunteer and a member of staff. I feel privileged to to have been here during a period that has seen the organisation grow in confidence, stability and into a place of true inspiration and learning. During this time I have also experienced yurt life in all its grit and glory, become a mother and grown immensely in my own knowledge, and self-knowledge.

Several people have said to me 'but this is your baby'. It isn't. Just as the rest of this land, it belongs to everyone and no-one. All we can do is to say that, in our short period of occupancy, we did our best and that our best made a difference in some small way. I am continuously inspired by the people I work with and the people that I meet at the Sustainability Centre which is why I know that it will continue to thrive and develop and change.

Anyway, you haven't quite heard the last of me yet! We are in the process of recruiting a new Chief Executive Officer as I write and I look forward to welcoming them to this amazing opportunity that is so much more than just a job.

Inspiration from the South Downs Green Fair

2011-05-17T02:16:00.000-07:00

Another year, another Green Fair. And what a spectacular one it was! The Fair has become bigger, brighter and better each year that I have been involved with the Sustainability Centre and I think we all felt a surge of pride as the constant stream of visitors poured through the gates. The words 'exceptional', 'excellent' and 'well worth it' were amongst the feedback we received. As one mum commented 'it was nice to pay the fee at the gate and then not be fleeced once we were inside'. The free crafts, kids activities and kids parade were ever popular and Juggling Jake's circus skills tent was packed with kids, teens and adults all day. Add to that the wonderful food, local bands, real ales, plants, seed swap and independent green traders.....well, I certainly enjoyed myself.

The Woodland Classroom came into its own as the venue for the Permaculture Question Time with keynote speech by writer and journalist John-Paul Flintoff. John-Paul gave a warm, witty and engaging talk about his journey of discovery making his own clothes. He is author of Sew Your Own, first published by Permanent Publications under the title of Through the Eye of a Needle. Reviews tend to focus on the nettle pants experiment but I was just very impressed with the quality of his needlework, and I was standing close enough to him to really look at the collar detail on that shirt and the neat seams on his jeans! The phrase that springs to mind is 'they don't look like he made them himself'. It is something of a shame that our first thought is often, 'it looks like a real one' or 'one he got from a shop' as our making skills have been so eroded in only one or two generations. A woman, perhaps in her 70s, came up to me after the talk to say that all this knowledge still exists, you just have to ask 'us oldies'.

John-Paul with a fancy dress costume made out of old babygros.
He also made the shirt and the jeans - impressive!

My current craft obsession is crochet, a skill with distict old lady overtones, but one that is becoming increasingly fashionable. At least that's what I tell myself when I am crocheting in front of the telly (Madmen DVD boxed set, amazing tailoring!) on a Friday night. I am secretly delighted that MP Damian Hinds agreed to wear my silly spider hat for the Flowers and Bugs parade at the Fair. I love making things but I am very aware that my skills are nothing like that of my mother or my grandmother, despite their best efforts to teach me as a child. My grandmother made unbelievably delicate lace crochet in the finest cottons and my mum made many of my clothes when I was little.

Janet, Me, Damian Hinds and the hat

It was heartening to see so many beautiful hand made items at the Green Fair, from vintage fabric bags to baskets to stacks of home baked bread. There is a genuine desire amongst many to become more skilled in making all manner of things and it would seem that many get real pleasure from doing it. We are more resiliant, more empowered and have a deeper appreciation for the nature of stuff by having a go at making things ourselves. I feel like I understand a bit more how much work goes into making a good shoe because I have an idea about how to knit a hat. The sad reality is that hand made things are always more expensive than those on the mass market; it costs considerably more to buy the yarn to knit a jumper than it does to buy one on the high street. The 'price' in monetary terms is not always the point, a hand made beautiful thing carries much more worth than its mass-produced counterpart, especially if you have made it for yourself.

On reviewing Sew Your Own Emmanuelle Smith, Financial Times comments:

“Compelling… For Flintoff, enlightenment comes neither through religion nor political affiliation – but in making clothes. He is most engaged, and engaging, when he is knitting doll outfits for his daughter, darning socks, or customising a T-shirt on his new eBay-sourced treadle sewing machine… an inspiring eulogy to DIY”

I feel that I can extend this sentiment to the Green Fair itself. Henry, Polly and the team made something beautiful this year that was educational, fun, vibrant and sustainable. It was hand made with pride, committment and a love for what we do. And it made people smile. That is what it is all about.

Images by Penny Rose

Thoughts on rubbish

2011-04-20T01:39:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is the springtime that brings out the recycling bug in me! We spent this weekend doing various domestic tasks, many of which I realised related to recycling or foraging of some sort. I also realised that I get a lot of pleasure from making good use of things or searching out that second hand bargain.

I rescued a child's bench from the firewood pile and sanded it in preparation for a new lick of paint, picked up a good-as-new sofa that we bought on ebay, unravelled a jumper to reuse the wool, and collected a few buckets fulls of flints from the chalk piles (the results of much hard work by the grave diggers) to edge my little garden. I also donated several bag of clothes to the Traidcraft bin in the car park after the girls in the office had rifled through them.

It all sounds very noble doesn't it? I know I risk sounding a bit 'holier-than-thou' in my purchasing habits but, to be honest, it has become a bit of a habit. It is not always a virtue either! In the past our many foraging trips to the tip resulted in a large number of items coming home with us that we didn't actually need and ended up back at the tip within a few months. When I was a student in Lancaster (home of the finest charity shops I know) I would browse weekly and clothed myself entirely in second hand clothes. I had a moment of realisation one week when I picked up a pair of jeans thinking, 'now who would get rid of those', before I realised that I had donated them the week before and actually I was perhaps a bit addicted to charity shopping.

The key to successful reusing and recycling is to be discerning. Select quality and select what you actually need. Much of the stuff that ends up at the tip or the charity shop - tea light holders, toast racks, USB hamster wheels, spaghetti jars, foot spas etc. - always were surplus to requirement and will possibly not enhance your life.

Upcycling is the new word for making new stuff out of old stuff. You have probably been doing it for years: a old tyre makes a swing, a bit of left over architrave is a picture frame, a sock becomes a puppet! Online there are some amazing upcycling ideas that are really fun. Today I learned how to make a laptop bag out of carrier bags and one of my favourite crafty websites is etsy.com which is packed full of really good projects that don't just look like something made out of rubbish!

The runaway success of websites like ebay, Freecycle and preloved how how keen our desire is to reuse and recycle. Permaculture Mag's readers solutions page also yields some really good ideas. I am particularly taken with the worm tubes that seem like a really easy and low-maintenance way of making worm compost.

Mercury comes crashing down

2011-03-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

Our usually tranquil little corner of the South Downs is currently being rocked by the sound and vibrations of military buildings crashing to the ground. Where I am usually woken to the percussion of a woodpecker on a nearby dead cedar, we are roused to the sound of very large diggers.

For those of you who know the Sustainability Centre you can't have missed the fact that we have, for over 10 years, been overshadowed by the derelict remains of SCU Leydene, the other half of the former HMS Mercury and previous custodians of the Sustainability Centre site. Razor wire has flanked the northern boundary of our site and imposing, dangerous buildings loomed over us. These are now being carefully picked apart and all the materials meticulously separated for recycling. It is impressive and intimidating to watch as slowly the top of the hill seems able to breathe again and we suddenly feel high. Obviously the site will be redeveloped but the new housing will have a much reduced visual impact.

We have had our own military heritage to cope with and it serves to remind us how far we have come since the Sustainability Centre took ownership of its part of HMS Mercury in 1995. I have only seen pictures but once our site looked much like that over the road and for a considerable time it was a huge demolition site. In those days they certainly didn't recycle and separate as diligently as they are today, another timely reminder of the rocketing prices of precious raw materials and the waste management regulations that now have to be adhered to. This spring is seeing the further 'demilitarisation' of our site, we are replacing the old red brick sewage works, built to a sturdy design tried and tested since the Victorian times but now inefficient, with a WET system which will use natural processes of transpiration and microbial action to treat our waste water. We are also knocking down the garages in the car park which will improve our frontage and add to a more open 'downland' feeling.

I may have used this image before but I have a favourite military remnant at the Centre. A concrete marker post with MOD embossed into it now supports a living tree that has grown over it. What could be a more fitting emblem of the Sustainability Centre. It has taken us some time to grow into a flourishing, stable organisation from the incredible and yet challenging gift of land and buildings that we were given fifteen years ago. Now we are a truly wealthy organisation in our land, our dedicated staff, our community and all the amazing opportunities that come our way nearly every day. We also pay our way which, in this current financial climate, is a rare and privileged position to be in.

Flu, Poo and Yummy Goo

2011-03-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

Hello All! Apologies for the lack of blogs in February, a nasty bout of flu had the better of me for a while there. I am on the mend now that the sun has finally emerged and the spring air is entering my lungs.

It is one year since I started writing this blog and such a lot has happened! And of course it isn't stopping there, we have some really exciting projects starting this year that should make a real difference to how we operate. The most significant of these will be our new WET system to treat our sewage. I am unusually excited about this project because it is so poetically simple. Not only will it deal with our poo, it will look like a wetland, it will be a wildlife rich habitat and it will yield coppice willow as a product. As Jonathan, our accommodation officer commented, 'I am struggling to find any downsides'.

WET system at Weston's Cider, thanks to Jay Abrahams for the images

The system will be constructed as a series of swales and as the wastewater flows through the soil banks it is purified by microbial action and the transpiration of the growing plants. The range of plants used is stunning and are specifically selected for each WET system according to soil type and application. The system is completely passive and uses no fossil fuels, it also uses no hard landscaping such as brick tanks or gravel beds. We will have to use a geosynthetic clay liner for our system because we are on the protected chalk aquifer of the South Downs and this will have a relatively high embodied energy, but it should last us for many many years and seems well worth it.

Another exciting development is that the Beech Cafe will be relocating into a much bigger and more pleasant space. The business has quickly outgrown its little kiosk and gets amazing feedback about the food. I was particularly impressed recently by the vegan beetroot and chocolate cake, it was iced with chocolate and cardamon gungy stuff and it retained a slight beetrooty earthiness. The relocation will take place in time for the Green Fair in May so if you are regular visitor you may have to bear with us for a few weeks while things are moving around. The intention is to keep as many regular hours as possible and any closures will be added to the website.

Amongst our other exciting developments are newly refurbished shower rooms in Wetherdown Lodge, a new 24' tipi and fresh new cover for the Mongolian yurt, an extra treebog on the campsite, planning permission approved for an extension to the South Downs Natural Burial Site,our first Forest School group who had a wonderful time, Green Beans willow dome and flower daisy under construction, polytunnel in action in the Fitzroy rural skills project compound, ugly garages scheduled for demolition.....almost too much to think about really!

Tweets in the trees

2011-01-27T06:14:00.000-08:00

It is always heartening to hear of other people who are living a life under canvas and who are committed to living a low-impact life. My attention was first drawn to Hen and Leo through the medium of Twitter, a social network that I have to admit I mostly find baffling. But some unique voices seem to find their way through the mass of retweets, links, tiny.urls and Hen is a enthusiastic and prolific tweeter. She also writes a great blog and makes baskets, a combination that feels comfortable to me. They just had a whole programme dedicated to them on BBC Radio 4's Open Country, which talked of their upland smallholding in Exmoor and mission to plant 6000 trees. Hen is currently running a twitter campaign to protest against the selling off of state owned woodland, currently a very hot topic and one that is generating passionate debate from many quarters.

Hen and Leo have embraced technology in their yurt much as we have in ours, although they don't have the obvious advantage of an on-grid Sustainability Centre on their doorstep! I am currently sitting with laptop and dongle next to the woodburner but I may as well be in my office, or halfway up Snowdon for all you know. I like this place in the world. In my line of work a computer is the principal tool of the trade, with a phone coming a swift second and a pen still proving essential. I think it is amazing to have seen the internet revolution and the ease in which information can be accessed and shared. I am sure that there is still more to come, my non-technological brain finds it hard to imagine how, but it will happen. Improvements in batteries have also made a big difference to us - I now have a laptop with an 8hr battery life (for now at least) and in the dark winter months this makes a big difference - as have the improvements in rechargeable and cordless appliances. I have a rechargable portable food processor that we can charge through the inverter and lasts long enough to blend two or three batches of soup.

Hen and Leo are currently applying for planning permission for their yurt and, in our twitter discussion about attitudes and perceptions of neighbours, she commented that she hopes that their neighbours might even one day be 'a little bit proud' to have a yurt next door. There was a time when our neighbours were certainly not proud to have a Sustainability Centre or yurts next door although I am delighted to say that this is now firmly in the past. We still get the odd grumble, as can only be expected as we get busier, but on the whole the local community are definitely a 'little bit proud'. The village magazine Meon Matters is running a feature on yurt living in their next edition and publicity about the Sustainability Centre as a whole is increasing all the time.

So, keep up with the Sustainability Centre, Wetherdown Lodge and Permaculture Magazine on Twitter, if you are that way inclined.

A child of the green wood renaissance

2011-01-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all! It has been a slightly grey and dismal start to 2011 but we are not letting that dampen our spirits are we?

A brief and slightly frivolous facebook conversation with Maddy one morning about coracles brought me to thinking how the green wood and coppice crafts movement has developed over the past 25 (is it really that many!) years. I was among the fortunate few to have been brought up within the green wood 'renaissance' that began sometime in the 80s and is modestly flourishing across the UK. I had my first coracle experience at 8, raced in numerous coracle regattas in Ironbridge and made my first tiny and highly unstable coracle when I was about 11. Alongside this I was tinkering with pole lathes, making willow whistles, planting trees and generally loitering around coppice craftspeople and artisans.

My brother Bryn and I at the launch of the Coracle Centre in Cenarth aged 9 and 11ish

The Green Wood Trust at that time was managed by Gerwyn Lewis (my dad, obviously) who played his own crucial part in reinvigorating the movement towards the sustainable management of British native woodlands and raising the profile of the ancient practice of coppicing. Green wood crafts such as pole lathe turning, hazel hurdle making and coracle making are an important part of this process both in the creation of beautiful, practical objects, but also as an accessible, attractive method of engaging the public in woodlands. Other key people that were around during my childhood and teens (sorry if this makes you feel old folks) include the inimitable Mike Abbott, fine chair maker Gudrun Leitz, Stuart Whitehead, yurt maker Hal Wynne Jones, the legend that is Walter Lloyd, the late Bill Hogarth, 'woodland pioneer' Rebecca Oaks and american green wooders Don Weber and Drew Langsner. I was somewhere in the background (in pigtails) of the first ever Bodgers Ball held by the Pole Lathe Turners Association and slept in a yurt in the days when no one had ever heard of them. The Green Wood Trust merged with the Small Woods Association some years ago and is now a flourishing, if very different organisation, with 30 staff across the UK.

I suppose the point of this ramble is that in my lifetime I have seen genuine change. A pole lathe is no longer an unusual site at country fairs and festivals, yurts are everywhere, hazel hurdles are in demand and, most importantly of all, coppicing and sustainable woodland managment are now recognised as useful, economically viable and crucial in maintaining our woodland heritage and biodiversity. You can now attend courses in green wood working and woodland management across the whole of the UK and more and more people hanker for a life in the woods.

At Lancaster University I was lucky enough to study under Professor Robin Grove-White who, with Professer Brian Wynne founded the internationally renowned Centre for the Study of Environmental Change. He has also been involved at the highest level of environmental politics including as the Chair of Greenpeace UK. I remember in one of my first lectures, when everyone was bemoaning the state of the world, he simply said that there was no point in being depressed about it and that he couldn't help but be optimistic about the changes that he had seen in his lifetime. The plight of the traditional English coppice worker is perhaps not immediately comparable to that of global climate change, but these small and sustainable occupations all have their significant contributions to make.

Forestry in the UK is again facing a number of serious challenges, not least the prospect of a national sell off of woodlands. We have disease to contend with and the very real possibility that our climate, particularly in arid south-east England, will not be able to support our traditional native species. But I am hopeful for the woods. I meet so many committed, excited, talented people who are dedicated to living, loving, using and protecting our woodland heritage that I can't help but remain inspired, even if I have seen more chainsaw sculpture than I care to remember.

A Simple Christmas

2010-12-15T02:02:00.000-08:00

I am sure I don't have to remind any of you that Christmas is now just around the corner! There seem to be a plethora of websites and magazine articles out there telling you how to green your Christmas as well as celebrities like Kirsty Allsop showing us how to make our own decorations and bake gingerbread tree decorations. They are full of good ideas of how to reduce your wrapping paper waste, recycle your tree, make your own gift tags by reusing old cards from last year and buying a goat as a gift.

This is all good stuff and I would support all of it, but it doesn't address that general unease that many of us have which is that Christmas has lost its way. Us greenies bemoan the glittery sell-out, the rampant consumerism, the disneyfied charade, the bloated feast of waste. This year there is also the uneasy undercurrent of austerity, revolting students and the prospect of swinging public sector cuts to add to the malaise.

I, however, still love Christmas and love it most when I don't worry about it. I have an advantage in that I am never happier than when I am making something, so a festive season of foraging for greenery, sticking sequins on things and making gifts is something that nourishes my 'ready-for-a-holiday' work mind. There are many reasons why it is good to make things at Christmas - thrift, recycling, the creative personal touch etc. - but for me it is fundamental to my enjoyment of the season. However, this only really works if you take a different and more simple approach to the whole shebang. For example, sending Christmas cards to 300 people including the postman who delivers them (if I was him that would be annoying given the amount of cards he has to carry) is unrealistic and takes all the pleasure out of it. Receiving two handmade cards is worth twenty of those multipack ones that were thrown into the trolley during the weekly Tesco run. I like getting presents, in fact I probably get more excited about my two year old's presents than she does, but I could really do without many of the 'token' gifts that I receive. Except for edible things, those I like!

Make your own decorations because you enjoy it and because it gives you pleasure to dress your home for a celebration, not because you have to or because the fashion this year is for white LEDs with cinnamon sticks.

Natural decorations at the Green Wood Centre

I think that the joy of Christmas can be rediscovered through simplification. These are some of my small solutions:

Send fewer cards and make them more personal. Not everyone will want to make their own cards but you can spend time writing a personal message in each instead
Buy fewer gifts, we don't need them
Go out into the woods or the garden and collect greenery for decorations
Make some stuff; it is not just about being worthy, you might even enjoy it!
Play games
Eat good food with friends and family
Go for a walk
Shop less
Worry less
Have a rest

For some Christmas is a hard time and for my family it carries a deep sadness at the tragic death three years ago of my young cousin. For this reason it is even more important that we are all together, supporting each other and remembering what it is that makes us strong, resilient and loving. It's often said that 'well, it's really about the kids isn't it'. Children are an important focus at Christmas but there is something in it for all of us if we allow ourselves the space and the chance to enjoy it.

Above all, I am looking forward to having a nice rest after a busy and eventful year at the Sustainability Centre. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to this special place and long may it continue, sustainably of course.

the importance of happiness

2010-11-25T04:39:00.000-08:00

This morning it was announced that David Cameron will commission the Office for National Statistics to carry out a survey of our psychological and environmental wellbeing. I was listening to this on the Today programme as I was snuggled up in my warm bed with a contentedly sleeping toddler at my side. Through the yurt crown I could see the glimmer of a fine cold day and a reassuring puff of smoke coming from the chimney. I relish this little bit of time in the early morning when Holly and Henry are sleeping and I drink my hot tea in bed.

This is already being labelled as the ‘happiness agenda’ (although ‘happiness’ is probably not a word we will hear politicians use) and it is proposed that it will offer an alternative or complementary benchmark by which to assess societal progress. Alternative, that is, to the GDP model of economic growth that is currently used. It remains to be seen how the ONS carries out this survey and what questions will be asked. It will be interesting to see what is done with the data that is collected and I will reserve judgment on the outcomes of this survey. However, a model of progress that recognises something other than economic growth has to be a positive move.

Holly enjoying her food!

True sustainability can be, on a very basic level, broken down into environmental, economic and social sustainability. I tend to find that, when confronted with the ‘S’ word, most people think of the environmental aspects first and then possibly the economic aspects. Very few consider social sustainability and even fewer will perceive them to be interdependent. I often hear the phrase ‘balance’ used in this context as if the different elements of sustainability are in opposition to each other. Where ‘balance’ is cited it is too often the environmental or social aspects that lose out. So, any recognition that aspects of social sustainability including physical health and wellbeing, mental and spiritual health, quality of life and even, dare I say it, ‘happiness’ are being recognised as important is heartening.

I hear it said so often that people are becoming disillusioned with their lifestyles of endless commuting, working long hours, driving long distances and being constantly ‘plugged in’ to various electronic media. High stress, high speed and high impact are becoming increasingly unfashionable as people rediscover things like growing vegetables, working from home and even perhaps settling for a lower income in order to spend more time with their families. It could also be said that this is a fad and a luxury that the upper-middle classes can afford, a Guardian readers’ green fetish, but I tend to think that there is genuine feeling of dissatisfaction underpinning this. It is a cliché perhaps to say that ‘money can’t buy you love’ and ‘the best things in life are free’ but I do believe that there is a point beyond which things don’t become any more satisfying or fun.

I often use the analogy of weddings, a simple concept and ceremony that has taken on the very worst excesses of consumerism and cynical marketing. I have been to weddings that cost £500 and weddings that have cost an amount that I have dared not imagine, and all I can say is that they don’t get more fun the more they cost. The best wedding food I ever had was cooked by the bride and her mum and the best wedding party I have been to was in a field. The bits I remember and cherish are the bits that cost nothing, the mad fit of hysterical giggles that overcame both bride and groom during their vows (thanks to Esther and Dave for that memory), the funniest best man’s speech, Holly dancing in a monkey suit etc. I have done the flowers for a couple of good friends’ weddings and it was a very pleasurable thing to do. They cost nothing except for a bit of ribbon and a new pair of secateurs. One bride’s mother thanked me with tears in her eyes.

Cat and David's wedding including wellies and homemade flowers

So, it remains to be seen what will happen with the Wellbeing Agenda and I suspect that the economic model will always ‘in balance’ be considered more important but I am glad that it is being talked about at least.

Tree Bog Blog

2010-11-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

Toilets! Not everyone’s favourite subject but one that tends to take up much of our time at the Sustainability Centre. I, and I am sure I am not alone in this, tend to judge a place on the quality, cleanliness and characterfullness of the toilets. I am sure we all have stories of our best, worst and most memorable toilet experience. I have a fond memory of a hostel toilet on a Swiss mountainside that had a picture perfect view of the Eiger through a window positioned carefully for a seated viewer. My worst I won’t elaborate on but it involved a train in India and a very long journey.

We have been beset by our fair share of toilet issues at the Centre. Ifo low water use toilets were installed with an accompanying rainwater harvesting system in the 90s, when this was all still pretty cutting edge in this country. They have served us pretty well as loos although we get numerous blockages due to our old naval drainage system which was designed for considerably higher volumes of water.

Two years ago we built a urine separating compost toilet on the campsite which has never really functioned as it should although it has seen some good use. After much deliberation, unblocking bits, conversations with the manufacturer and the like I have come to the conclusion that it can't cope with the volume of use that it is getting.

So, our solution to this problem is to commission some tree bogs from the Wye Wood Project in Herefordshire. The project is run by the Small Woods Association and is an innovative approach to improving health through involvement in woodland activities and training. Participants are directed to the project through PCT mental health services, GP referrals, the probation service and self-referrals. In order to make the project more financially sustainable they are starting to make tree bogs and supply timber as a social enterprise. A team of Wye Wooders have been here for the past week building the tree bogs and staying in Wetherdown Lodge.

Wye Wooders adding the straw to the outside of the treebog. This helps to absorb excess liquid and provides a visual barrier!

The tree bog is a variation on the traditional long drop compost toilet with a significant difference. Instead of using a pit the compost pile is at ground level and the toilet itself is raised on a platform. This makes best use of natural aerobic decomposition and allows the poo pile to stay dry. Willows are planted around the base of the tree bog to absorb liquids and create a source of biomass. In our case the tree bogs are sited in woodland so instead of willow we are making use of the existing trees. And they look great! The Wye Wood gang have crafted some lovely rustic structures with plenty of character. They are building a double tree bog plus a wheelchair accessible pit latrine that, with limited use and our free draining chalk, will not be smelly. Maurice, the project officer at Wye Wood and woodsman, has left his mark in the form of a carved face on the yew door handle, a wonderful finishing touch to a lovely little building.

The tree bogs and wheelchair accessible toilet will provide facilities for the Fitzroy Rural Skills Project, another social enterprise working with adults with learning difficulties and physical disabilities. The parallels with the Wye Wood project are clear and both embody the social and environmental principles that the Sustainability Centre holds dear. The social enterprise element of both projects are also hugely positive and they are making important steps towards financial independence.

Hand cleft chestnut shingles

If you would like to learn more The Sustainability Centre is running a Tree Bog building course on the 9th-10th April 2011.

We are also running a shingle making course that will teach you how to make hand cleft shingles like those used on our tree bogs.
For more information on WET sewage treatment systems from the inventor of the tree bog take a look at the Biologic Design website. Well worth a look!

First Frost

2010-10-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

We are well and truly on our way to winter now and as I write this in the early first light I can hear the crows cawing in the trees, a sure sign of autumn proper. The ground was crisp with frost this morning and my hot outdoor shower was certainly invigorating! We have been doing all our winter preparation including digging a new hole for the compost toilet, getting in the firewood and buying a new adaptor for the laptop – a vital source of battery powered entertainment in the dark months! We have been harvesting the last of our little garden which has been amazingly productive given its size. We have had loads of beans, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, salads, spinach, chillis and herbs. A rampant courgette that we thought would never give us a vegetable has produced several large squash which has I am planning to harvest and cook as part of a feast this weekend. What we hadn't expected were all the bonus tomatoes that have seeded themselves from the washing up water thrown on the garden! We have also invested in a preloved Swedish woodburner which kept us toasty warm in last night’s chill. It has a glass door and gives a wonderful warm glowing heart to our circular space. At the moment we are burning bone dry hazel offcuts from a local coppice worker and they give an amazing heat. We combine these with seasoned oak sawmill offcuts which stay in well overnight.

frosty trees at the Centre last winter

Last winter was bitter but we don't experience anything like the subzero temperatures that are experienced by those who live on the Mongolian plains in yurts, the obvious inspiration for all us Westerners who have the luxury to choose a tented life. Because it is a luxury, even if many are perplexed by our choice to live without those services that most would consider to be the basic necessities for life: running water, mains plumbing, electricity on demand and separate rooms for privacy.

Mongolia is a very poor country and they are experiencing some of the worst ravages of climate change. Conditions are harsh with seasonal water supplies that have led to a nomadic lifestyle where animals are moved on for grazing. Temperatures have been shown to have risen, the groundwater table is decreasing, and desertification is intensifying. Mongolia is a water stressed country with as much as 40% of the population lacking access to safe drinking water. As the water table drops this situation is likely to worsen. Most Mongolian’s earn their keep by raising livestock and as water and water-fed pasture decreases, this source of income and self-sufficiency will also become less viable.

There has been much written about the inequalities of environmental degradation and it is often true that the poorest in our societies are the ones that live in the most polluted areas and those with scant resources. This can be seen in places like China that take shiploads of our dangerous waste for recycling, in isolated communities like those in the north of Scotland who rely on nuclear reprocessing and decommissioning for valuable income, and in minority ethnic communities like those in Detroit, a city smothered in a smog of pollution from the automotive industry and one that is over 80% black and has one of the highest poverty levels in the US.

In our own country how will the poorest amongst us adapt to climate change and peak oil as energy costs rise, food prices go up, commodities become more expensive and resources are under pressure? I like to hope that something about how we choose to live in our little house shows that it is possible to live simply, cheaply and comfortably with few inputs. I will not pretend that I don't have the same worries about money, overdrafts, car troubles and credit card debts that too many of us have, but we are able to live a lifestyle that I believe gives us a higher quality of life than if we lived in rented accommodation, which is scarce and expensive in this rich and privileged part of the world. And there are so many advantages, access to this stunning landscape being one of them!

Red Sludge

2010-10-11T02:55:00.000-07:00

Kolontar, a small village in Hungary, is on the map this week for having been deluged in around one million cubic meters of red mud, a by product from an alumina plant. Aerial photos show the extent of the spill that spreads like a blood stain across the landscape and through the streets. The spill is now heading towards the Danube, a river that is already heavily polluted from the five rivers that flow into it and the millions of people in 19 countries in the Danube river basin that pour pollution into it.

The internet and the papers are awash with contradictory information, as ever. A quick google search was enough to confuse my Sunday afternoon brain: it is highly caustic and full of heavy metals, it is not really that dangerous, the Danube is threatened, the Danube is not threatened etc. Red mud is, however, a long term problem because it is very difficult to dispose of, hence it sits round in giant drying ponds that can never be built on or farmed again. Or, of course, they can burst and kill a number of unfortunate people who probably relied on the alumina plant for employment and to support the local economy.

picture from guardian.co.uk

I did not know much about bauxite mining and aluminium production until last week and I had certainly never come across red mud before. I did know that it is difficult and energy intensive process and that there were pollutants associated with. I am also vaguely aware of the problems associated with many industrial processes: the dyeing industry, the leather industry, DDT, the coltan mining industry, artisanal gold mining…I could go on all day.

In my internet ramblings I came across the Blacksmith Institute who publish an annual report cheerily titled the World’s Worst Polluted Places report. They have changed the emphasis for the 2009 report to focus on successful cleanup stories rather than on a gloomy list of disasters. It still makes for pretty depressing reading although there is certainly hope and the Blacksmith Institute are keen to highlight how change can happen when national and international communities work together. They cite the phasing out of leaded gasoline and the Chemical Weapons Convention as examples of positive action.

We have our own minor contamination occurrences to deal with on our site, asbestos being the most prevalent and one that affects a huge number of public buildings including many schools. In the past we have also found unidentified cans of something, old batteries, shell casings and all manner of scrap metal left by the Navy. The regulations surrounding disposal of waste are getting more and more stringent and that has to be a good thing. You can’t throw computer monitors and TVs full of toxic waste into landfill, you can’t dump fridges and you can’t bury asbestos in a hole in the ground as commonly practiced in the old days. And more polluters are being called to account in a number of landmark cases including the Multinational company Trafigura who were found guilty of exporting toxic waste to the Ivory Coast where, as reported by Amnesty, thousands of people fell ill and there were 15 reported deaths.

On a day to day level, bear in mind that it takes 5% of the energy to recycle an aluminium drinks can than it does to make a new one and that maybe you could Freecycle your old telly instead of taking it to the tip. Small actions like this start to become significant when we think back to those Hungarian villagers wading through caustic red sludge.

Reflections on the Peter Roberts Memorial lecture “Beef, bread and water: ethical food in a warm and thirsty world” - Guest blog by Kelly Williams

2010-09-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

Although invited write this blog from a vegan perspective in response to George Monbiot’s recent Guardian article. I don’t think I can put it much more succinctly than Graham Land when he says the argument seemed to miss the point somewhat.

The individual action of cutting down on meat and dairy – or ‘going the whole hog’ and becoming vegan if you like – shouldn’t be confused with revamping livestock farming into a more sustainable industry. They are different, albeit related, points.

Debate over the perceived right and wrongs of meat eating and veganism in blogs and on message boards can border on religious zeal at times – just delve, if you dare, into the comments board after Monbiot’s article online, certainly a far cry from Mary’s considered and rational blog post last week.

On Monday evening this week, I attended The Peter Roberts Memorial Lecture – “Beef, bread and water: ethical food in a warm and thirsty world” The growing crisis faced by the meat industry outlined there might be the most productive use of this blog space. John Parker the globalisation editor of The Economist magazine, not usually noted for its stance on ethics over profit, at the outset clearly stated the world can not cope with the way we currently feed ourselves – but what is the trade off?

One of the world’s leading experts on water usage and creator of the water footprint concept, Prof. Arjen Hoekstra then highlighted practical factors. World water scarcity and pollution from pesticides and industry are of concern but also hidden globalisation and commoditisation of water from crops grown and exported for animal feed from poor countries to rich ones, effectively exporting water too. He urged each of us to look at their personal water footprint. It certainly is hard to estimate how many kilos of potatoes I eat each week but I’ve had a go on the slightly clunky calculator and come to a rough personal figure of: 576 cubic meters per year. Hoestra estimates only 3% of our water usage is at home with 97% of the water footprint residing invisibly in our food (60-65% of this coming from abroad).

His current calculations on water use are:

1kg wheat = 1,300l water

1kg (factory farmed) beef = 15,000l much of this imported as grain to feed the cow and what he called servicing the animal, not just what it drinks.

Developing countries use much less but it is on the increase due to industrialisation and the worldwide cultural aspiration that higher meat intake = sign of prosperity. Therefore a universal rise in meat consumption would be highly unsustainable as water becomes scarcer. His proposals include more efficient irrigation of crops, product transparency for consumers, coherent targets from government and ultimately all environmental, agricultural, energy, trade and foreign policy sectors to work together – a big ask.

Host of the event, Phillip Lymbery Chief Executive of Compassion in World Farming, reminded us of stark facts. 2 out of every 3 animals eaten are factory farmed, 1 in 3 food grains go to feed factory farmed animals and that half of the world’s antibiotics are fed to these animals. More people mean more animals 67 billion currently and expected to double by 2050 but this earth is finite.

Which will we reach first: peak oil or peak land? Even the most conservative estimate that global temperatures will rise by 2 degrees centigrade, this will mean a rise in sea levels and a loss of valuable agricultural land. Meat and diary in the west are massively under priced compared with their true impact.

According to philosopher Kate Rawles ethics are not soft options or luxuries held by individuals but embedded in all our systems, structures and institutions. Our food system is part of a flawed, detached anthropocentric world view – where the magical assumption of indefinite growth is ingrained. Reality is that economic goals are prioritised over everything.Our fast growing highly unsustainably current system of meeting our needs in general lead Rawles to assume that we must be in deep denial citing the UN Millennium Development Goals not being met as a prime example.The radical ethical factor she proposed was not seeing food as just another business. This as opposed to the option of tweaking the system with more consumer choice, labelling for example leading only to a short term impact.

A model of sustainability has for some time been represented by a triangle with environment, society and economics at the corners, Rawles proposed extending down to include ethical issues such as animal welfare that do not fit in to any of the other categories.Her way toward change is not only to set positive goals but to actively prohibit unethical practices and set an ethical bottom line which cannot be crossed in food production.

Next up the man from the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation. Dr Samuel Jutzi intoned unending dry figures from the 2009 SOFA report. Yet, he recognised the problems of excessive meat consumption and clearly stated the UN has never advocated factory farming. He also made an interesting point about the boom in meat production in Asia – leading to a large percentage of it being exported to… – you guessed it - the west. Something people in the west can do something about as consumers.

A large UN study has looked at reasons for meat consumption and worldwide the answer was less often for nutritional value but for taste, diversity and convenience. 70% of the world is expected to be urbanised by 2050 the study shows meat consumption goes up when populations move to cites. He touched on a growing awareness within the UN that livelihoods, food security and environmental issues are intrinsically linked and had grave concerns about human health and disease citing that 70% of emerging illnesses come from animals.

Damage to society and the environment caused by food issues are now not just talked about but actively anticipated by the UN. Recent food riots in India and Mozambique are a case in point. These examples illustrate what happens when the unrestricted free market speculates on food prices.

The disparity between to poverty and hunger and wealth and obesity was undeniable when presented by Prof Tim Lang a few years ago. 1 billion malnurished, 1 billion obese - I was very moved by the demographic chart looked like two mountains with a deep ravine in between.

There is no magic bullet to this massively complex issue , Jutzi seemed to drop his faceless beaurocrat mask and appeared visibly shaken when talking later, a man who has undoubtedly seen much, appeared ground down by the global slow progress to act on food issues and seemed exasperated when talking about Copenhagen He claimed to feel hopeful as the event had in the room all the people who should be talking to each other apart from obvious exception being major politicians. He also reported the intense pressure on himself and colleagues from a very strong industrial meat lobby funded by large corporations as opposed to small farmers.

My original concern was that Monbiot’s article could be divisive amongst groups who could just as easily pull together under a common goal. Let’s consider the urgent call to action from Phillip Lymbery, toward a worldwide re-think. Our current intensive farming system has only been in place for 50 – 60 years, let’s hope it does not take that long to bring it to an end or to convince people to eat less meat, and put a sustainable food system in place.

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Further Links:

http://www.ciwf.org.uk/

http://www.outdoorphilosophy.co.uk/

Kelly is an active volunteer at the Sustainability Centre with the Green Beans toddler group. She also organises vegan events at the Centre with delicious catering from the Beech Cafe. Thanks for your post, from Mary x

Meat

2010-09-07T08:01:00.000-07:00

I have been inspired today to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) regarding Simon Fairlie’s new book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, published by Permanent Publications. George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian today, also comments on it and graciously admits that Fairlie has challenged him over a number of points including his statement that veganism is the only ethical response to the inequalities of human malnutrition and the unjust use of large tracts of land for feeding unsustainably high numbers of livestock for the meat and dairy industries. Monbiot now acknowledges that veganism is not the only answer and that not all meat is bad meat. This has also sparked some lively debate on the Permaculture facebook page. Good, I am glad you are all still paying attention!

Fairlie agrees that our current models of meat production and factory farming are deeply flawed and undoubtedly environmentally damaging but he also argues, in a well researched and dispassionate way, that some livestock and modest meat consumption can be part of a sustainable model of food production. I do not have enough knowledge of land use and agriculture to be able to accurately assess the robustness of Fairlie’s analyses of different methods of food production but his arguments are convincing and thought provoking.

The element that struck me most sharply was the deep complexity of food production and the role of animals in the landscape. What does happen to trees and crops, for example, if you stop culling deer and rabbits? Would a vegan society be able to reconcile itself to culling or controlling pests? Fairlie also points out how a mechanised, politicised culture has contributed to inefficient practices such as banning the feeding of waste to pigs, who are natural omnivores and do a brilliant job of converting waste food, including meat and bonemeal, into energy. Feeding the same waste to herbivorous cows, however, is plainly wrong. Somehow in the political melee that accompanied BSE and Foot and Mouth we ended up with a ban on this food recycling across the whole of Europe and we now have large amounts of waste meat and bonemeal going into landfill or being incinerated in a system that is both counter-intuitive and inefficient. And meanwhile the pigs are increasingly being fed soya from North America and the Amazon….

I am, like Fairlie, a modest but enthusiastic meat eater and I have always felt that eating meat is not ethically wrong per se. After all, a great many of us do it across the globe and have done so for a very long time. One of the arguments levelled against this book is that the only message that people will take is ‘eat meat’, which is simplistic and reductive. It presents a great many sophisticated arguments and in no way lets meat eaters off the hook. The vision that Fairlie presents is of a radically different British landscape of energy descent, ruralisation, localised food production and a return to low-tech, low carbon farming techniques.

I have a deep respect for those who have chosen a vegan lifestyle for ethical reasons and I have no doubt that it is a very healthy and vital way to live, especially for those who opt for raw food diets. Livestock and domestic animals, however, form an important part of our cultural and natural heritage and it is only relatively recently that the industry of meat has reached its perverted heights of animal welfare injustices and unnatural farming practices. Meat is cheap and meat is easy, it comes in little plastic boxes and you don’t even have to touch it.

In practice this has strengthened my resolve to source good meat and to continue to reducing the amount that I eat. I have already considerably reduced my consumption but I must confess that the odd sausage of dubious origin has snuck in from time to time. This is an important book because it is important to continually question how we live, what we eat, how we use our precious land and how we might live and work in a low-carbon future.

Please read it for yourself. Meat is available from Permanent Publications by mail order or online priced £19.95. ISBN 13 978-1856230551

Simon Fairlie is also the editor of the Land Magazine and runs Chapter 7, an organisation that provides planning advice to smallholders and other low income people in the countryside.

blackberry heaven and the longest runner bean

2010-08-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

I started this blog in February when the very first snowdrops were poking their shy little heads out from the frosty ground. Now the vegetation around the Centre is displaying its full blowsy splendour and is literally dripping with shining jewels of blackberry, guelder rose and all manner of fruit. It is a time of fecundity, gluts and cloying sweet jams. There is also, as we approach September, a distinct nip of back-to-school in the air. I don't want to wish our summer away but I do love the autumn time and I relish the feeling of getting back down to work. Holly and Ella are in berry heaven and spend much of their with red mouths and sticky fingers. If anyone, however, has any tips for explaining the difference between a red and a green tomato I would much appreciate it. At this rate not many of ours will make it to maturity!

Last week I was kindly invited to present the prizes at the East Meon Garden Club Annual Show. It is a wonderful event with all the elements that you would expect: beautifully grown and presented flowers and vegetables, delicious cakes, jam, photography and flower arrangements. There were also a number of categories for fun which included the longest runner bean, most amusingly shaped vegetable (won by a chilli curled up like a prawn) and some wonderful kids categories such as creating an edible handbag. I was really impressed at the knowledge and skills on offer and it brought home to me that this was a demonstration of 'old fashioned' sustainability. The delicious home cooked food, home brewed drinks, amazing vegetables, and flowers to nurture the soul, represent skills that are vital to creating resilient communities. It was noticeable that most of those taking part were of a 'certain age' and although that does reflect the demographic of the village to a certain extent, it would seem that these are skills that need to be passed on. It would be very satisfying if next year there were some young people there who had learned their skills from the gardeners of East Meon.

This is also a time to begin thinking about preparing for the winter time in yurtland. This weekend we got buckets and scrubbing brushes, dressed the toddler in her all in one waterproofs and set about scrubbing two years worth of grime and green gunge off the yurt. For those of you that are interested we used a non-chlorine, non VOC mould and mildew remover with a bit of washing up liquid and it seemed to do the trick nicely. It will never be bright white again but it is looking much, much better. This was followed by a liberal coat of reproofing solution. The first time we ever proofed a yurt we used a solvent based stuff that was hideously toxic and we couldn't sleep in the yurt for a couple of days. We learned our lesson pretty quickly and now we use Nikwax which is much more innocuous. We mix it with water in a pressure spray and literally spray it on which takes about an hour. I have heard of someone who proofed a yurt in natural latex but I have never been able to find out how successful that was, i can't help thinking it would look kind of yellowy and unpleasant looking. We are also looking to upgrade our wood burner this year because I have a hankering to see the flame and because, although we coped fine last winter, a little bit of extra warmth won't go amiss. Simon Fairlie comments in his new book 'Meat' in the context of land use for producing fuel wood (I will blogging about 'Meat' next week) that a home without a fire is a cheerless place and I am inclined to agree. I think that being able to see the flames will make it truly the heart of our little round home.

The Woodland Classroom in Pictures

2010-08-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

This week I will be abandoning my usual wordy format and handing over the images of Penny Rose to tell the tale of building the Woodland Classroom. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

The whole build has been filmed by Undercurrents who have produced the Roundwood Timber Framing DVD. We will be launching this at the Grand Opening on the 21st Sept and the DVD will be available to buy from Permanent Publications in the autumn.

Thanks go to Ben Law and the Roundwood Timber Framing Company for a great result and a truly beautiful structure that will be enjoyed by many for years to come.

'Scenarios #11 & #23' A short story by Raina Jones

2010-08-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

The tide had turned; the cupboard was empty; it was time to go. She glanced outside at the empty street, which was bereft of cars and let go a sigh. It was so changed. She eyed the tide marks left behind by the last storm-surge on the terrace opposite. A net curtain flapped in the onshore breeze. The air reeked of salt and silence.

Portsmouth had never been a great town; it’d had only a small cultural scene. But still the hazy images in her mind of the sunny barbeques on Southsea Common and of idle Sunday afternoons, snagged somewhere in her chest and made her feel that the sea had risen yet another five metres and sucked her into its silent, plunging depths.

She left the window. The room was peeling and darkened with dampness and neglect, the carpet spongy. She made her way across it and out the back door of the small house.

The air weighed heavy with searing sunshine as she crossed the salt barren ground. Above her the little solar panel salvaged from an abandoned, twisted motorboat wreck glinted. It now lit a few LED lights in an upstairs room. From behind the compost toilet she pulled out a patched and battered rowboat on a homemade trailer. “Thank goodness for small luxuries!” she thought to herself.

She walked slowly down the street; the empty windows glared vacantly. Portsmouth had been a densely populated island; a reclaimed-by-landfill, seaside city. Since the floods began heavy rain, surging waves and roaring storms had ripped across the town throwing tiles savagely into the streets.

The lucky people had managed to sell up; others had left, few had stayed. This shallow, narrow patch was all that remained of Portsea Island. She had brought her house in the good days, scraping the mortgage repayments every month. She’d had no insurance and nowhere else to go. She thought bitterly of the local government’s lip service to climate change, they must have known it was happening, that the seawall wasn’t high enough.

She wheeled her boat down past the high security prison, which was the only functioning thing left on the island since the sea had reclaimed the landfills in what felt to her like retaliation. So many and so much had been lost in the vicious rip currents that surged through the submerged streets. Those who’d survived had quickly learnt to read the tides.

She lowered her boat into the canal created by the old railway line and set off on her mission to get some food. The landfills, ripped open by the ocean, had birthed their contents messily throughout the channels of the corroded streets. Rubbish lapped against her craft threatening sickness and a death worse than drowning.

She went on to the mainland, past the squalid, sallow women who earned their money in the oldest way. With only her Government-Tesco partnership food tokens up for barter, her determination kept her apart from them; yet she felt their desperation as she pulled her boat up above the new shoreline.

The tide had turned; the cupboard was nearly empty; it was time to go. She glanced outside at the empty street, which was bereft of cars and let go a sigh. It was so changed. She paused to watch a sleek bicycle glide silently down the street, the cross-shore breeze tousling the rider’s hair. The bike was recycled, geared for minimum effort, ergonomically engineered, British-made and came with a matching trailer. The council had brought a large number for shared, citywide use. You could pick them up or deposit them at designated shelters as needed.

Portsmouth had become a great town, an amazing place to live. Craftspeople, storytellers, poets and performers had risen from the ranks of the consumers and commuters of the past providing a rich cultural life. The ‘working local’ scheme that had been embraced throughout the country twenty years ago meant a long journey to work was something she barely remembered and those younger than her had never known. People had time for skills that didn’t involve creating paperwork these days.

She left the window. The room was comfortably furnished with furniture that was locally made or occasionally sourced from the ‘Re-use Warehouse’ downtown; she thought the building had been a shop called something like ‘Tesco’ before.

She went out the back door of the small house into the searing sunshine and the abundant garden. It occupied what had been the individual gardens of the encircling terrace. Brimming with avocados, oranges and lemons, it provided all her neighbours and her own fruit and vegetables. It also soaked up much of the increasingly heavy rain that had previously bounced on the concrete and poured into inadequate drains, pooling at the grills like an impatient crowd at the gates of a football stadium. She worried occasionally that the rain would become too much one day, but for now the vegetables grew well and ever so quickly.

Above her the government-funded solar system, which provided all the energy to her home glinted. From behind the compost toilet she pulled out one of the community shared bicycles, loaded it with the excess peppers from the garden and walked out into the tree-lined street. She had waited for the tide so the wind would be behind her as she cycled along the mountainous sea wall. She didn’t like to think what would have happened if the council hadn’t invested in it nearly twenty-five years ago. The sea had risen considerably since and roaring storms still ripped across the town. They had designed more resilient roofing systems to prevent the storms throwing the tiles savagely into the streets.

She rode along the sea wall, enjoying the rock of the ocean against its enduring flank, past the warm, leathered people fishing for what once were considered Mediterranean species. She felt their contentment as she pulled into the cycle shelter next to the market on the common.

Raina is courses coordinator at the Sustainability Centre and you can contact her on courses@sustainability-centre.org. She is also a yurt-dwelling, kayak-paddling, story-writing pixie.

Rain

2010-07-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

I have really enjoyed the rain this last couple of weeks. Maybe it is something in my damp Welsh-Shropshire hills soul that makes me crave a little wetness from time to time. I felt as if my pores were drinking in the moisture just as the plants must have been craving it. It has been so dry for the last two months in Hampshire that the earth has baked hard and the campsite had started to turn into a dustbowl. My favourite smell is rain on a warm dusty road and sleeping in a yurt when it is raining is magical, assuming it is not leaking.

Prolonged wet weather is a different matter, of course. The first year we lived in the yurt it rained for what seems like the whole summer, we had a slug plague, mouldy patches on the rug and a snail ate my cheque book. We lived in a state of perpetual dampness which prompted us to get our yurt off the ground and onto a deck. Variety and a certain degree of uncertainty about the weather is part of the social psyche of the British. We get a lot of weather, even if it is not of the particularly extreme variety. We don’t have much in the way of tornados, tsunamis, monsoons, avalanches or mistrals at the moment but extreme weather events are likely to get much more common due to climate change. We can expect drier, hotter summers and warmer, wetter winters with average temperatures going up generally.

The South East of England is officially a semi arid zone with a lower rainfall per person than Istanbul or Dallas, leaving the region very vulnerable to water shortages. The NGO Waterwise points out that not only is our personal water use high, we also have a high level of ‘embedded water’ in the food that we eat, the goods that we buy and the houses we live in. We use around 150 litres per day for drinking, washing, toilet flushing etc. When you take embedded water into account then this rises to around 3400 litres per day. The richer we are and the more we consume, the more this goes up. The South East has high levels of wealth and consumption….I don’t need to labour the point.

At the Greening Campaign conference I attended yesterday water was one of the main topics. The aim of the conference was to introduce the Community Adaptation Toolkit which will help communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change, including the increasing likelihood of water shortages in the summer and flooding in the winter. Malcolm Fergusson of the Environment Agency commented that we can expect to see a decrease of around 15% in the flow of rivers by 2080 and as much as 50-80% in some rivers. For Alex Nickson who is tasked with climate change adaptation with the Greater London Authority, increased flooding is an inevitability and something that is already a significant risk to London. He did also comment that, when asked what they would do in the event of catastrophic flooding, 60% of Londoners said that they would head for the underground! It would seem that we have a long way to go!

So the message would seem clear, we can expect more of this hot dry weather in the summer and, even in the best case scenario, our water supplies are going to be stressed. There are some positives, the South Downs is now a champagne producing region because the climate is perfect for growing grapes. But there is no getting away from the fact that we must use less water and waste less water. If you take embedded water into account, we must consume less of everything or find ways of producing food, building materials and other products in ways that are less water intensive. In farming this is referred to as more crop per drop.

In the meantime, enjoy the rain! I love it.

To buy water saving gadgets visit http://www.green-shopping.co.uk/ . For cost effective water saving why not try the Interflush which reduces the amount of water used to flush the toilet and the Water Two Greywater Diverter Valve which allows you to redirect your grey water to a hosepipe or collection tank.

Don’t want to know ‘bout evil, only want to know ‘bout love

2010-07-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

Listening to John Martyn on a Sunday evening got me to thinking, as I do periodically, about what it is that keeps us motivated in the face of incomprehensibly large global problems and societal ills. Many things make me feel depressed and angry: oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico, ‘Smile you’re on CCTV’, the Criminal Records Bureau, banks, climate change denial….Often the things that make me seethe are very close to home: the conspicuous wealth of the South East of England, second homes lying empty, nimbyism, lack of imagination and thoughtless intolerance.

But then I look around and see so many positive things going on and people with immense spirit and ingenuity working towards change. Last week I unexpectedly met Swasie Turner, a true character with a spectacular handlebar moustache who is currently pushing his wheelchair along the South Downs Way to raise money for Enable Me, a charity that works to raise disability awareness. He is currently doing the length of the South Downs Way (Eastbourne to Winchester) and he arrived at Wetherdown Lodge dusty and tired after a muggy hot day on the Downs. He has dedicated his life to doing challenges such as these in his standard issue NHS wheelchair and has raised money for many different charities. He does it for love and because he wants to see change. Incidentally, he was also impressed with our facilities for disabled visitors, which is good to know.

The diversity of groups that use the Sustainability Centre is increasing all the time. In any one week we will have groups from the Fitzroy Rural Skills project who run a social enterprise project with adults with learning difficulties, MIND working with adults with mental health difficulties, Phoenix futures who work with drug and alcohol rehabilitation, mums and babies at Green Beans and many others who just turn up to have a look around. Penny led a school residential last week for a group of Muslim students with learning difficulties. It was their first time away from London and for many, their first time away from home. I didn’t see them on the tractor trailer ride but their smiles as they returned said it all. Many rural areas, Hampshire included, experience what Trevor Phillips (thanks to Homa Khaleeli writing in Friday’s Guardian for the quote) once called a ‘passive apartheid’ and become places of fear or exclusion for non-white people due to their very low ethnic minority population. It is a point of comment if you see a non-white face in this part of the world, which is astonishing considering our proximity to London, one of the most diverse cultural melting pots in the world.

Cliffdale Primary pupils outside the Mongolian Yurt

I suppose the point of this ramble is that in the face of intolerance, injustice and evil in the world, there are always people who are just getting on with making things better in which ever way they can. The role of the Sustainability Centre is to provide a safe place where this can happen and hopefully to keep on broadening that net to include as many different people as possible.

Elderflower time

2010-06-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Elderflower cordial is available all year round these days but somehow it is never quite the same as the cordial we made when we were kids. My mum had Richard Mabey’s ‘Food for Free’ book and collecting elderflowers was something of a seasonal ritual that ended in a blissful few weeks of drinking cordial with ice as a treat. I remember diligently shaking each head to check for freshness and sniffing that slightly mousy-sweet smell that is so distinctive. Elderflower time is one of my ‘Cider with Rosie’ memories; a romantic jumble of sunlight, sugary fingers, tiny cream blossoms floating on the surface and nettle stung shins.

At school I had elderflower in my flask at lunchtime and I remember one of the other kids sniffing it dubiously and saying, ‘are you like a vegetarian or something.’ I do come from a part of the Midlands where a jam sandwich is considered by many to be part of your five a day.

We used to have a number of these seasonal food rituals: blackberry time, raspberry time, wild garlic time, mushroom time, that have all started to merge into one now that these foods are available all year round in the supermarket. There are some food items that I think are particularly obscene, a dozen blackberries in a plastic punnet being one of them.

I am a bit of a fair-weather wild foody and tend to favour the sloe gin and wild garlic end of the spectrum i.e. the things that are very easy to collect and prepare. I have fungi foraged in my time and can just about tell my chicken of the woods from my amethyst deceiver. I have eaten squirrel, rabbit and road kill venison, all of which have been very tasty. I can’t claim, however, that wild food forms a part of our daily diet as a family except, perhaps, for the wild mint and marjoram that grow abundantly around the yurt. We did have a pot-luck supper a few weeks ago where the majority of dishes were wild-garlic based and it is fairly common place for a party guest to turn up with a demijohn of nettle beer or other homebrew to share. I keep meaning to make my own wine but somehow it always seems to pass me by.

When I have been out foraging the thing that has amazed me most is what you can see when you start looking for it. This hit me in a stunning way with fungi. I went out into the woods with a fungi expert and on the first cursory glance it seemed that there wasn’t much to be had. On closer inspection, however, I suddenly began to see what was there and after a short time there were mushrooms, slime moulds and other unspecified mycelia all over the place. I had no idea or appreciation of the world of fungi until it was stuck right in front of my face. Moss and lichen are another of my fascinations, they are amazing when you look at them properly. Maybe I spend a lot of time looking down but I do tend to remember places by minutiae, a habit that I think I developed as a child. I was one of those children that spent most of my time on the beach looking for shells, interesting stones and wave-washed glass. I remember the isle of Rum not for its Manx Shearwaters, sea otters and spectacular views but for the many coloured lichens that formed a magical patchwork across the rocks.

Anyway, I digress. Today I made elderflower cordial and it reminded me of my mum. I can’t wait until Holly is old enough to share the excitement of Elderflower time along with all of those other natural seasonal rituals that are so important to preserve and enjoy.

The Sustainability Centre runs a range of wild food foraging and wilderness skills courses. Look at the courses and events section of the website for more information. Or you can learn how to make your own ‘party squirrel’ dish in Ben Law’s The Woodland Year along with a range of other woodland food recipes. Go to Permanent Publications for more information.

in praise of spoons

2010-06-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

My dad makes spoons as, now, do I. He makes traditional Welsh eating spoons to a particular design that I have never seen done by anyone else. I grew up eating warming cawl with a wooden spoon made shiny with the patina of use. I loved them then and I love them now. There is something about the spoon as a utilitarian object and artefact that fascinates people. On green wood courses, spoon making is a perennial favourite and rarely are people more satisfied than when they eat their first meal with a spoon that they have made themselves.

My spoons are also functional and I use them every day for cooking and eating. They are more wiggly and experimental than my dad’s and yet I, like him, insist on a finish that is silky smooth when you rub the bowl against your cheek. But, for me, it is the very act of making them that is special and is an activity that I can be totally absorbed in for hours at a time. For a restless mind like mine it is meditative, cathartic and creative. Last weekend, after a stressful time at work, Henry got up on Sunday morning and said ‘I think you should make a spoon today’; he knows me well. He then disappeared into the woods and came back with a lovely length of hawthorn from which I made a long handled spoon. I gave it away as a gift the same day and hopefully it will be enjoyed and used for years to come.

This spoon is made from Lilac from a garden in Clanfield.

I should probably add that my dad, Gerwyn, makes lot of other things out of wood and has a feel and an eye for wood that has earned him the title of ‘wood guru’ in some circles. He is a teacher at heart and gets great personal satisfaction from passing on his skills. My brother is also know to some as Bryn Wood and is a flexible skilled craftsman with an impeccable eye for contemporary design. We grew up in a wooden house with a Hoover with a wooden wheel and bread that, if we had forgotten to get it out of the freezer, would be sawn up into beautifully even slices with the bandsaw.

In his book A Handmade Life WM Coperthwaite says “I want to live in a society where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things”. I love watching the joy that people get from making things and learning to make things. I also, however, am conscious not to over romanticise the role of the maker over other roles. We also need thinkers, dreamers, talkers, facilitators, administrators and technology geeks. We need people who stand in front of tanks and chain themselves to railings, and we need people who work behind the scenes making stuff happen.
I like a challenge and to a certain extent I thrive on stress but when it all it all gets a bit much I go back to my spoons or my sewing machine and things are suddenly better.

It is slightly off the point but when I was looking for a picture of a spoon I came across this scanned image from some early Beatles sheet music. I can’t remember where I got this from but I do remember being struck by the juxtaposition of suits and traditional coppice products. Can anyone shed light on this?

Frame Raising

2010-06-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

This week we raised the frame of the Woodland Classroom on a very wet, windy day and after a month of almost unbroken dry weather. With the large mast-like timbers, ropes and the lashing rain, the whole scene had a distinctly maritime feel. In fact, as the frames slowly lifted one by one, it had the look of a giant ship in a bottle topped out with a wreath made with boughs of Lawson cypress and may blossom. There was less cheering than we had expected as spectators huddled shivering under umbrellas and it is hardly surprising that most of them headed cake-wards to the Beech Café sooner rather than later. We celebrated heartily later in a cosy yurt with a barrel of local real ale and a banjo.

The frame of the classroom has been made entirely with Lawson cypress sourced from the woodland at the Sustainability Centre. It was originally planted as a nurse crop for the beech and was never thinned. In this case, the neglect of the Navy in managing the woodland has worked in our favour as the trees are slow grown and very drawn making them close grained, durable and long. They mimic the slow grown timbers that we used to get from the colder climates of natural Baltic forests, as opposed to the very fast grown, poor quality softwoods that we are now used to. Lawson cypress is very rarely used as a timber tree in this country but apparently it is as durable as western red cedar and, for us, is an abundant low-cost crop. Ben’s research also showed that Lawson cypress is terrible for steam bending but our experience seems to show otherwise. The team are steam bending two roof rafters a day from whole trees in the round and they seem to be holding their shape nicely. The roof will be oval with a curved profile and now that the frame is up, that profile is starting to take shape.

The steam bending rig is impressive in its own right. The steam is being produced from a water filled oil drum over a constantly tended fire. The steam box is constructed from a length of polypropylene gas pipe that was liberated from the side of the road somewhere in north London. Not stolen, you understand, but just effectively utilised waste that would have ended up in a skip and was taken with the blessing of the workers, if not the foreman! When the steamed wood comes out of the pipe it is quickly clamped into a jig set up between two trees. One of the heavier team members is employed as ballast to bend it to the right shape and it is strapped down to set for a day or so.

I have been struck, as I have been observing the build, by the calm, good natured atmosphere of the building site. Ben is ever the professional and nobody is ever slacking but everything is conducted in a quiet and measured way and there is plenty of time made for lunch around the fire and morning tea. There is very little noise apart from the odd chainsaw and for the most part you would hardly know they were there.
Undercurrents are filming each stage of the build which has added another dimension to the project. Paul, Ami and 18th month old Bo have become a part of the team and have also been positive, flexible and keen to be involved. Bo is, coincidentally, only a couple of days younger than Holly meaning that all three babies on site were born within 8 days of each other. I am not sure that I believe in attaching any cosmic value to this fact but it does seem amazing that they have all come together like this.

I don’t get down onto the site as much as I would like and so it has been a lovely weekend of getting to know Ben’s team and all the trainees over some home cooked food and a keg. Being involved in a project like this with so many collaborators is a special thing and the finished project is also looking like it will be a beautiful thing.

Watch the trailer for Ben Law's Woodland Classroom DVD by Undercurrents. The finished DVD will be on sale from Sept 2010 from Permanent Publications

Wanderings and Ramblings

2010-05-16T23:55:00.000-07:00

We had a lovely, if a little chilly, Green Fair on Sunday and it was great to see so many old and new friends there. There was a subtle and yet distinct change in atmosphere this year as the GreenShare forum was ramped up a notch, the Permaculture crew expanded their wares into the foyer, the fancy dress parade meandered through the site and the bands played to a full marquee. More people came because it was a Green Fair this year and because it is now an event firmly ensconced in the local calendar. The messages I have had this week have been ones of inspiration and enthusiasm as transition town activists met up with an Amazonian campaigner, and local farmers rubbed shoulders with Indian permaculturalists. Having said that, the locals turned out in their droves too, and made the most of the real ale and copious local food.

Wednesday brought a different kind of excitement in the shape of Clare Balding and the Radio 4 Ramblings programme. We walked 6 miles of the South Downs Way and I variously rambled. It was a stunning day in what is undoubtedly a quintessential English landscape, the soft underbelly of southern England, a cowslip-bedecked country beauty. We walked with Maddy and Tim Harland of Permanent Publications, Alan McVittie from Natural England and Andy Gattiker, South Downs Way National Trail officer. Clare has walked hundreds of miles across the British countryside over ten years and yet she maintains a genuine interest in the landscape and a passion for walking. She was particularly interested in our choice of lifestyle and my yurt’s eye view on our national obsession for suburban brick boxes. We also talked about human influences on the heavily managed landscape of the Downs and how this may change as we face different pressures on energy and food resources. I also learned a lot on the walk about long-barrows, tumuli, the river Meon, local history and early purple orchids. We also informally shared our concerns as we smelled the unmistakeable acrid wafts of pesticide on the air and discussed pollution of the Meon.

I am quite aware, in myself, of a capacity to absorb information but also of the capacity to rapidly lose that information when the next thing comes along, so I am quite in awe of those people who are able to keep lots of dates, names and detailed knowledge of ecosystems in their head. I am also not a local and am probably guilty, as many of us are in our ‘silos’, of not really paying due attention to what is happening on my doorstep. It was a refreshing change for mind and body to get out into the wide landscape of the Downs and it rekindled my determination to develop more projects at the Centre to make use of this amazing resource. As Clare put it (and I paraphrase) ‘if we could bottle this feeling, we would be millionaires’. We were unsuccessful (or out-competed) in getting a grant from the Lottery funded Eco-minds programme last year, which would have paid for people with mental health difficulties and those at risk of developing mental health problems to get involved in rural training and activities on the Downs. We are still planning to do this but, without a cash injection, we will have to do this in a much slower and probably ultimately more sustainable way. We are working with our local MIND group, Catch 22, the Elizabeth Fitzroy Foundation and local family learning teams to get groups of all kinds of people involved in the Centre and this beautiful landscape.

Walking and talking like this brought home, literally, how vital this place is to our survival: it provides our food, our biodiversity, our water supply, our timber and our space to think. I think of my true home as the Shropshire hills and the post-industrial landscape of the Ironbridge Gorge. For a while, however, I am also lucky enough to be able to call this place home.

‘This land is the house that we have always lived in.’
Linda Hogan, Chicksaw, American Indian

Country Living

2010-04-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

What do you think of when you imagine Hampshire? I was asked this question at a marketing seminar this week. The answers came back as you would expect: wax jackets, good country gastro-pubs, the smell of wet dog, willow on leather, the wind in your face, undulating hillsides….. All very nice, however, we are on the cusp of this Hampshire, right on the edge of the urban sprawl of Portsmouth where this Country Life image is barely recognisable.

And what is so good about the countryside anyway? It is invaluable to us in many ways including food production and other products, green space, landscape, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, health and wellbeing, and the intrinsic value of nature, whatever it is that we think that many mean. There are many good farmers, foresters and conservationists working hard to protect our landscape, biodiversity and rural cultural heritage in the best way that they can. I know of some brilliant work being done to creatively diversify in farming, there are some great local food projects and green tourism initiatives that are really making a difference to our countryside.

Much of ‘country life’, however, is a relatively recent construct developed and marketed to a certain niche market. Aside from any ethical debates about hunting, shooting and fishing (I will leave it to you to decide where you think I may stand on that debate) many country pursuits are energy intensive and high impact. I am no horse expert, for example, but from a layperson’s point of view it would seem that to feed, house, train, equip and care for such a large animal must consume a large amount of energy, carbon and money. There are still working horses around doing a fantastically valuable job in areas such as woodland management but the vast majority are used for primarily leisure reasons. How do those energy and carbon considerations compute when you add a few large, energetic hunting dogs and a couple of landrovers to the equation? Does this have a lower environmental impact than a visit to Mecca bingo or a football match? I don’t have any figures but it would be an interesting exercise to figure it out. And, of course, these are stereotypes that play to all manner of assumptions about what constitutes ‘country’ and ‘town’ and the people that live and work in them. Many horse owners are environmentally conscious and many people drive 4x4s because they are useful vehicles in a woodland, but you get the picture?

When I imagine this part of Hampshire I think of all the young people and members of the local community that come here to enjoy the countryside and learn to value it in ways that are not damaging. They come here because it is quiet, peaceful, green and different from the urban environments that they inhabit on a daily basis. We also get a lot of people visiting from high pressured environments in London and they value the pleasure that they can get from very simple activities such as cooking outdoors, sleeping under canvas and taking a gentle amble to the local pub.

I love this place and the landscape of the South Downs, but the reality of this landscape is of an aesthetic that is relatively recent. This is highly managed landscape which will inevitably have to change in response to climate change, food and energy security, and pressures on biodiversity. I believe that this change can be dynamic, productive and creative as we adapt to a different vision of ‘the countryside’ and how we choose to enjoy it.

Outdoor living and camping equipment is featured in the most recent edition of Permaculture Magazine. For those of you who wonder what I look like (?), I am on the cover with Henry and Holly cooking up a veggie feast.

http://www.permaculture-magazine.co.uk/

Clear skies

2010-04-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Hasn’t it been lovely the past few days? Clear blue skies, no vapour trails, quiet, quiet, quiet… I have no doubt it has been deeply unpleasant and inconvenient for all of those people who have been stranded across the world and, of course, many people will be losing a lot of money and business for all kinds of reasons, but it has still been truly lovely here. The Sustainability Centre is under a number of flight paths including Gatwick and Southampton. We also get a lot of military air traffic that buzzes to and from Portsmouth and …well, somewhere else. Large ponderous Chinooks often fly low over us and helicopters seem fond of circling us a night. On some nights we have been convinced that they are out to drive us out of the yurt, but it is more likely that they involved in some inexplicable military training exercise using off-gridders and a couple of unsuspecting sheep.

On Saturday, as I was raking my raised beds to a fine tilth with the sun on my back I absentmindedly thought ‘it seems really quiet here today’. The skies were silent and we had been temporarily transported back to a pre-aviation age. The news is all about the utter chaos this has caused and yet there is such a feeling of calm.

This also serves to highlight how tenuous and insecure our supply chains are as fresh fruit and veg from Africa runs low, pharmaceutical exports are threatened, computer components are delayed, tourism suffers, gigs are cancelled etc. As Eyjafjallajökull continues to belligerently belch we are suddenly aware how vulnerable our complex and interdependent culture of commodity is. Global trade, global food production and even our global culture of celebrity is threatened.

How long would it take before we got used to it? It certainly hasn’t taken us long to get used to the idea of cheap aviation and I suspect that it won’t take long for us to adapt again when this currently unsustainable age of cheap air travel comes to it’s logical end. Would we really be unhappier if we can’t get air freighted raspberries from Mexico or blackberries in November?

Whilst we all should be planning for a future with a much reduced aviation industry I have no doubt that us everyday folk, who are endlessly creative and resilient, will cope just fine. We may look back at the days when we could take a weekend break in Cairo with nostalgia just as we look back at the days of smoking in pubs. We will also know that the conspicuous consumption of oil for leisure and commerce was dangerous and irresponsible, just as we know that smoke-free pubs are now nicer and healthier places to be. If we are serious about a low-carbon future for this country and the planet we should seriously aim for skies that are calmer, quieter and clearer.

Pictures by Penny Rose taken at the Sustainability Centre this week, thanks Pen x

Dirt under the fingernails

2010-04-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

We made a start in our yurt garden this weekend, having neglected it for a while due to having babies and uncertainty about whether we would get our planning permission. Now that Holly can help with planting (and unplanting!) and we are secure here for a while we thought that we should really get on with it. The glorious sunshine also did quite a lot for our motivation.

Despite being involved with the Sustainability Centre, I am not a natural gardener. I was itinerant for much of my twenties and lived mostly in short term rental properties in the city. I spent some time living in a wooden cabin at the Green Wood Centre in Shropshire where I learned loads about woodland management and traditional woodland crafts, but I never got as far as vegetables. My parents, although they have a wonderful veg garden now, also never made it a priority when I was a kid. They did build a house and achieved other amazing feats of time management, so this is not a criticism at all.

So, we have built three raised beds and planted up four large planters with herbs, salads, onions, beans and potatoes. We have peppers, chillies and tomatoes coming on nicely by the window in the yurt and nasturtiums growing from seed. It is modest selection but I am happy with it for now. We do have plans afoot for more food growing projects at the Centre but they are all works in progress at the moment.

I, like many of us, spend far too much of my time staring at this flickering screen and it does tend to suck up time and energy. We are information rich to the extent that we find it difficult to filter that information that is actually important in our lives. Sometimes I am startled by my own lack of knowledge about things that were second nature to previous generations: how to make bread, which vegetables to plant in April, how to clean an oven without using chemicals etc. I was asked this last question on the Sustainability Centre Facebook page last week and I must confess that I Googled it. I can reel off a list of funding acronyms - much to Henry’s amusement – but I can’t remember my best friend’s phone number.

It almost seems a cliché, but it is good to get your hands dirty sometimes. I do have a tendency to get absorbed in work and sometimes I have to be reminded that there are other things that are important. I am careful to spend quality time with my little girl but sometimes I forget about myself, a common ailment amongst working mums I suspect! Anyway, with my little plants getting on nicely and the sun starting to warm the cockles, I have a new resolve to spend more time dirty.

Permanent Publications have an extensive range of books on organics, edible gardening, forest gardening and permaculture. Go to http://www.green-shopping.co.uk/

Life skills and Skills for Life

2010-04-06T02:50:00.000-07:00

Skills for Life, core skills, key skills, essential skills…. For anyone who works in education or learning these terms will be familiar. They have specific technical definitions that include literacy, numeracy, IT, speaking and listening, and other broader transferable skills. But there are a whole range of other skills that we need to live a more sustainable, responsible and enriching life: learning to use a knife, cooking, indentifying wild flowers, respect for others, understanding our local environment and many, many others. Some, like learning to tie a reef knot, are simple, others are complex and challenge all of us to change ingrained behaviours and attitudes.

Learning at all stages of life is a key supporting principle within sustainability. For many of the young people that we work with this includes building self-esteem, developing a sense of their role within the world, touching and experiencing the outdoors and opening their eyes to new possibilities. We like to think that when they go home with the smell of woodsmoke in their hair and their trainers covered in mud, that they also have some new energy for change and new experiences buzzing in their heads.

This sense of wonder and inspiration never has to leave us and I am constantly amazed by the people who visit the centre and leave with the resolve to make changes to their lives. I interviewed some of the participants from Ben Law’s OCN accredited Sustainable Woodland Management course last week and got a sense that these people had been deeply and fundamentally changed by their experience. I was not particularly surprised as this is something that often happens when people meet Ben, but it touches me every time. I spend quite a lot of time looking around the centre thinking: ‘must get a new gate’, ‘who is it that keeps leaving junk in the porch’, ‘must remember to finish that Defra form’, ‘can we afford to fix the rainwater pump this month’ – I am sure you can imagine how it goes on - and it is great when people come to me to say they have learned something new and important.

Lifelong Learning is defined by Wikipedia as ‘the "lifelong, lifewide, voluntary, and self-motivated” pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons’. More commonly in the UK 'Lifelong Learning' has been adopted as an umbrella term for education that falls outside of the school and university system and can include Further Education, Community Education, Work-based Learning and similar voluntary, public sector and commercial learning environments. There is also an increasing recognition of the value of informal and non-formal learning in personal and professional development. All sectors have their jargon, the environmental, education and voluntary sectors being some that I am more familiar with, and while Lifelong Learning appears to have been given a technical definition, the concept of learning that carries on throughout life remains a simple and elegant idea.

We offer learning opportunities at the Centre that range from toddlers planting beans and children practicing recycling ,to high level permaculture design concepts and technical renewable energy courses. At all levels it is inspiring to see people learning new skills and getting satisfaction from learning and creating. It is hard not to enjoy watching a tomato seedling growing or to feel satisfied at having made a beautiful green wood spoon from scratch, and it is also immensely enjoyable watching others experience these things for the first time.

Rising sap

2010-03-24T04:53:00.000-07:00

As the sap rises and the days lengthen so the blood starts pumping and everything suddenly starts to happen. The solar shower block is producing hot water, the foyer is getting a new display and a lick of eco paint (donated by Keim paints, thank you very much!), we have had our first group of Duke of Edinburgh Award campers, we are shopping for our new minibus and the gardens are getting a makeover…phew! It is not just the plants that start springing into life, we all feel more energetic and ready to face the busy season.

The Centre is at its best when it is buzzing with people. Today the sun is shining, the big yurt is going up on the campsite, the Petersfield School are planting a hedge, the outdoor education unit are airing out their kit and a small, intimate funeral has just passed on its way to the burial site.

This is the time of year when we start finalising the plans for our annual Green Fair on May 9th. Last year was a stunningly beautiful late spring day with a hot sun and just enough freshness in the air to put a spring in the step. The Green Fair has developed over the years into a local calendar event with a relaxed festival feel. We welcome over 40 ethical and green traders and a wide range of crafts people from willow coffin makers to bee keepers. Our aim is to provide information on sustainable lifestyles whilst also communicating that this is not about wearing a hair shirt. We provide loads of creative, crafty things for kids to do and for the grownups there is a series of talks on a range of interesting subjects in our Green Forum.

Trevor Thwaites, our music maestro, always convenes a fine and enthusiastic group of musicians from the local area who give all their time free to the Centre and are kept well fuelled with ale from the local microbrewery and local sourced ice-cream.

The fair is also a great day for all the staff and volunteers that work at the Centre. It is a time when everyone pitches in and we all look forward to a debrief over the leftover real ale and a campfire. We are all guilty at times of focussing on our own corner and getting into a ‘silo’ mentality. As in the vast majority of workplaces there are times when we feel stressed or overworked and it can often seem that the task of the Sustainability Centre will never end. Of course, this is true! Our work here will never be done, but it gets better all the time.

Do you juggle, stilt walk, make gipsy flowers, enjoy working with kids or think you have a fun green idea to try out at the Fair? Contact Henry on greenfair@sustainability-centre.org , we would love to hear from anyone who would like to be involved.

Babes in the woods

2010-03-17T02:24:00.000-07:00

Holly was born on a stunning frosty December night in 2008, unfortunately not in the yurt as we had planned but in Winchester hospital. The ambulance drove over a glittering frozen campsite right up to the yurt door, the crew knew who I was, they had been on ‘yurt alert’ for a couple of weeks. I had a very positive experience with the Winchester and Eastleigh midwife team; they were genuinely excited at the prospect of two yurt babies (Jenna next door was due on the same day) and encouraged me to have a home birth from the start.

8 days later Holly and I attended the birth of Ella, who decided to arrive in something of a hurry with no midwife in sight. With my own birth experience still imprinted on my body I felt enormously privileged to be present at Ella’s birth and delighted that at least one of us managed to give birth at home.

I still see my midwife at the Sustainability Centre as she chose the burial site for her mother - a decision which has a beautiful circularity - and my health visitor turned out to be equally sensible and supportive. No obsessive weighing regimes and plotting graphs for her, she picked up Holly, weighed her in her hands and said ‘feels just fine to me, do you want her weighed?’

What I hadn’t been prepared for is the onslaught of cynical marketing that is directed at pregnant and new mothers, and the bewildering array of equipment that you are supposed to need in order to keep your babe ‘safe’. These safety guidelines often conflict with the messages that you get from the natural parenting groups; when to wean, whether to co-sleep, immunise or not to immunise etc. It is no wonder that many parents are confused. It seemed at times that everybody, from natural child birth champions to complete strangers, felt that it was OK to tell me what to do: Sit down, don’t eat that, tune in to your body, give up work….. What I actually do is probably the same as all new parents, I muddle along as best I can and try to make the best choices for all of us.

I had expected resistance when we decided to continue living in the yurt with a tiny baby in the depths of winter. What we actually received was a huge amount of warm support from family, friends, colleagues and health professionals. Some people are surprised but when they get over their ‘but where do you poo and where do you wash?’ worries, most agree that this has to be the healthiest and happiest way for a curious little soul to grow up. She has both of her parents within easy reach every day, she spends much of her time outside, she is comfortable with many different people and she can run around to her friend Ella’s for one of Jenna famous home baked biscuits fresh from the wood stove.

If you are local to the Sustainability Centre and you have little ones, why not join us on Thursday mornings for Green Beans baby and toddler group. It's free and you get a 10% discount on Kevin's selection of vegetarian and vegan cakes http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=mf&gid=131299546221

Living and working the dream

2010-03-08T02:19:00.000-08:00

A vision without a task is a dream
A task without a vision is drudgery.
A vision and a task are the hope of the world.
attributed to Black Elk (Oglala Sioux)

This quote appeared on the cover of the East Hants Local Agenda 21 document published in 1997. It was prepared by Earthworks Trust, who had a vision to develop an innovative Sustainability Centre from a derelict Naval property. Thirteen years on, many political and financial wrangles later, and much water under the bridge, we are realising a vision. And it is a huge task.

Some would say that Earthworks Trust was ahead of its time; we would say that everybody else has been slow to catch up! We are in the very fortunate position now that many local statutory bodies, community groups and interested individuals are now coming to us for information on sustainability and are expressing an interest in being involved with the Centre.

On an organisational level Earthworks Trust and the Sustainability Centre has a huge amount to be proud of. We are completely independent, we are financially self-supporting, we employ 12 people, we have around 15,000 visitors per year and we are still here! Many other organisations, the most notable of which are the Earth Centre and a number of white-elephant millennium projects, have come and gone due to unsustainable methods of funding. In the early days the Centre fell victim to the ‘boom and bust’ school of funding. When the core grant was pulled the charity was forced to reassess and slowly build up a series of business ideas that would generate a reliable source of revenue. It has been a long journey and it is by no means over, but we are getting there.

The most common question I am asked after ‘what is it that you actually do here?’ is ‘how are you funded?’ and I am delighted to be able to say ‘we are not’. We have been lucky enough to get some large capital grants and donations in the last few years - the most substantial of which have paid for the hostel renovation, a solar PV array, a minibus and the woodland classroom – but we are able to maintain our staff and core running costs from the money that we make from natural burials, accommodation and education.

For me and my little family, life and work are often hard to separate. We are gradually working our way through the myriad of small and large tasks that emerge daily. As manager I am also very lucky to be working alongside a talented and dedicated rank of staff, volunteers, trustees and long-suffering family and friends. I can’t speak for all of them but I would say that, although things are difficult and stressful at times, it is never a drudge.

At the Sustainability Centre we are not perfect and we have a long way to go. But we all, as individuals and as a society, are imperfect and the job to improve will never be finished. Don’t be stunned into inertia by the scale of the problem, we can all effect change.

Yurts in Spring

2010-03-02T05:30:00.000-08:00

Yurt living makes for a keen awareness in minute changes in the seasons and light levels. This is the third winter in the yurt for Henry and I, and the second for Holly who is just starting to itch to run around outside. She has inherited her father’s desire to be outdoors and grubby.

We woke this morning to sun streaming through the crown and a fresh energy for making good for the coming year. Each year I just get to the ‘tell me again why we live in a field, grumble’ stage when the beauty of the South Downs and a glimpse of new life remind me why it is an amazing and vital way to live. It has been a cold winter and a tense wait for a decision by the planners but now that East Hants District Council planning team have granted us 3 years grace we feel revitalised. Now is the time to figure out why we have that mystery drip by the sofa and treat our compost worms to a bigger house.

Equipped with solar powered blackberry, laptop, iPlayer and Lovefilm we are well connected to the modern world but there are many aspects of yurt life that do hark back to an earlier time: chopping firewood, carrying water, heating bathwater in a copper urn, sweeping and scrubbing, storing food away from the temptation of furry visitors… Things take longer and the business of living uses a lot of our spare time. I have got used to it and although sometimes there is a conflict between this lifestyle and having a ‘normal’ office job it is generally a very satisfying way to exist. I rarely look in a mirror, I don’t iron, I don’t watch much telly and I have no idea what is going on with the X Factor. We do spend time cooking and sharing food with friends, playing outside with other parents and kids from Green Beans baby group, sitting around campfires and tinkering around with a whole range of projects that accompany outdoor living.

We are very lucky to have a wealth of information and experience about low-impact living at our fingertips, which we believe gave us an advantage when preparing our planning application. Helpful advice came from Simon Fairlie of Tinker’s Bubble , Mike Hannis from King’s Hill and the ever useful trove of information that is Permanent Publications. Yurts are becoming big business for the ‘glamping’ market and you can hardly open the travel section of the Observer without seeing a luxury yurt experience on offer. We are also seeing, however, a considerable increase in people who are interested in living in low-impact dwellings and in land-owners exploring the possibilities of developing low-impact communities. Last year saw Lammas and Steward Wood get permanent planning permission, which has been fantastic news for all those trying to live on the land. Another inspirational project is the Landmatters permaculture project who have been granted 3 year temporary planning permission.

See how the others are doing it:
http://www.landmatters.org.uk/
http://www.stewardwood.org/
http://www.lammas.org.uk/

Find out about low-impact communities and other intentional communities:
http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/

Get valuable advice on planning from the Land is Ours:
www.tlio.org.uk/chapter7/
For inspiration and practical tips read:

The Complete Yurt Handbook, Paul King
Tipi Living, Patrick Whitefield
Building a Low Impact Roundhouse, Tony Wrench
Do it Yourself 12 volt Solar Power, Michel Daniek
The Woodland House, Ben Law
(All available from http://www.green-shopping.co.uk/ )

Celebrations of life at the Sustainability Centre

2010-02-23T05:10:00.000-08:00

The snowdrops have pushed their pale, delicate little heads through the icy ground and finally spring appears to be on its way after a cold and dramatic winter of deep snows and hard frosts. February is a month that I often find it hard to muster enthusiasm for but this year it signals a whole host of new beginnings and exciting new projects. Our news page will keep you up to date with the highlights that include the Woodland Classroom built by Ben Law, new secure cycle storage facilities made from recycled timber, a revamped forest garden and a veg oil powered minibus.

The South Downs Natural Burial Site now conducts around 4 funerals a week, a 44% increase on last year and an indication that attitudes towards natural burial are becoming located firmly in the mainstream. The vast majority of funerals that we have here are celebrations of life located within the continuing cycles of life and death that the woodland provides. Spring time is a very special time on the burial site and has vibrant energy that I believe is fundamental to the peace and solace that people find here.

In the two years that I have held the post of Centre Manager the Sustainability Centre has seen two births, over two hundred funerals, serious illness of close friends and the joy of their return to health, and an ever-increasing number of interesting and passionate people sharing their time and energy. My personal life has seen the birth of my daughter Holly 14th months ago on a sparkling silver night and the deeply tragic death of a young member of my family. Life and death have been in sharp focus.

My little girl Holly is growing up in a yurt built by my partner Henry just a stone’s throw from the burial site and it is favourite walk of ours, particularly at the beginning or the end of the day. I feel privileged to be involved in the business of planting people and I never fail to be amazed at the inner strength, pragmatism and compassion of the burials staff Al and Charlie who are immersed in it every day. There is nothing at all weird or ‘spooky’ about natural burials. In the early morning or late evening light it is truly beautiful.

Woodland Burial by Pam Ayres

Don't lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall
Where the dust of ancient bones has spread a dryness over all,
Lay me in some leafy loam where, sheltered from the cold
Little seeds investigate and tender leaves unfold.
There kindly and affectionately, plant a native tree
To grow resplendent before God and hold some part of me.
The roots will not disturb me as they wend their peaceful way
To build the fine and bountiful, from closure and decay.
To seek their small requirements so that when their work is done
I’ll be tall and standing strongly in the beauty of the sun.

The Natural Death Handbook is available from the Natural Death Centre http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/index.php?page=book-shop

Or for celebration of new life read
BIRTHRITES: Rituals And Celebrations For The Child-bearing Years by Jackie Singer
http://www.permanent-publications.co.uk/

New website is launched

2010-02-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

A big thank you goes to the Mamie Mollan Trust for funding our new website. It gives a fresh, exciting new look for The Sustainability Centre and for 2010. We are now able to accept credit card payments and bookings via the website and by telephone.

You can also now find The Sustainability Centre on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We look forward to seeing you there!