Though fairly new to South Africa, the eco-village concept has been around for about 70 years, reports Jacqui Pile
James Shepard is a man with a plan. As an ecologist working at Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre in Roodepoort, he has dreams of turning most of the centre’s 18ha of land into a working example of how urban areas can become self-sustaining green belts.
Shepard hopes the area can be developed into an eco-village, where people purchase small plots and where all aspects of human social and economic activity are integrated into an environmentally friendly lifestyle.
“One of the main aims of these villages is to develop a culture of recycling and sustainability to replace the throwaway consumer culture that has developed along with industrialism,” says Shepard.
Already bulldozers are moving earth to create swales – long mounds of earth that direct and store rain water in regenerated wetlands and dams. These are part of a vast recycling process which will transform a variety of waste into reusable material, so that ultimately the farm becomes completely self- sustainable.
Women can be seen hoeing an area cleared for organic farming and there is a tangible sense that life has returned to the quiet valley.
Central to eco-villages is permaculture – literally permanent culture – which is a philosophy that integrates ecology with food provision, manufacture, leisure, commerce and spirituality.
In large scale eco-villages like The Farm in Massachusetts, vibrant local economies provide income for villagers. Communal farming areas and group solar heating systems provide for their basic food and electricity needs. The trend has caught on in New Zealand, Australia and parts of Europe, where self-contained eco-suburbs are developing. “Ideally, a successful eco-village would only need one car per 800 people,” says Shepard,” and that alone would contribute to decreasing air pollution.”
While the modern eco-village concept is fairly new to South Africa, they have been developed around the world for more than 70 years.
“People are realising the benefits of living in a community and not in isolated units,” says Patti Ovenstone, a pioneer at the Kathumba Eco-village north of Plettenberg Bay.
But while some could criticise the eco- village model as being isolationist and too esoteric, it could be seen as a possible solution to one of South Africa’s core social and economic problems: the millions of unskilled, unemployed rural poor.
As we move to a manufacturing and service-based economy, there is little space for employing unskilled labour, but permaculture could be used in an urban or rural setting to empower and feed people.
At the Umthathi Project in Joza outside Grahamstown, women from the community are trained in the techniques of permaculture and have established a number of thriving urban gardens. “We sell to the hotels and to students,” says Elina Mankihlane, “and what we don’t sell, we eat.”
Permaculture is also being taught in the nearby schools and children take this knowledge and spread it through the communities. Youngsters learn how to catch and store rain water, make compost with waste from their homes and how to grow seeds.
Generally people in squatter camps are living on the breadline and are not using expensive detergents and cleaning agents, so a simple filtering system like a hole with stones in it can purify the water sufficiently for it to be used to grow plants.
“This is not necessarily new knowledge,” says Ovenstone, “villages across Africa are in themselves, small eco-villages. To break down the integrity of these is a big mistake.”
But she says the challenge is to teach people not to look outwards for handouts, but to add to the wisdom they have developed about the environment and not to try and recreate it.
“Rural farming communities are often experts, but can benefit from an explanation of the principles involved,” says Thelma Dalamba, a community developer. “The small farmer represents a large, yet neglected resource for improved agriculture.”
Dalamba sees reliance on outside inputs like hybrid seeds and artificial fertilisers as a major problem for small farmers. “But permaculture promotes the collection and preservation of organic seeds, the harvesting and storing of water and the use of compost and organic fertilisers to enrich the soil.”
“It is the key to maximum production in the short run, but protecting the land in the long run,” she says.
Dalamba says permaculture demonstrates to disadvantaged communities that they don’t necessarily need large amounts of money to improve their conditions. “We used to say, ‘Give us money’. Now we can say, ‘Look what we’ve done.'”
However, there needs to be a paradigm shift, where people realise that old systems still have their place in new ones.
Education is one of the motivating factors for building the eco-village at Wilgespruit. And education by demonstration is a very powerful tool.
One education centre at Wild Rocke, an organic farm in Lonehill, Johannesburg, helps to show people how permaculture can be used in urban settings.
Here Thomas Linders experiments with a variety of techniques. An abundance of vegetables, fruit and flowers grow where there was once a hard horse-training ring.
Water from the nearby Jukskei River fills a dam and ducks swim and dive among the reeds, despite a thick layer of oil on the surface.
“This water is badly polluted,” says Linders. “Depending on the sample, it can have an E-coli count of about eight million to 160-million per 100ml of water. That is dangerous for humans to swim in, let alone drink.”
But Linders has changed the ecology of the water using permaculture and has given it the potential to support life again.
Within three days of implementing his process, the water will have an E-coli count compatible with recreational swimming standards – about 800 E-coli per 100ml.
The process he uses does not involve heavy capital investment, nor does it require any pumps, motors or chemicals. And it could be easily adapted to a rural setting.
Nature has provided her own cleaning equipment – wetland plants that remove pollutants in the water, by breaking down compounds in their root systems. Micro-organisms on the plant also act as predators to harmful bacteria.
The water then goes through a cleansing system, which could well be mistaken for an attractive water feature. Called flow form, these large bowl-like structures circulate water in the shape of an infinity sign to aerate it.
“If you take examples from nature, from the most basic building blocks like DNA to huge spiral galaxies, even a kudu horn, everything in nature has a tendency to spiral. Water transported through city pipe systems tends to lose its natural energy and by allowing it to spiral, it regains a certain life force,” says Milton Milaras, a grade eleven science student who won a silver medal for his work with water at the National Science Expo.
He found that “vortical water” – water that has been through the flow form – increases a plant’s yield by up to 45% and causes seeds to germinate days earlier than those irrigated with tap water.
Wild Rocke also shows on a small scale what could potentially work at Wilgespruit.
Human sewage is filtered through wetland systems and is recycled into an odourless, dry substance that can be used as manure to enrich the grass where cows graze. “Only 3% of human faeces is solid, so it seems crazy that we waste 11 litres of drinkable water flushing it down the toilet,” says Linders.
In the eco-village Shepard hopes to develop, food forests and edible landscaping will also help to save water at the same time as providing food to eat. “Living buildings” made from willow trees will recycle sewerage through their roots at the same time as providing shade in summer.
In permaculture, everything is put back to work.
“Once people start to realise that each natural resource has multiple uses, it creates a shift in seeing the minimum resources as having potential,” says Avice Hindmarch, a qualified permaculturist.
She sees the problem in informal settlements and poor rural areas not as being a lack of resources, but as a lack of creative thinking.
People are limited by what they can imagine, but with a belly full of organic food, the chances are that they will come up with creative plans to change not only the fate of their communities, but of the planet as a whole.