COMMUNITY
RESILIENCE TRAINING
Having Enough Wherever You Are
W
e all understand that sustainability is a must, and yet how many of us feel that the options exist for us to live 100% sustainably here and now? For most of my life I’ve encountered successive obstacles to living a truly sustainable off grid life. For example, wherever
I moved, I had to replace old failing infrastructure with the off grid alternatives, and to do
that I had to gain permission from landlords, neighbours, planners and so on. Often my life
was such that within six months I was forced to move again due to unreliable landlords or
personal circumstances, and had no tenure over the lovely living green spaces I’d been
privileged to nurture.
Everyone always says to me they’re looking for land, and when they get their piece of land
they can fulfil all their dreams. I said this too for a while. Then I looked at my life. I’ve lived
in terraces, mansions, camped on the verges of motorways, swung in my hammock from
ancient hedgerows. Everywhere I’ve lived, I followed a pattern where the impact of my
choices created more life or didn’t; the choices were conscious or ignorant. I planted trees
or I flushed my waste into the waterways; my wrappers went in landfill, my leaves in the
compost... if there was a light switch, I flipped it and either a nuclear power station would
churn its boilers, or the energy of a windmill’s creaking vanes would allow me to see.
COMMUNITY
One of my inspirations
is William Kamkwamba,
a boy who built a wind
turbine when he was
14 years old by looking
at pictures in a book.
His village was suffering
drought and famine and
he’d subsequently been
pulled out of school. His
wind turbine pumped water enabling them to grow
food through the drought
and he helped his family
have lighting and power
for charging the mobile
phones and radios of the
village. Yet here we sit in
the luxury of a developed
country, with all our ‘options’, all the information
we could use and yet apparently not the motivation to do similar to William. Our need is veiled,
our motivation unclear,
the reward circumspect.
We don’t have a famine
fuelling us, we don’t have
hunger, thirst, we haven’t
been pulled out of school
to help find food. But other people have because
of us. Because of the bubble we live in, people all
over the world are suffering the consequences
of our daily actions. The
world is suffering the consequences of our great
unconsciousness.
I don’t teach going
green. I teach people
to blast away the ignorance or apathy, despair
at what’s going on in the
world, whatever it is that’s
stopping us from growing
our food forests already.
Whatever stops us from
returning our waterways
to places where we can
kneel on a bank, cup
our hands, dip our heads
and drink. It is a birthright
to have a good home,
to have nourishing food,
clean air and clean water. I teach ways and
means;
aquacultures,
perpetual gardening, low
impact building. I teach
methods of filtering and
purifying water from the
survival level through to
lake restorers using phytoremediation. I rarely see
these solutions being used
to solve the world’s problems to the degree they
could be.
Desert’ (with the cunning
use of swales, micro irrigation, mulch and shade
trees!). I tell them stories,
as many stories as it takes
really for them to begin
questioning what their
life support systems are,
to measure and quantify
how long and how well
their homes, towns and
gardens can actually support their families? I help
people to increase their
own level of adaptive capacity to challenges, to
changing circumstance,
to the weather.
If you want to know more
about the resilience training I teach, check out
www.earthfrogs.org. The
company is called EarthFrogs because frogs are
a symbol of diversity and
their medicine is about
transformation, purification, turning negatives to
positive. And because
there just happened to
be a whole lot of frogs
around when I was looking for a name.
I tell people about William
Kamkwamba, or Geoff
Lawton of ‘Greening the
Louise Brookes is the founder of EarthFrogs, an organization that helps
communities meet their basic needs using innovative, low cost, sustainable
methods. Louise studied with Ecovillage HQ in Canada. She then joined
the Woodcraft School in 2006 to become one of the first qualified Survival
Instructors in the UK. She has received the Summer Mountain Leaders
Training Award and Single Pitch Supervisors Award. She has also completed
the Plas Y Brenin Alpine Apprenticeship, and studied Permaculture Design.
For more information about Louise, please visit www.earthfrogs.org.