Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

252 Designing ecological Habitats
resilience in these changing times, particularly in meeting the challenges of
climate change and peak oil.
In Australia, there are big challenges with isolation and motor
vehicle dependency, especially in sprawling suburbia, urban fringe and
rural areas where public transport is virtually non-existent and people
commute long distances to meet basic needs. I’ve been there myself,
living for six years on a large property 36 km from the nearest small town
and over 50 km from a regional centre. The realities of socio-economic
isolation can be debilitating, not just for individual households but for
many intentional communities.
A hallmark of a village as a form of human settlement is that it is human
scale, within walking distance. I know of several self-titled ecovillages where
residents need to commute several kilometres to the community centre
and for up to five km within the community to visit friends who live at
the opposite end of the property. Unfortunately, topography often doesn’t
make for easy cycling, and walking can be a challenge with large loads or
toddlers in tow. So we find intentional communities where residents depend
on vehicular transport to move around and function within the community,
and then to access needs beyond the community can involve commutes of 20
to 50 km or more to a town or significant service centre.
I conducted a workshop once for an intentional rural community of
23 adults and numerous children. The community had been going for 15
years yet had only three completed houses. Most residents were living
in caravans and sheds and surviving on social security payments. The
atmosphere of poverty and powerlessness was debilitating. Half of their
meager incomes were being used to keep their motor vehicles on the road
so they could drive 50 km to the nearest supermarket mall to buy cheap
food with the other half of their income. They couldn’t afford fencing
materials to protect gardens from wildlife so very little food was actually
grown in the community. Over $55,000 a year was being spent on motor
vehicles for fuel, oil, registration and essential repairs (Note: this amount
does not include the initial cost of the vehicles or replacement value, just
annual operating costs). At the time, early 1990s, $55,000 could build a
modest house for an owner-builder. The equivalent value of a house a year
was effectively going into greenhouse gas emissions and petrochemical
company profits.
In the late 1980s, I began to seriously address these bigger-picture
issues and developed a planning process for evaluating a property or
settlement and its location in terms of access to human needs – bringing
the principles of zonation (proximity, access and schedules) into bioregional
planning and community design. I later coined this process the
Eco-Social Matrix (ESM).
ESM is a process of analysing the interplay of natural, social and
services catchments of an area to explore the impact of land-use use
decisions not only on the environment but on people’s lives, how they
access and meet their needs. The matrix can be applied to an individual