Creating Trustville 2020

Island insights

Archetype: City
Posted by Len Len Founder of Cradle of Design [...] Send an email Read Articles
on July 7th, 2010

What if you live on an island and you hear all this talk of climate change? You wouldn’t like it. Actually; living in the Netherlands -knowing what we know of water and the possible destruction it can cause, it might be an idea to think beyond tomorrow and think about what we’re going to do with respect to the energy matter. So here’s a hands on little exploration of what small islands did and what I think you and me can do.

This was quite a surprise for me; Bonaire one of the former Dutch Antilles (they became a ’special citadel’ or something like that recently) has decided to become fully sustainable by 2012. The idea is that they have started implementing the (mostly wind-driven) no-impact energy in 2009 and will be fully switched by 2012. As a stability factor they are building diesel-generators -which is still necessary as a safety-guard in case of hurricanes or something like that. There are a couple of things very interesting; first off they’d be the first fully self-sustaining island in the caribbean, secondly; they will be supporting the 15,000 permanent residents of the Island with 13 (1x 330kW & 12 x 0.9MW) wind turbines. Imagine that; 13.

Then there’s the Isle of Eigg, who -beside their pretty cool name, have become -to my knowledge, the first community owned self-sustainable island. When in 1997 the islanders became the owners of the island (for the price of 1,5 million pounds) they decided to (as islanders do) become completely self-governing and independent of the main-land. They have also recently won the ‘Green Oscar’; you can read more about that (and other things) on the website; islandsgoinggreen.org

What Eigg has done exactly will be shown to you in this video by one of the islanders:

Now; I’m often put aside as a dreamer when I say; let’s just buy the energy companies out of business. But err, you just saw the video right? Can Trustville be a community owned piece of land? In the documentary I saw yesterday I heard say this interesting quote which sounded something like; “these days nature has no rights, it’s property”, which is something that has crossed my mind more often, in terms of well, who decided that? And, along that line; why do I have to adhere to the claim laid by some corporate business when it is possible to -community-based, ‘own’ it ourselves, next to that do we not all, as human beings, belong to the planet -whereby it would be owning us?

But besides my slightly anarchistic ideas, would you; as a business-model, be willing to get together with your neighbourhood and start ‘harvesting’ your own energy? It makes more sense to me, but maybe I’m being silly. Curious about your thoughts.

Tags: environment governance sustainability urban planning