Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

256 Designing ecological Habitats
pharmacy, herbal apothecary, post office, local credit union banking facility
– and lots of cafes! Nimbin also has a doctor’s surgery, small hospital and
other health services. I can comfortably cycle to meet most of my needs
locally and need only do the 30 km commute to Lismore, my local provincial
city, when I require specialist and higher order goods and services.
Friends living in the next valley, where there is only a small hamlet with
a very small general store stocked mainly with junk food, a pub and a café,
constantly need to commute over 20 km to Lismore to meet most of their
basic needs. These are important things to consider when choosing where to
live or to develop ecovillages or cohousing with their increased populations
– what pressures will that increased population put on roads, on vehicular
carbon footprints, on the economics of survival? On the other hand, the
increased population of a community can present opportunities for viable
small enterprise and provision of services. Is there sufficient population to
support a bakery, a hairdresser, a food coop? Note that enterprise efforts
often fail in intentional community and ecovillage developments due to
insufficient Social catchment to support the business or service.
Social catchment analysis and community consultation processes can
also reveal what circumstances take people out of the community. In 1983,
Nimbin’s village laundry burnt down. This had a major impact on the village
economy as a whole as people commuted to Lismore to do their washing
and consequently did their other shopping in Lismore. This resulted in an
average 40% drop in trade turnover for most businesses in Nimbin village.
When the new village laundry opened ten years later, local trade picked up
substantially.
Services Catchment
Services catchments involve identifiable networks of utility, infrastructure,
transport and administrative services from the community to the regional
level, together with their hierarchies and thresholds. Examples of elements
in a services catchment analysis include transport and mobility networks
(pedestrian, cycle-ways, road, rail, air, sea/river, etc.); electrical grid and
distribution, potential for co-generation, renewable energy resources and
sites; waste management and recycling for solid waste, sewage and water;
local government boundaries and precincts, higher government services and
administration catchments; and other regulatory bodies and services.
An example of Services catchment in my own village is electricity.
Most electricity for this region comes from dirty coal generators some
500 kilometers away. The substation that services this sub-catchment area
provides data to monitor energy usage in the Nimbin Valley district. There
are over 100 households on stand-alone solar or micro-hydro systems. Within
the past two years, over 55 households have installed solar grid-feed, and
now the community has received funding for a Community Solar Station
which is currently installing solar arrays on the roofs of ten communityowned
buildings in the village. When the community system is completed,