Editor’s note: The following article by Patsy Blackstock was previously published in One Earth Magazine Issue No. 18, Summer 1995.

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,
A big hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?
They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot. ”
—Joni Mitchell

The Park at Findhorn is no paradise by any stretch of the word as we tend to think of it—no lush green valleys bathed in golden warm sunlight, with fragrant exotic flowers dotting the landscape, ambrosial fruits ready to be picked as we wander through the dreamy countryside. It is, however, a haven for many who consider it paradise in another sense of the word and, in comparison to many places they may have been to before, it is a paradise. A paradise that in recent years has been overrun by cars, one of modern humanity’s greatest contributions to ‘convenience’.

I was asked to write this article following a Community meeting last Autumn the topic of which was ‘Cars’. Although the ‘downtown’ area of The Park has its vehicle problems, the meeting was inspired by the awesome congestion of vehicles in Pineridge, the more ‘residential’ area. This was particularly noticed when the Building Department undertook the monumental task of putting in a new water main through the whole of Pineridge, half the loop at a time, thus closing off parking areas and creating temporary ‘pedestrian only’ areas.

So here I am, reporting about cars and parking in our community. I’ll try to keep it interesting: data on air pollution, toxic emissions, destruction to the environment, the downside social aspects of the massive numbers of cars now being driven throughout the western world, I’ll keep that to a minimum. I don’t want to trouble you too much, or shatter the hope that a lot of us secretly harbour about today’s modern world, the hope that all the ‘bad stuff’ will go away, and life as we know it will go on, of course, getting better, because science on the one hand, and the New Age on the other, will ‘fix’ it. If this gets to be too much, just put the magazine down, take a few deep breaths and let an image of something alive and natural float into your mind, a pastoral scene alongside a motorway perhaps …

I admit to a deep concern about the whole car scene in the Community and beyond. It wants to well up in me as the sarcasm obvious in my writing. It looms bleak and grey like the Scottish skies, as a shadow of despondency, nearly despair. Some of you may share with me a concern that feels overwhelming in the face of our cultural denial of the magnitude and scale of the global and local problems we face. Some of you may not, may have a different perspective. That’s what makes life spicy. But this whole subject is a pretty hot one, especially here in our community.

The Foundation, alongside its spiritual and personal development Education Programmes, is a model of an ‘Eco-village’. I have been working with the Building Programme for three and a half years, my entire ‘career’ at Findhorn, and over the last year or so have become progressively more involved with the Eco-village. From the beginning, I have been both inspired by the vision for a sustainable future and disappointed by the reality of the way life is lived here on a daily basis, an example of which is recycling. Thanks to the single-handed establishment of the (pitifully funded) Ecology Department by Ulf Bang-Ellingsen, we now have recycling that is accessible and able to take many types of items. Even so, we still have masses of rubbish each week. Folks just don’t recycle or think enough about re-use. There are other examples. To a ‘green revolutionist’ like me it looks dismal.

It is not good enough if we are calling ourselves a ‘model’. Especially after I visited some other communities in the autumn of 1993 following the ‘Celebration of Communities’, a large event held on the west coast of the United States attended by over one thousand North American communitarians. For Britain we are progressive, true enough. In the communities movement, of the well-established ones, we aren’t doing so well. We may be spiritually aware, but our consciousness around ecology and sustainability is sorely lacking. We are out of balance.

To tie this together for you, let me quote John Talbott, one of the primary people here who has been carrying out the on-the-ground work of the Eco-village development and who, after proposing the subject for our Autumn 1995 conference, ‘Eco-villages in the 90s: Models for 21st Century Living’, is co-focalising it. He writes in his original proposal to the Education Department:

At the community level the event could be seen as a follow up to our One Earth ’82 conference ‘Building a Planetary Village’ which was the inspiration behind launching the Caravan Park [purchase] appeal. Now 12 years later we have made an excellent start on the building of the village here but also seem to have lost, on a collective level, some of the original inspiration and vision of what our work in this area is. I believe it is now time to re-inspire ourselves with this vision and to look practically at how we need to take the next steps in our development.

This is my point exactly: not only have we lost some of the inspiration, I think as a collective we have moved towards a kind of laziness that seems inherently related to the modern world of ‘conveniences’. Additionally, we are so stressed by living our lives dedicated to planetary transformation (and running the Foundation) that we end up contributing to the very problems we are trying to change, out of exhaustion and overwhelm. Many of us know this paradox.

John writes further:

I think it is worth remembering that in the early 80s we struggled to find our identity and purpose again in the midst of our financial crisis. The vision that inspired us, of taking our work with Nature into the planetary/ecological village, also turned our fortunes around. There was a recognition that the work with Nature, started by Dorothy in the Findhorn garden, was only the beginning. Co-operation with Nature needed to be extended into every feature of our physical lives, the homes and buildings, the energy we consume, the food we grow, the water we drink etc.

Time to renew our commitment not only to Spirit but also to Nature, and to define the context in which we carry forward our work in the world.
—John Talbott, 24 June 1994

Thank you John. I agree. It’s time to re-inspire. From my critical viewpoint, past time. Let’s hope the conference inspires us to examine issues like cars and take action decisively and boldly.

Continuing on about the current car situation, an informal survey was done by the Park Planning Office prior to the meeting. The results of that survey showed that 74 adult residents (plus 15 children) of Pineridge in 51 residential caravans and houses have 32 cars among them. That’s a ratio of 1 car to 2.3 people, in a community that calls itself a model for sustainability. Astounding. In Britain, the ratio of cars to people is 1 to 3. You would think we would be doing better than that in an ‘ecological village’!

A detailed scrutiny of the survey showed that the two ‘classier’ neighbourhoods, the Bag End and Whisky Barrel clusters, are ‘car dense’ areas: Bag End has 1 car for every 2 people, with the Barrels only a fraction off that. (By comparison, at the other end of Pineridge where there are only caravans, the car to people ratio is 1 car to 9 people.) What does this mean? When living in a nice suburban house in The Park you tend also to have a car?

 

“is the
Findhorn Foundation
Community becoming a convenience
based middle-class community
of people who can afford cars and
modern housing and whose lives are
dedicated to planetary change
as long as we can
have our cars and drive
them, too?’

 

 

Is the Findhorn Foundation Community becoming a convenience based middle-class community of people who can afford cars and modern housing and whose lives are dedicated to planetary change as long as we can have our cars and drive them, too? The plans are to continue to develop The Park. The Findhorn Housing Company has come into existence to facilitate this. New houses is likely to mean ‘more’. More televisions. More washing machines. More cars.

I know this sounds discouraging. It is. We are making efforts, though. Our eco-logical homes are beautiful. The windmill, generating 20% of our electricity, is a monument to the cleanest form of energy available. Trees For Life continue their determined efforts to plant trees. However, it is not enough.

My first summer at Findhorn, Dr. Helen Caldicott came and spoke one evening. I was profoundly moved by her talk. She started the group ‘Physicians for Social Responsibility’. The subject of her talk was the destruction of the environment, the urgency with which we need to act, to change our lives and lifestyles, to create new policies that are based on deep investigation into the potential for sustainability, as opposed to destruction. As I listened to her speak, as I became aware of how immense her view was, how dedicated an individual she was, I wondered why more people were not at her talk. The questions following the talk immediately revealed why. I was shocked when she was not applauded for her work, but criticised instead for her ‘doom and gloom’ attitude, her ‘pessimism’, her ‘negativity’. This was the woman who helped make Australia a nuclear-free zone!

I walked away, unable to make sense of it all. Did the Findhorn Community know a magical way out of the environmental crisis? Was she ‘off’ and were we ‘on’? Was there not room to honour the work to which others dedicate their lives? Was the Community so insulated from the world that it could not handle the inevitable emotional reaction to the level of destruction and danger we are facing?

I myself had undergone a major inner change when I finally came to terms with the state of the planet. I cried for hours when I realised that global warming meant that, for every degree of increase in temperature, temperate forests recede 100 miles northward. What hit me full on was that trees can’t move, and being a tree lover all my life, I ‘experienced’ the death of trees who, unlike myself, cannot move to a better habitat. And it is a slow death.

In Britain, cars are responsible for about one-fifth of the carbon dioxide pollution, the main cause of global warming. In Germany, scientists researching the costs that society bears for its addiction to cars, calculated that each car is responsible in its lifetime for three dead trees and thirty ‘sick’ trees. What would St. Barbe-Baker say about the number of cars being used at the Community? Plant more trees.

It’s not enough, though. I heard it said shortly after I had arrived at Findhorn that we didn’t need to worry about the state of the environment, the devas would take care of it all. Being a neophyte, but not one to cast myself into new belief systems without a bit of research, I wondered about that viewpoint until I had the chance to ask Dorothy Maclean, the Findhorn deva expert as far as I was concerned, if she held that view. She was appalled and I myself breathed a sigh of relief. As a matter of fact, she said the deva world would assist us from within their realm, at the level they work on, but our job was to take care of the physical level.

I wonder how embedded these and other attitudes are in our little community? What other misinformation keeps us treating the Earth without regard for her delicate balance, her limited resources? What keeps us from acting positively, swiftly and with a strong commitment, to advance our living model of how life can support and co-operate with Nature at the highest, most rewarding level possible?

And what of that Community meeting? Lots of people turned out. Good things got said. The discussion was lively and productive. A list of ideas and solutions was created. Here is a partial list of the things that the wonderful, caring, creative folks at the meeting came up with that night:

* Increase number of Foundation bus runs to Cluny and reinstate runs to Elgin (15 miles away)
* Create (re-create?) a shopping/pick up/delivery/transport service to the local village, town and Elgin/Inverness
* Investigate the feasibility of using electric cars/carts/milk floats and/or solar powered vehicles in the Park
* Create a ‘car fleet’ which would be available to members of the service through a booking system
* Improve other facilities, e.g. sheltered bicycle racks near parking areas
* Create a ‘Share A Ride’ noticeboard

These are good ideas. Many of them are already in existence in other parts of the world so we can get support, gain from others’ experience. The problem is nothing has happened, no action has been taken. Everyone is busy, busy, busy here. And they need their cars to get where they need to go, when they need to get there. They need their cars to escape from the stress and fast pace, to get out where they can breathe and relax. Or they wish they had one so they could.

It is true that in these times of tighter finances it is harder to realise plans. Unfortunately, the practice of spending time and money for short-term gain is still as alive in the Findhorn Community, as it is in the rest of the world today. Even so, as John pointed out, with inspiration and the willingness to strive, the money comes.

There are a few of us who continue to keep the issue alive, who are working out for ourselves ‘what is enough?’ and ‘what does living in balance mean?’ It is a privilege to live here; we have a wonderful infrastructure already in place that makes many of these suggestions imminently practical and not hard to implement; we have the privilege, joy and power of having community in a way that few in the world do. In time, I am sure some of the very constructive suggestions will come to fruition. It just takes the will to put them into action. Hopefully, you will read about them in future issues of One Earth or see them for yourself when you visit.

Patsy Blackstock is a car owner at the Findhorn Foundation and in the three or so years she has had the car, she has shared it regularly with over 30 people and has never lived in the same place as it was parked!