This December I had the privilege to spend five days Wwoofing (willing workers on organic farms) with Max and Trudi Lindegger at Crystal Waters EcoVillage, one hour drive inland from the Sunshine Coast, Qld.
This is a real eco-village and intentional community, designed along permaculture principles in 1988. Max and partners started this eco-village, having done Bill Mollison's first permaculture course. He now lives there, doing design consulting, training and international development aid work. Otherwise Max is looking after his bees, a few cows, nut trees and seedlings which he sells at local markets.
Crystal Waters is in many respects, is a typical subdivision of a 259 ha cattle farm. Roads, dams and all other infrastructure were constructed.
What Max and his partners did, that most developers don't do, is spend 9 months observing the site, before committing design pen to paper. They observed the property through the seasons - how water moves, ecological niches, fauna and flora, soil, sun, wind and other external energies. A business plan documented the research and the potential products (fruits/ nuts, aquaculture, agroforestry, livestock) and how they'd fit into the 'system'.
Today Crystal Waters is home to around 250 people. A standard body corporate structure, is the formal mechanism which binds the community. All the infrastructure is maintained by the body corporate, with very little involvement of the local council. It is not close to a major town, and many people work from home. The local community economy is strong, with residents often employing each other. Some locally major businesses started from Crystal Waters, such as Green Harvest Organic Gardening Supplies, or Rammed Earth Constructions.
Houses are clustered in small groups, and most of the land is set aside for nature (permaculture zone 5). There is a kind of village centre, as you turn off the main road into Crystal Waters, with a community functions centre and eco-centre training facility. There is something on most nights of the week, though there's no expectation on residents to engage in activities.
A couple of streams run though the undulating property, and Max and others have planted thousands of indigenous trees, recreating in one area, a rain-forest. And by the sound of things, they've been very successful at re-creating nature. Literally, it is very noisy (in a beautiful way) with 26 frog species, 176 bird species, noisy cicadas, wallabies along the verges (they're not noisy), but no dogs or cats allowed!
For those of you interested in the town planning principle of encouraging mixed use, this eco-village takes the idea to a new height. People are living and working in diverse ways seamlessly with nature. Even the pastures have lots of species variety, with no herbicides used, there's lots of grasses, clover, fungus and other herbs. It's easy to see how this diversity, in nature and human culture, breeds resilience. If one herb is less successful, there is another which animals can graze and so on.
As a sustainable solution for human habitation, Crystal Waters is at one end of the spectrum, giving most back to nature. Clearly at around one hectare per person, it's not housing many people and nor does it intend to. At the other end, someone living in central Manhattan uses very few resources, and is arguably just as sustainable. Where do I want to be? Not sure. Crystal Waters is more beautiful, but perhaps not as exciting (in a human kind of way:)
A well designed system, doesn't need much maintenance. That was evident from Max's six cows (and one bull). They are lowland Angus, used for their meat, saving on the milking. They are cell grazed, meaning that a grid of electric fences is used to keep them in a segment of their paddock and every two days, they're moved into the next segment. It's a simple matter of lowering the electric wire and they move into the fresh cell. This way the clover and other grasses get eaten down once, and can recover before the cows are back. Soil compaction is also less. The paddock is full of pecan nut trees, and in-fact the cows as a by-product of the system. A mobile abattoir/butcher is used to kill the cows.
Max's best cash crop though, is his honey. It tastes quite unique because of the surrounding polen the bees forage. Most honey you buy is blended from many areas. As well as the bees, Max sells thousands of seedlings at local markets. They're popular because, being grown outside, they don't keel over as soon as you plant them.
My wwoofing jobs were mainly general maintenance stuff - pruning, mowing, planting seedlings. This December, it's been hot and humid, and we had some heavy tropical rain. I was glad to dive in the dam at lunch time. Thanks Max for sharing your experience.
See more at http://crystalwaters.org.au/
The rest of the holiday
Then we went off to Noosa for some traffic and culture shock, though also very pretty.
