Beginnings
The October 1982 Conference ‘Building a Planetary Village’ hosted by the Findhorn Foundation marked the beginning of serious attempts by the intentional community, which had existed at Findhorn since 1962 to demonstrate a human settlement that could be considered sustainable in environmental, social, and economic terms.
The term ‘ecovillage’ later came to be used to describe such experiments and in 1995 the first international conference of ecovillages, Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities for the 21st Century, was held in Findhorn.
At first almost all of the activities this involved, such as eco-house construction, a 75 kW Vestas wind turbine and an ecological waste water treatment system were undertaken by the Findhorn Foundation itself, or its trading company New Findhorn Directions Ltd. However, from 1990 onwards a growing number of independent charities, businesses, small sister communities, independent practitioners and community bodies have grown up and significantly extended the size and diversity of ecological projects, some of which are listed below. As of 2005 the Ecovillage has around 450 members centred around The Park (the main campus on the southern edge of Findhorn), but also based at numerous locations in the nearby town of Forres and elsewhere in Moray. The project supports approximately 300 jobs in the Findhorn/Forres area and provides a total aggregate economic impact in excess of £5 million per annum in the Highlands of Scotland as a whole.
Read more about this topic: Findhorn Ecovillage
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)