Eco Village People

Three years ago the Government of Wales enacted a rather extraordinary piece of legislation. Buried within a Technical Advice Note to the updated Planning Policy of Wales was introduced the concept of "One Planet Developments" into law. The idea is to encourage those who want to live their lives as if we have just one planet (which the sharp-eyed amongst you will know, is actually true) rather than as if we have three planets-worth of resources (which is how most of us in Britain live), by allowing people to live off the land in a self-sufficient and environmentally low-impact kind of manner. 

Can't people already do this? Well yes if they happen to own a mixed smallholding, which these days is well out of the price-range of nearly everyone. The difference with One Planet Developments (OPDs) is that you can buy a piece of agricultural land, around ten times cheaper than residential land, and then build your own house on it using local materials.  The catch is that you have to show to the local council in great detail exactly how you plan to live off the land. Within five years you are expected to be getting 65% of your food needs from it, as well as most of your energy for heating, cooking and warmth, and sufficient income from some kind of land-based business (such as selling your fruit and veg, running basket-making courses, etc) to keep you afloat. The other catch is that local councils are not falling over themselves to grant permission for OPDs.

The eco-village Lammas where I have been staying this past fortnight was set up in response to a similar policy in Pembrokeshire in West Wales that slightly predated the national One Planet Development version, and in fact helped to shape it. There was a long tortuous battle to gain planning permission for Lammas which they eventually got on appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. They are three and a half years into their five year plans now; apparently some are well on track to hitting their targets, others less so, but there is cautious optimism that on balance Lammas will meet them and be allowed to continue. 

Very unusually there was only one attendee for last Saturday's Lammas tour - me. I could bend the ear of Paul Wimbush, the leading proponent of all things OPD, for an entire hour as he showed me round which was very useful as I am using this year to weigh up whether to go this route on my bit of land. One key bit of advice he had was regarding the number of people my plot could support, which he believed could be no more than two or at a stretch three people, based on its size and topology. This of course would limit the type of community that could form there, as I had been thinking more in terms of five or six people, purely from the social angle.

It's been a privilege this last fortnight to have been a small part of this vital experiment at Lammas, which in practical terms has meant helping Nigel put a sloped roof on his barn extension. I'm proud to say we did it. The four heavy wooden rafters were cut to size with an angled top surface, lifted on top and slotted into their chiselled-out holes, ten long batons laid and nail-gunned cross-wise over them with a sheet of felt material inbetween, and then large OSB chipboards carefully cut to size and nailed on top of that; the whole she-bang tightly covered temporarily with recycled plastic sheeting as the tiles are not ready to go on yet. Amazing how a single sentence can boil down seven days of ingenious problem-solving and hard labour! 

On Sunday I head back home to my caravan in Snowdonia to find out what Spring has been doing to the plantlife there and to begin to prepare the soil for growing food. I feel better equipped after these two weeks with people who are several years into doing it. It is certainly no picnic, I've heard many grumbles from people here as they chafe against the daily routines of feeding animals, the impact of the turbulent weather systems on their gardens and the intrusion of council officers into their living arrangements and financial affairs, but one thing is for sure, it is an intriguing and important alternative to the consumerist and non-sustainable lifestyle of the typical Westerner. 

The Lishman's plot