by Peter Harper

As Tom Stoppard memorably observed in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Actors are the opposite of people. An actor on stage, at the end of a passionate half-hour soliloquy, would be appalled to discover that there was nobody in the auditorium. In total contrast a person imagining they were alone for half an hour would be shocked and embarrassed to discover that they had in fact been watched.

This symbolises the difference between ecovillages and eco-demonstration centres which I shall call eco-centres for short. In an ecovillage the internal links are more important than the external links. In an eco-centre it is the external links which are more important. The balance of links makes an important difference to almost everything.

The distinction first occurred to me at the 1995 ecovillages conference at Findhorn. I was there with several colleagues representing the Centre of Alternative Technology (CAT), which had started life as an ecovillage in 1974. It was tremendous fun to compare notes with other communities of similar vintage (The Farm, Auroville, Findhorn itself) to see the unfolding patterns of successes and failures, and how things now stood compared with the early years.

Yet it soon became obvious that CAT was no longer an ecovillage and did not really fit in the wider community represented by the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). Instead it is another kind of animal, perhaps equally useful but in some ways an opposite pole. All ecovillages need an economic base. The inevitable failure of CAT's original self-sufficiency programme led within a year to an economic crisis. This was solved by reorganising part of the site as an exhibition and opening it to paying visitors, who would also buy meals other goods.

Meanwhile most of the staff continued living on the site, but there were constant tensions between simply living and putting on a show. Our visitors were very keen to see how we lived. But the very act of strangers observing private life utterly changes it. Eventually the `show business' aspects of CAT came to dominate. Theoretically a residential community could continue, but in our experience residents increasingly resented the intrusion of the business into their private lives. Some responded by finding homes outside the site and negotiating a strictly working relationship with the organisation – already changing the balance. Others stayed on the site in dwindling numbers but leaving no prospect for a thriving, `full-featured settlement'. I have found this puzzling. In theory a residential community ought to be able to exist side-by side an ecocentre, and to a certain extent the Findhorn Foundation has managed this, but I can think of no other examples of organisations who survived for long on this razor-edge. It seems you have to go one way or the other.

So now CAT relates more to other eco-centres than it does to most ecovillages. Most of these were specifically founded as eco-centres, not as communities. CAT is very unusual in this respect. Examples include De Kleine Aarde, Centre Terre Vivante, Folkecentre, Energie und Umweltcentrum. In Britain we have a lot, depending how you define them: there seems to be a clear distinction between small beginnings and slow organic growth and `big bang' instant developments financed by government or lottery grants.

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) is built inside an old slate quarry in Wales, UK. The various buildings include residences, a series of eco-cabins where visitors can monitor all energy inputs and outputs, demonstrations of various styles of building methods, gardens and lots of demonstration alternative technology units. (It also has possibly the best 'alternative design' bookshop Val has ever visited!)

What are the features of eco-centres?

These organisations are financially self-supporting, but have a public service ethos focused on environmental values. They actively seek to attract visitors. This allows an intense communication of experience and ideas while providing a large part of the income required to sustain the organisation and to support less public activities. Other features include visitor facilities such as car park, toilets, restaurant, shop.

A range of parallel activities such as courses, research, publications, membership organisation etc

Unprofitable activities are supported by the visitor income

Grounds managed on ecological principles

Serious attempts to `practice what they preach' in day to day operations, with pragmatic fiddles

We too felt the need for some kind of international network, but if not GEN, then what? This forced us to think more carefully what sort of organisation we were and what our role should be in the sustainability movement.

Access to the CAT site is via a water balance railway. The water used is stored in this lake at the top of the railway. It is a most impressive system.

CAT started in the seventies during a time of apocalyptic despair. The emphasis on low-tech self-sufficiency seemed logical. The idea was to create a model demonstration community that would install and test a great variety of technological systems, de-bug them and finally communicate the results. It was naively supposed that the resources necessary to do this could be generated from a suitable site, without outside support. This proved not to be the case! So basically there was an economic crisis, and solution turned out to be opening the site to paying visitors. This simultaneously created an income stream and communicated the ideas in a very immediate way. Apart from gate money, visitors can buy refreshments, books and products, generating even more money (currently trading generates twice as much as entrance fees).

The railway has two carriages linked together with a steel cable, so that when one goes down the other is pulled up. Each carriage has a water tank at the front. When people need to go up or down on the railway, a computer controlled system allows water to flow through a pipe into the tank of the top carriage until it is heavy enough to pull the other one up. They are then allowed to move. To stop both carriages accelerating up and down and crashing, they are slowed down by a system that stores the energy of braking by compressng gas in cylinders. This energy can then be used to pump some of the water back uphill.

Actually this is quite profound stuff: Show business is in a curious way the opposite of real life. A private person on her own is suddenly shocked and embarrassed to discover that somebody has been looking at her. An actor, in contrast is equally discomfited to discover after an intense performance that actually nobody was there to observe it. It was also the same with a lot of more technical things: a `real' installation does not usually communicate its true nature to someone inspecting it for five minutes; it needs to be distilled, interpreted, packaged. And this often renders it unworkable.

Peter Harper,
Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT),
Machynlleth, Powys SY20 9AZ, Wales, UK.
E-mail: peter@catbiology.demon.co.uk