Emerald greening: Kinsale joins Willits in seeking energy self-sufficiency
By Anne Weller/Special for The Willits News
Article Launched: 03/07/2007 11:15:43 AM PST
»Residents of Kinsale, in Ireland's County Cork, are creating projects and working groups to promote energy efficiency and local sustainability. The move, which they hope will wean Kinsale off its dependence on fossil fuels, is being aided by the youthful energies of the area's Permaculture College.
My husband Brian and I visited with Kinsale's Transition Town group last September.
City Councilwoman Isabelle Sutton is keen to make Kinsale more energy-independent. Her relationship with the town council is similar to Willits' relationship with former City Councilmember Ron Orenstein.
Kinsale is like Willits in many ways. The small town rests in a mostly rural valley surrounded by hills filled with homesteads and farms. The town of Kinsale is the center of commerce and local interest. Residents live far away from the city of Dublin, and about an hour from Cork (about the size of Santa Rosa). Perhaps they are luckier than we are in their tourism climate: Kinsale is situated on a beautiful bay; it's an old fishing village with photogenic buildings, gardens and homes.
Before the creation of the European Union, Ireland retained a simple culture, holding to old ways of life from lack of economic possibilities. Now there are
new houses, roads, more cars and an obviously rising economy filled with opportunity for change and growth.
Although the Irish rejoice at the creation of jobs, quality food and entertainment, there also is the ugliness of the quick-growth syndrome. As one looks across the picturesque harbor which used to offer a view of boats and old village houses one cannot ignore a big condo complex, built with no thought of fitting into the existing architecture style or coloration of what was recently a pastoral hill of sheep, rocks and trees. Sutton and others on Kinsale's planning commission have been trying to curb such developments, but the draw of money and wealth has been winning out, she says.
Ireland still eats locally. Farming has been practiced continuously for generations, and the Irish have not strayed far from an agrarian lifestyle.
While we were staying with her family, Sutton created several wonderful desserts including the one we named "Stolen Apple Crumble," made from apples taken from a neighbor's tree.
The apples have been left to rot on the ground each year for as long as Sutton can remember. She's now gleaning them to be used by family and neighbors.
One of the pies was sent to an elderly, disabled neighbor down the road. We all helped to eat several others, served with local cream.
Many of the meals we ate at the Suttons were made from local ingredients. The cream, eggs, ham, chicken, vegetables and fruit were all produced locally.
Ireland is not far removed from being a sustainable system. Many cottages have gardens and there are plenty of sheep roaming the fields around every village.
The following excerpted article puts much of the recent work of the Transition Town Group into focus. It also mentions Willits.
HOW TO WEAN A TOWN OFF FOSSIL FUELS
By Hana Loftus
worldchanging.com
The story of the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan is an extraordinary one. A mid-30s Englishman with a penchant for permaculture and an interest in peak oil moves to rural Ireland, starts teaching at the local further education college, and ends up writing, with his students, a ground-breaking document: the first timetabled strategy for weaning a town off fossil fuels.
And what is more, that small Irish town actually adopts the action plan and starts to implement it.
Kinsale is a seaside town of 7,000 inhabitants, renowned as Ireland's gourmet food capital as well as the home of a well-known jazz festival.
Kinsale 2021 is the title of the document: Rob Hopkins is the man, who persuaded Kinsale Further Education College to start the first full-time two-year course in Europe training in people in Practical Sustainability.
Hopkins had a simple idea for his students: to ask them to think practically about all the aspects of a town that would need to be changed if a low-energy future was to happen, and how they could do so over a 15-year period. So far, ao standard college project.
What was extraordinary was the way they went about it seriously, meeting the movers-and-shakers of the town in a "community think-tank," and researching and writing with every intent of making the project real. The result was named 'Version 1', because the plan they devised was all about continual refinement,
community input and gradual growth.
As the team says, "We describe what we are doing in Kinsale as a process, not an imposed plan in the town."
The first draft was launched at a conference in Kinsale in June 2005, and two of the students set up a not-for-profit company to handle the project, called Transition Design. Then the big step came when in December 2005, the Kinsale Town Council unanimously passed the motion to support "its initiative to
act as process leaders in Kinsale's transition to a lower-energy future and in developing the concept of a
'Transition Town'; making the transition from fossil fuel dependency to a state of energy independence."
Kinsale really hit the headlines.
Kinsale isn't, of course, the first community to try to plan for a locallised, post-oil world (Willits, California, is another example) and their process wasn't perfect, as Hopkins himself is the first to analyze parts of the report read as naive. But it was the first to actually write down a real plan for every year of the process, and the best bits are impressively thought through food, for example, which is deliverable to the point of mentioning the EU funding streams it would tap into.
In the last year, Kinsale has inspired many other towns globally to come together to form EDAPs, including Totnes, England, where Hopkins now lives.
Kiinsale itself continues to further develop and implement the early stages of the action plan inevitably slower than the plan envisaged. Delivery is difficult, but the first stage is to write a practical and detailed plan, and even this, before Kinsale, was a step most didn't dare take.
The plan is worth downloading and reading in detail it is a remarkable piece of work. But there are many remarkable things about this story. It is extraordinary that the principal of the college actually supported a course in Practical Sustainability. It is fantastic that Hopkins found students who not only took the subject matter to heart, but took it so seriously they would do what no one had thought to do before.
ISABELLE'S STOLEN APPLE CRUMBLE
For crumble topping
6oz of soft butter
12 oz white or brown sugar*
8 oz plain white, brown or wholemeal flour*
Mix together by hand in large mixing bowl until all mixture is a fine crumble
For Apple filling-
Take 8 good size gleaned or stolen apples ( perferably eating apples)
and chop into good sized chunks. No need to peel (Don't waste the goodness)
Put into 8inch cake pan/pie dish and sprinkle 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon on the apples.
Sprinkle crumble on top of the apples and put into 200 degree oven for ½ hour or so.
Eat with whipped cream or ice cream.
*(UK recipes use weight, not volume measures.)
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