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by Gaia U Advisory Board Member, Albert Bates
Re-post from http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/
By too close we mean a distance of a few hundred miles in the downwind or down-current direction, or more if you are contemplating an island redoubt in British Columbia, downstream of Fukushima. And remember, North Korea doesn’t have to complete the half-dozen steps The New York Times says are still required before it can deliver a warhead to the mainland US. It just needs Federal Express or a small plane.
The ecovillage, just going on 8 years old, is really a marvel. There are houses of cob, hempcrete, straw, and timber. Rooftop rainwater is caught and channeled to blackcurrants, gooseberries, raspberries, Rosa Rugosa, plum, pear and cherry trees that line the streets and paths alongside 70 heirloom varieties of Irish apples grafted onto some 600 trees. The village rescued semi-mature oaks from a motorway in Dublin and gave them a new home here, along with 17,000 sweet chestnut, ash, alder, blackthorn, hawthorn, downy Birch, elder, and rowan.
- WeCreate offers co-working, shared workspaces for local businesses, entrepreneurs and projects and courses for colleges.
- Among the WeCreate enterprises is the only community-based FabLab in Ireland — established by two ecovillage members. It allows the manufacture of almost anything by scripting or downloading plans and using computers to make the products.
- Django’s eco-hostel with 34 beds.
- RiotRye wood-fired bakery and bread school
- Sheelagh na Gig, a bookshop and coffee shop on Cloughjordan’s main street
- Walnut Books, an on-line bookshop
- Cultivate, an NGO for community resilience and permaculture
- FEASTA, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability
- Cloughjordan Arts, currently working on the Cloughjordan Community Amphitheatre, a multi-purpose facility with a 300-audience capacity
- Cloughjordan CoHousing
- VINE (Village Internet Network Engineering) bringing internet and telephone services to ecovillage residents
Recognizing that renewable energy may require something more dependable than silicon wafers and neodymium generators, the biomass district heating system occupied a central part of the master plan for the village when it was first laid out in 2003. The two-boiler unit and insulated ground pipe are designed to serve 130 homes and businesses over the 67-acre area, although only 55 houses have been built, so far. The plant sells its surplus heat to the older, less well-insulated parts of Cloughjordan to replace imported coal. In 2014 the village was named by the European Commission as one of Europe’s 23 most successful ‘anticipatory experiences’ in the transition to a low-energy society.
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This post was originally published by Gaia U and is republished via the Creative Commons license.
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Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash