Sustainability from the point of view of an EcoVillage means the ability to keep doing what we are doing for untold generations without degrading the environment.
"Wealth" from this perspective is not about money but about the resources needed to be sustainable. When we are living sustainably, life is abundant and we have "the ability to forwardly organize life and life processes", to quote R. Buckminster Fuller. This is true wealth. The following are basic principles regarding sustainability and practical actions by which to feel our way cautiously forward into a sustainable and wealthy future:
1. The Nutrient Cycle:
It is incorrect action to take the nutrients from the Earth in plant or animal food, eat, digest, and excrete the by-products of metabolism (highly concentrated packets of unused nutrients), and throw this resource into rivers, sea, or landfills, or burn them to produce immediately-dissipated electrical energy. In direct opposition to this practice stands the idea of a nutrient cycle in which the fertilizing elements from garbage and sewage are returned to the soil to grow more food. (Not to golf courses, and not to tree farms.) This is a particularly important question to resolve in the modern world where humans cluster together in vast urban enclaves, concentrating wastes, and where fertile soil is being rapidly lost or degraded by contemporary agricultural practices.
2. The Hydrologic Cycle:
The hydrologic (water) cycle must also be considered. Once again, it is incorrect action to consume fossil-water deposits faster than they can be replenished. This is particularly true, if at the same time we do not engage in recycling what we have already used, and also in the harvesting of rainwater. The demand for human urban water use can be substantially reduced, and probably in most cases eliminated altogether, by capturing the rain while also purifying and recycling the water already in circulation. Water harvesting outdoors can be done by many methods, including the terracing of slopes to slow rain run-off and aid percolation into the water table. There also exist other well-established methods for retaining moisture, reducing erosion, and farming with micro-catchment basins in combination with deep absorbent organic soils. In general, the most efficient way to store and conserve water is by keeping it underground, and by replenishing the deep aquifers. The purification of water by microbes, protozoa, algae, fungi, plants and animals is called "bioremediation". This cleansing capability of life can be harnessed by building balanced ecosystems, such as special wetlands constructed for wastewater cleanup. The effectiveness of bioremediation is well established. In fact the traditional septic tank, after settling-out the sewage solids, then discharges the still-contaminated effluent to be purified by soil organisms.
A constructed wetland is more efficient than the septic system, and also a more aesthetically pleasing method of treating wastewater. It uses an array of flowering and decorative marsh plants, together with their aerobic bacterial symbionts and other tiny organisms, which purify polluted water of many categories. Domestic sewage, industrial toxic wastes and even heavy metals can be cleaned up in this way. There are even some plants that will concentrate radioactive nuclides.
By using such a bioremediation system to process sewage under a closed but transparent greenhouse-type structure, the atmospheric water vapor evapotranspired by the plants, can be extracted by condensers, collected, and sterilized. This water, which has passed through green plants, is already quite pure. The only losses of moisture that must be replaced are those of evaporation from cooking, sweating, mechanical evaporative cooling systems, breathing, and any other evapotranspiration from plants that may be irrigated in the open.
The bioremediation purification by plants and bacteria occurs through the processes of:
a. Incorporation: For example, nutrients are removed from polluted water and are then incorporated into the plant biomass (leaves, stems and roots) in a wetland ecosystem.
b. Concentration: Elements such as heavy metals, salts, and some radioactive substances are often concentrated in the bio-mass of various growing plants. These elements can also be sequestered through being deposited in stream or lake sediment.
c. Transmutation: The vast majority of all chemical compounds on Earth are "organic." That is, they contain the element Carbon. Toxic wastes such as pesticides and many thousands of other human-created organic chemicals, can be changed or transmuted into carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor by soil bacteria and by symbiotic aerobic microbes living in cooperative arrangements on the roots of aquatic, or even terrestrial plants. Petroleum based substances, pesticides, and the hydrocarbon products of combustion from diesel fuel are among the many compounds that can be transmuted by plant and microbial life.
d. Destruction of Pathogens: Many disease-causing bacteria and viruses can be destroyed by the natural bacterial and oxygenating processes found in healthy aquatic, or semi-aquatic, ecosystems (unless they are overloaded.)
e. pH and BOD: pH is the measure of the degree of acidity or alkalinity, and BOD is the
Biochemical Oxygen Demand. Balanced living aquatic and semi-aquatic ecosystems are known to shift pH in both directions toward a neutral condition, as well as to reduce the biochemical demand for oxygen.
f. Suspended Solids:
Suspended solids are called "turbidity" in water, and this is substantially reduced by slow moving aquatic plant systems.
3. Atmospheric Purification:
This is accomplished by the combination of plants and microbes in wetland systems, as well as by air - plants and terrestrial plants which absorb airborne volatile organic compounds and change them into CO2 and water vapor. There are similar techniques that pass polluted air through soil to allow the aerobic bacteria there to cleanse the air. (These systems are called "soil-bed reactors")
4. Renewable Energy:
Decentralized renewable alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels for energy is a major step toward reaching sustainability, and is now an undeniably an economically attractive reality, particularly in such places as the windy High Plains of Texas, where there is also sunshine about 260 days of the year.
5. Building Materials:
Materials that are long-lasting and require a low amount of energy for their use, transport, or manufacture are important to sustainability. Earthen structures are estimated to house over one third of the population of the earth. Even in earthquake areas, adobe and other forms of earth building are practical. The Dolores Mission, which is the oldest structure in San Francisco (built in 1776), is made of adobe. In the photo museum there you can see the building just after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the pictures show the old adobe mission building unscathed along side of the ruins of the fired-brick cathedral.
Earthen walls with lightweight ferrocement and tile roofs and floors are a good structural approach for an Eco-Village. Ferrocement and tile domes and vaults can cover substantial spans without interior column supports. Tiles, although high in "embodied energy", are fire-proof, re-usable, and have great longevity and durability. They are a truly economical and reusable material, and their embodied energy can be amortized over the lifetime of the material, that can often be measured in hundreds of years. These materials contribute to a sustainable building approach, wherein the majority of the basic material is found close to the site itself. The basic idea is to use a minimum of high-energy, manufactured, and "imported" materials. Material costs are greatly reduced by building with local materials as much as possible. This practice also cuts out the "value added" expenses of factory-made, transportation-dependent materials, and reduces environmental costs. Dollars that are normally spent outside of the community, become available for rerouting into the local labor force, and this is highly advantageous for the local economy.
6. Correct Production and Use of Materials:
Materials that are renewable but which have an adverse ecological effect on the environment are not sustainable in the long run. Tree farming, as it is generally practiced, has been cited as a good example of this. Such farms, due to lack of diversity, are degraded and incomplete as ecosystems, and are often operated so as to take out the maximum, and return the minimum. True forests have much greater biodiversity and a consequently a higher resilience to disruptions of disease, fire, or even storms.
Most current forestry practices also produce structurally inferior building materials, when compared with what was available as recently as forty years ago.
7. Toxic Compounds:
Eliminating the use of persistent toxic household and industrial compounds, as well as insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, contributes enormously to sustainability of soil, and to the health of the human population, as would the isolation and reclamation of heavy metals in bioremediation systems.
8. Transportation:
Transportation that is less intrusive (pedestrian, bicycles, mass transit, personal rapid transit (PRT) makes a huge contribution to community livability. At the same time, this approach also reduces the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. A key to transforming the current situation is to make systems so convenient that they are more attractive to use than private automobile. Smaller, cheaper, lighter and less energy-requiring are all elements to be considered in choosing or developing a transportation system. Unfortunately, the politics of transportation is a major deterrent to a rational and efficient transportation policy.
9. Town and Regional Planning:
When town planning is based on local access to sustainable energy, building materials, food, water, nutrients, transport, employment, education and many other services it is truly "conservative," and at the same time also "radical" in the sense of, "root", or "fundamental." To our knowledge, there are at present no truly sustainable communities in the industrialized world! Here and there you will find a few traditional hunters-gathers, and some subsistence agricultural groups living in small pockets and still living under fairly sustainable conditions. A case could be put forth that some traditional Asian farming villages are somewhat sustainable, but indications are that they suffer severe patterns of cyclic starvation. Starvation is not an acceptable component of the quest for sustainability, and the goal of any community should be to achieve an abundant life, not merely a subsistence level of existence. Population is naturally a major consideration in this issue. Once the Ecological Footprint of a community is established, and its pattern for density and restriction of extra-territorial development is determined and agreed upon, the final size of a community should be considered to be set, and essentially unchangeable. San Francisco is a city that has not changed population size for over 50 years due to the physical constraints of its location.
10. Consumption:
Abandonment of the mentality that promotes consumption as a moral right, duty, and an economically desirable goal is necessary for those who profess to espouse sustainability. To consume means, "to use up or destroy". The idea of customer as, "one who exchanges energy for value received" is of course a totally different orientation. This assumes the use of a truly valuable form of currency for such an exchange.
11. Biospherics:
The term "Biospherics" is used to describe the discipline that studies, creates and manages closed ecological systems. Whether the word Biospherics is used or not, in any materially closed system, such as Planet Earth, sustainability depends upon the use of Biospheric principles. These imply a symbiosis of human-created technologies and living ecosystems. It is the opposite of those technologies that are by nature, inimical or destructive of life, or are used in such a way. (In living systems every waste product of one component becomes food for another component of the system. In non-living, or mechanical systems, waste and many of the products themselves usually end up in a landfill. ) Lewis Mumford used "Biotechnic", in his book Technics and Civilization, as long ago as 1934, to express the idea of life-enhancing technologies. He said that a biologically centered paradigm would be the next major step in human history. We are now there.
Biotechnics is not the same as "biotechnology" as it is usually used nowadays, which implies "genetic engineering". A dictionary definition of "technology" is "the application of knowledge for practical ends". Essentially, 'technologies' are anything created or developed by, or principles discovered by humankind. This ranges from language and fire, to computers and aquaculture. It is an ecologically positive activity to apply technologies synergistically in artistic and poetical ways so as to produce biotechnic results.
Biospherics recognizes the necessity to seek out appropriate biotechnic methods and apply them to what ever human-directed activity is being engaged in, so that all technological activities act symbiotically with Earth's Biosphere in order to enhance living systems, rather than degrading them. A community that is rich in use of these methods of living within the principles of sustainability is a wealthy community in the true sense of the word.