Welcome to the Sprout Village blog! While we are in the planning phase of this wild project, there won't be a lot of interesting news specifically on the Sprout Village front. After all, there's only so much attention-grabbing information to share about searching for a block of land or researching local council development policies.
In the meantime, I'll be bringing you stories, news and ideas from around the world about simple living, eco-friendly communities, regenerative agriculture, gardening, economics and much more. Let's get into it!
Although we don't hear about it often, there is a rising number of eco-villages popping up in Australia as well as around the world. The Fifth Estate reported on a company building eco-villages in urban areas in Australia's cities, Smart Urban Villages. They provide long-term leases to those wishing to be involved in a sustainable community without having to buy land or build a house themselves.
One fantastic concept they promote is that of 'affordable living', which they offer an as alternative to 'affordable housing'. They says it provides more of a long-term focus, because they design ways to reduce ongoing cost of living, including heating and cooling costs. From The Fifth Estate, "Instead of selling the dwellings, they will be retained by Smart Urban Villages in the form of a real estate investment trust and leased out on long, perpetual leases."
This article was from a few years ago, and it looks like they still haven't secured any sites yet or begun production. I hope that the company is able to move forward with their plans soon, as we need this sort of sustainable development both in urban and rural areas.
Speaking of rural areas, one thing you are bound to find when you drive through a regional or rural area in basically any country is fences. I recently read an article that made me think about fences in a way I hadn't before. That is to say, it made me think about fences, period.
In my area, fences are a given for every farmer, usually for keeping animals either in or out, depending on the species. Anthropocene discusses a recent study in BioScience and says, "To borrow a phrase, there are two sides to every fence. Even those put up with the best intentions can interrupt migrations, detrimentally change animals’ behavior, or push conflict elsewhere rather than fixing it."
It turns out we don't know a whole lot about how the construction of fences affects the ecosystem as a whole. We know that "in each scenario, fences create “winners and losers”—species that benefit and species that don’t." In Australia we have thousands of kilometres of fencing to keep out pests like foxes and rabbits, but they also stop native animals, sometimes endangered species. Most of our knowledge about fences are about large animals, and not many considered the impacts on the movement of small mammals or the spread of plants.
I believe that part of the reason why we put up so many fences is as a signal to other people, of ownership, of control. Many people buy a house in a busy suburb and then put up a huge fence to block the sound and sight of other people. This article has made me ready to assess the need for fences in a different way when we start construction at Sprout Village.
While fences can provide protection from sun, wind, noise and dust, a more natural alternative exists that may interfere less with the local environment - trees! They prevent soil erosion and therefore dust, they can provide a privacy screen, they can act as a windbreak, and they don't block animals from coming through in the way that fences do. In fact, they even encourage wildlife as a large enough group of trees can provide a suitable habitat for a range of creatures.
Trees can be slow growers compared to other plants. But it doesn't have to take a century to grow a wildlife corridor or a windbreak. As reported on Ted, "Eco-entrepreneur Shubhendu Sharma’s figured out a way of growing native, self-sustaining forests anywhere in the world." Sharma pinpoints the appropriate trees and other plants for the soil, climate and people, and plants dense native forests that grow to dizzying heights within a decade.
One of my dreams for Sprout Village is to revegetate land that was previously deforested for agriculture. Sharma says, "Forests aren’t necessarily good for producing single cash crops. A native forest has to be biodiverse to thrive — including a mix of at least 50 to 100 different species."
Instead of clearing trees to make way for a large monoculture crop, we can use it to provide food, timber, shade, soil improvement and a host of other ecosystem services: "Other useful trees for farming communities include those that produce oil seeds, fodder for cattle, or firewood for humans." The benefits will increase in line with the biodiversity of the forest as well as the care and attention we provide. Together we can provide a beautiful and useful space to be.
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