“If I needed a wake-up call to see that I was doing the right thing by investigating ecological living, that was it,” he explained, comfortably nested on an earth-colored couch from the common room of a strawbale house of an ecovillage named Munksoegaard, located about 25 km outside of Copenhagen, in Denmark. “I don’t think anything should be raised this way,” he added, referring to the less-than-humane conditions the hundreds of chickens living in the factory had to endure. (Not to mention the mechanical tasks its workers repeated eight hours a day.)

Clockwise from left: Ben, Micah, Radu, Adrien, Etienne, and Kinia, surrounding Jytte, our saw-playing host

Along with a team of six other people, the young American spent over two months exploring six eco-villages in Norway, Sweden and Denmark with the project One Step Beyond, whose aim is to document that living more sustainably and ecologically can be rewarding and fun.

Etienne Gernez, a 26-year-old French engineer who was inspired by another couchsurfer during the summer of 2008, conceived the project. The original idea was to cross the Atlantic with five sailing vessels and to travel across Europe for six months to visit the sustainable sites of Europe. Unfortunately, although the idea generated a lot of interest, it never took off.

But Gernez, a young man full of energy and passion, decided to realize the project on a smaller scale, in Scandinavia, by focusing on five different themes: waste, transportation, food, social life and energy. He had received an inheritance from a family friend, Brian Plummer, part of which he wanted to use for a good cause. Taken aback by the frenetic and stressful lifestyles his coworkers lead, constantly attending meetings, flying from one place to another a couple of times a month, he wanted to show that a different life, one closer and more respectful of nature, is possible.

Ecovillages, which are “human-scale, full-featured settlements, in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future,” according to sustainability thinker Robert Gilman, seemed like the perfect laboratory for exploring such lifestyles. “They are places where people have invested time and money in finding new and alternative solutions to what is offered and what people are accepting,” Gernez explained. (This is also why ecovillages are often referred to as intentional communities. “When you live [an urban life], you have to use the way energy is produced by the city, its waste management system, its transportation… you have all these services and facilities that are offered. You can just use them without any thinking about how improving them. These people in eco-villages are working on making them better.”

In practice, this involves mainly two things: shared living spaces (or in some cases, co-housing) and modes of living that are respectful of the environment, which represent the pillars of eco-villages.

29-year-old Adrien Raybaud, the team’s cameraman, was interested in the greater impact eco-villages could have on reducing humans’ influence on the environment. “You make efforts to recycle plastic, glass; you try to take public transportation. Then you take the plane and your efforts go to waste. Do you stop living trying not to ruin the planet, or try to do your best and hope the others do too?” he asked. “That’s why I participaged in the production of this movie, because by yourself, you don’t do this much. By making this movie, by diffusing information, you can have a bigger impact.”

Suderbyn Ecovillage - our home for three weeks

The One Step Beyond team visited communities at various stages of development. Suderbyn on Gotland Island in Sweden, for example, is a start-up project developed by a family of four with the help of volunteers. Munksoegaard and Svanholm in Denmark, however, are more ancient and established communities housing over 100 inhabitants each. The amount of individual financial liberty individuals give up represent one aspect differentiating the communities visited. In Munksoegaard, each inhabitant pays a part of the common budget through house rent fixed once a year based on a common agreement. But at Svanholm, inhabitants put in common 80% of their salaries. They keep the rest as pocket money. However, in exchange, they receive housing, organic meals, a kindergarten and a part of higher education fees paid for children, access to the community’s 30 cars (an extra fee is paid for every km driven) and most importantly, a community to rely on. (For a more in-depth look at the social aspect of eco-village life, please visit the section “the social aspect of eco-village living.)

“When you live in a place like this … you are much more inclined to go to a neighbor to help you solve a problem. You can meet a lot of your needs and build relationships rather than exchange money. People share energies to solve problems. They are more rooted in a place,” Micah Sewell explained. Decisions are generally achieved on a consensus basis, which means that everyone must agree on a proposal before it can be approved. This serves to avoid the frustration and dissatisfaction the minority can feel after a majority decision. But just because someone is against a decision, it doesn’t mean it cannot be carried out. Inhabitants are invited to propose alternative ideas. Proposals sometimes have to be redrafted a few times before they are finally approved.

How does it work in practice? “You won’t believe it,” explained 64-year-old Tom Michaelsen, a Svanholm inhabitant. “The hardest case we’ve had was about the bike shed. You can never agree on small things. It took 15 years for us to agree on this bike shelter!” However, when it came to the central heating system, which involved a cost of about six million kroners (close to 1 million euros), the decisions were made rather quickly. “Nobody knew anything about it. People thought, ‘it sounds ok’, we must have it. And the new cow stable cost about 6 million kroners: there was some discussion about it, but not that much,” Michaelsen added.

Lars Levin Jensen, one of the founding members of Munksoegaard, explained that “basically, we do the things that people want to do. If a lot of people are interested in building a playground, then a lot of money flows there. And that has worked.”

The One Step Beyond team is currently busy editing a one and a half hour documentary showing how inhabitants of eco-villages are attempting to “close the loop” through the use of rainwater for laundry washing, clean energy such as solar panels and windmills, buildings that once destroyed, can be turned into soil (for example, strawbale and cob houses), composting toilets, car-sharing, co-housing, common kitchens, local food production and bulk purchases, amongst others. With news of the consequences of the financial crisis still making headlines, the documentation work could inspire people to explore new living patterns and find information about existing solutions they can use right now.

According to Robert Hall, the founder of the start-up ecovillage Suderbyn in Sweden, “the financial crisis is not a bad thing ecologically. It might be an opportunity where more sustainable investments can be made because it’s a cooling off period. Governments have to stimulate the economy. I think people may see inherent dangers in the unstable financial system…. We’ve had people interested in living like this because they want a secure future. And [I believe] this is a secure future, a good wholesome way of living.”

We both read the article, and were at first mildly entertained. The author explored ecological living with a touch of humor, but overall, he made the concept seem like a costly burden and a sacrifice. He started off by calculating his ecological footprint (“terrible”). He then poked fun at eating seasonal vegetables, before comparing the prices of ecological nose tissue brands and organic vs. non-organic foods. Enter some musing about recycling, shower lengths, dandelions and cherries… nothing too inspiring, in the end. It made sustainable living seem like something that was only a trend to be adopted at one’s convenience and whims, or something to be left “to the hippies”.

The article adopted a very fragmented approach to ecology and sustainability, which contrasted with the holistic approaches we’ve discovered over the last few weeks. Visiting eco-villages and intentional communities made the team realize how sustainability is really an investment and a question of “closing the loop”. It’s about reminding ourselves how human beings are part of nature and how what comes into us and leaves our bodies goes back into the food chain.

It’s not just a question of the prices of organic foods or of recycling. Actually, one of the most shocking discoveries I made during the excursion was that the waste from water toilets represents 90% of the individual household’s environmental pollution! We literally defecate and urine into our drinking water. There’s a very simple solution to that: separating both substances at the source.

“The biggest problem is that we try to lead urine and feces out through pipes and into the waterways, and to me this is a catastrophe,” said Flemming Abrahamsen in an interview with Hildur Jackon, author of  Ecovillage Living, Restoring the Earth and her People.

“In the meantime, we’ve been brought up to think that the water closet is the most modern and hygienic solution: correct, until the waste comes out of the house, after which we consider that the rest of it is not our problem. Only it is our problem. We think we are so smart, but I’d say the level of intelligence has gone down a lot since the time when people knew about nutritional balances in nature; the times when people knew about the use of feces and urine in nature,” Abrahamsen, who is one of the pioneers of ecological building in the North, added. The architect also introduced modern composting toilets in Denmark.

What was even more shocking in Le Monde‘s article was the four “indispensables” (must-have) eco-friendly objects it promoted. It didn’t bother me just because sustainability is also related to lowering your level of consumption. (Even though buying more gadgets seems like a contradiction when you are trying to be more eco-friendly.) It’s that fundamentally, the article did not focus on the benefits of living more in harmony with nature. If you eat natural foods, take care of your water and exercise, you are investing in your own health and by extension, into the health of the eco-system you are part of. That’s the biggest reward, and probably the most responsible attitude to adopt when thinking about environmentally-friendly living. This logic of “closing the loop” can be easily extended to house construction as well (but that’s something you’ll discover in other articles…)

In sum, it seems we really do get the wrong idea about “going green” when we narrow it down to a question of organic food prices and pesticides. It’s not so hard to live more ecologically if you also see it in terms of investing into a lifetime of health, pleasure and reward.

preparing the birch flame tower

June 19 – Gotland – Midsummer, i think, is the best time of year to be Swedish.  The air is warm, the flowers are starting to bloom, days are long, and strawberries are turning red.  To celebrate this longest day, Swedes gather together and celebrate around a midsummer pole.  A lot of time goes into hanging and decorating the pole, which is an ancient symbol of fertility and good harvests.  We set ours up near the future site of the ecovillage houses, and had about 40 people come to celebrate.  Food was abundant, and we all got plenty of chances to dance like frogs.

Anchoring and decorating the midsummer pole

Some of our dance party

The most traditional song to sing at midsummer is called Små Grodorna (Small Frogs), and the dance moves involve hopping and springing and bouncing around.  Very fun to see typically reserved Swedes break out and dance like little kids through a field!

Gotland’s favorite game is an ancient one called Kubb, where two teams take turns trying to knock over each other’s tokens, and then eventually hit the king in the center of the field.

And to add some ambiance, our handyman Tom made two birchwood lanterns by chainsawing a cross about 1 meter down through a log.  You can then drop an ember into the middle and it will be held there and burn slowly all night (in theory). These two took quite a smokey while to get going, but they eventually lit up.

With stone-oven-baked sourdough bread, strawberries, stirfries, and herring, we celebrated in true Swedish fashion as we got ready to depart from Gotland towards our next adventure.

Dissa's going-away cake

June 15 – Gotland – For the dozen-odd of us living at Suderbyn during June, eating together became a favorite way of spending time.  Since we volunteers outnumbered the family members, we took turns working in pairs to prepare all the food for the day.  We got to experience firsthand what we’d heard and seen at Hurdal – one of the greatest benefits of living in community is the power and efficiency of numbers.  When each person has to look after their own needs, much energy is lost.  But when everyone takes turn looking after each other, it frees up all those creative juices.  We all learned that we much prefer to cook for 12 people once a week than to cook for one or two every day.

cooking together

So this entry is a tribute to the fantastic food we cooked for each other, and a symbol for the lesson we learned about the power of a strong community to improve quality of life.  Heres to the bread we baked, the potatos we roasted, the sun that powered our stirfry, and the good friends that helped us to eat it all.  Bon appetit!

Chocolate Pie!

Wee potatos roasting, roasting

P.S.  Check out the recipes page for tips on how to make some of these tasty dishes!

crusty loaves

Close encounters of the red hummus kind

Solar stirfry

Stirring the fry

My proudest moment

Apple crisp with rhubarb caramel glaze - what!?

Barbecue at the beach

Challah Bread

Preparing for the Midsummer feast

Pathway towards the 7 earth mounds

June 11 – Suderbyn, Gotland – Human life depends on spheres and circles of all sorts – from the sun that provides all energy and life, and our own spinning home that sustains our daily needs, to the wheels and drills that underpin our modern society.  Take a look at a typical field of vegetables or grain, or a suburban neighborhood, and you’ll find straight lines, right angles, bare earth, and little competition.  At Suderbyn, the founders believe there is another way to design one’s surroundings, and this theme of circles and spirals came up in all our work there.

The most noticeable manifestation of this (it’s impossible to miss) is the massive earthwork running diagonally across the property.  Seven connected mounds of earth, dug up on the property, run for a length of 2000 m at a height of 2 m.  These mounds resemble a series of interlocking horseshoes.  All are facing south, which will create both a shelter from the wind and a warmer microclimate inside their protective arms.

Looking south over the mounds - click for a closer look

The excavation sites will eventually fill with water, creating four ponds on the property.  These will give habitat to a wider range of plants and animals, and will generally enhance the diversity and health of the land.

One of the four future ponds

All of this work is founded on the tenets of permaculture, a school of thought seeking to emulate natural communities and structures in our own human settlements.  Permaculture structures, like natural ones, serve many purposes at once – not only will the ponds provide water, they will increase biodiversity and benefit the aesthetics of the community.  Likewise, the mounds are not only fertile soil for plants to grow in, they provide shelter and heat to the land inside their arms.

In the sheltered interior of the earth wall: potatos!

First we threshed the tall grass to make way for the earth.  We laid the cut grass down as a first layer of mulch, hoping it would keep the grass from growing through our barrier.  On top of that we laid a double layer of newspaper and cardboard as added weed protection.  Then came the soil, brought by the wheelbarrow load from a leftover pile excavated from the pond.  For a 12-meter diameter circle of earth, this took quite a long time.  Eventually we finished it and planted in the potatos, with a border of beans and horseradish to encourage good growth and healthy soil.

Potatos, root vegetables, and tomatos call these beds home

We didn’t get to finish the interior beds before we left, but they were designed as a kind of watermelon-slice-with-a-bite-taken-out-of-the-middle to match the circular lines and provide easy weeding/harvesting access on all sides.

The outer bed is complete, and the inner beds are almost finished

Snail-shell garden beds

An herb spiral provides a home for all of the culinary herbs you can grow.  It provides a wide range of climates, all within arms’ reach for harvesting.  It’s a staple of permaculture design, both for its ease of construction and the many benefits it gives.  Stones, sand, soil, and seeds are all it takes to build one.

The magic of the spiral is in its use of space.  A typical garden bed of the same length would be about 7 m long, and you would have to walk along it and bend down to the ground to harvest the herbs growing in it.  The herb spiral takes the same amount of growing space and curls it around and upwards, putting the entirety into easy reach. Beyond this, the rocks also take in the heat of the day and slowly release it in the night, keeping the soil warmer and allowing a wider range of plants to grow.   The height of the center casts a shadow over the northern part of the spiral, making this area better suited for shade-loving plants, and the crevices of the rock give plenty of habitat to creeping plants like thyme and lemon balm.  And, as if that wasn’t enough, water falling on the spiral will flow downwards and collect at the bottom, making the top quite well-drained and the bottom more marshy.  Combine all these effects and you end up with a microclimate for almost everything you could want to grow!

Growing upward

Tom and Jean stabilize the rock wall

The finished product, planted with herbs

We planted our spiral with rosemary, lemon balm, yarrow, dill, chamomile, thyme, oregano, marjoram, mint, and semper vivens, with room for basil and other plants to come in later.

Asta the bulldog enjoying the work site

For a decent guide to starting your own herb spiral, look here.  Be sure to site it close to your kitchen for easy access, and so you can marvel at the power of the spiral over your breakfast.

Adrien and Alexei on the job

Gotland – Suderbyn ecovillage served as a gathering place for the whole group, the place where the film crew joined up for the first time.  Adrien and Alexei both come from France, from the same film school – Adrien is a graduated cameraman, while Alex is still in school for sound engineering.  During our stay at Suderbyn they shot nearly 20 hours of footage and audio, from interviews with residents and guests to artistic metaphorical shots of grass blowing gently in the wind.  We’d often find them setting up for an interview in the fields or lurking behind buildings to capture candid work footage.

Over sand, rocks, and grass, Alex and Adrien have a difficult job keeping pace with all the work going on, while at the same time coordinating their movements with each other.  Both being talented in their fields, they make it work as they dance around each other through the fields of Suderbyn.

When he's not working, Alexei likes to relax with a bit of light grass clipping.

Suderbyn Ecovillage - our home for three weeks

Writer’s note:  we’re getting backlogged in our journal entries here, sorry to keep you waiting!  We’re currently outside of Malmo and should have time to bring the blog up to date with reality. Until then, a sneak peek at our three weeks on Gotland, off the east coast of Sweden.

Monday, June 1 – After three days’ visit in Stockholm, in which the One Step Beyond team grew from 3 to 6 (our filmmaker, sound engineer, and nomadic man of the forest arrived), it came time to head off on our first extended stop of the trip.  We’d arranged to stay for three weeks on Gotland, a very large island off the east coast of Sweden, almost as close to Latvia as it is to Sweden.  Visby, the main city, has been at times a trading center, Viking stronghold, and pirates’ nest.  These days it’s more of a nest for tourists, but beautiful nonetheless.

Suderbyn ecovillage is the first place of its kind on Gotland.  Started just a year ago, Suderbyn is run at the moment by Robert and Ingrid, our generous hosts.

The most noticeable aspects of Suderbyn’s acreage are the seven horseshoe-shaped berms of earth covering 640 meters (200o feet) (see the design here). At 2 meters high, they dominate the horizon.  They’ve been planted with trees and shrubs that will eventually grow up and cover the slopes, but for now they are mostly bare earth.  Each horseshoe faces south and houses a protected area within its arms.  Sheltered from the wind and insulated by the earth, these spaces will function like natural greenhouses, keeping in the heat and allowing plants to grow deeper into the cold season.

Tending the solar cooker - this thing could melt your face off

One of Robert and Ingrid’s main goals is to show that sustainable living can be fun and enjoyable.  They’ve built many whimsical structures on the property, including a rocketship for housing the compost from the outhouse,  and have plans for many more.

They also have two solar cookers, great for harnessing the power of the long sunny days of summer.  The parabolic cooker above is specially designed to focus the light of the sun onto a specific point.  On a sunny day, it gets hot enough to make a stirfry (or to burn through the support post, which we almost did!).

The more traditional solar oven - less capable of melting your face off, better at making tasty slow-cooked food

Suderbyn also has a type of solar oven that more people have seen.  It’s essentially an enclosed box surrounded by reflective panels.  With a dark pot inside, the cooking temperature can easily reach boiling, hot enough to cook anything.  We cooked rice and beans during our stay, but it’s possible to work with much more in a solar oven – some friends of mine have even used theirs for canning fruits and jams.

Monday, May 25 – Before heading east towards Stockholm, we followed a tip from Gunnar, Mjolnatorpet’s resident architect.  He told us about a project he worked on in downtown Karlstad, designing a superinsulated apartment building in the Orrholmen neighborhood (more photos and text here, in Swedish).  We took the bus to the neighborhood parking garage  (not your average lot) and headed out to see what we could see.  The contrast i found there to an American neighborhood in a similar location was striking.

Downtown Karlstad - population 80,000

Orrholmen is located just south of the main downtown area of Karlstad.  It’s a peninsula jutting out into Lake Vanern, Sweden’s largest.  Home to several thousand people in a variety of different apartment buildings, it was immediately clear that Orrholmen was designed with much foresight for the needs of its residents.  The entire three-sided waterfront is a vast, beautiful park, free of houses and surprisingly natural for an urban setting.  All the buildings occupy the central part of the peninsula and are served by an undergrounf parking garage running most of the length of the peninsula.

Orrholmen, looking the other way

We weren’t able to tour the particular building Gunnar mentioned to us, but the layout of the entire community turned out to be much more interesting.

Bicycle Garage

The garage features a huge amount of space reserved for bicycles, from safe rooms to parking spaces.  All this underground parking allows the entire peninsula to be carfree – the road effectively ends at the northern edge.  The difference this one change made in the character of the neighborhood was staggering – no need for wide roads, a sense of calm throughout, and kids running and playing without fear for their safety.

Topside of the garage, with air vent hidden in the background

The picture above shows one of the air vents for the garage – they’re hidden very well by the greenery that surrounds them.

Add environmentally friendly building techniques to this attention to land use and you end up with an urban neighborhood sustaining a very high quality of life.

One of the housing blocks in Tuggelite

As the first ecovilage in Sweden, Tuggelite attracted much attention at its founding 25 years ago.  Local governments from all over Sweden came to study the village and its organization.  We quickly noticed a major difference between Tuggelite’s layout and that of Mjölnatorpet (TOO-gah-LEE-tay and MYOL-na-tor-pet for the Swedishly challenged).  Tuggelite’s 5 housing buildings all face south, and each family’s house has its own greenhouse attached on the south side.  The interior walls of the greenhouse are made with a thick layer of concrete, used as a “thermal mass” – the heat of the sun becomes stored in the warm concrete, which cools more slowly than the air – the wall releases that heat into the night, reducing the need for heating at night.

Tuggelite's layout

Albert, our tour guide, was one of the driving forces behind the village’s founding.  In 1984, they were at the cutting edge of sustainability in Sweden – all the houses are equipped with triple-glazed windows, a technique that is now the standard in Sweden (we’re still working on getting double-glazed windows into old houses in America).  Many more of Tuggelite’s ideas have been taken up into the mainstream of Swedish policy.  They were the first place in the country to use wood pellets for heating – a  waste product of logging, the pellets are a highly efficient source of energy.  The entire village is hooked into a district heating system controlled from the common house.  The pellets are stored in a type of silo and their flow into the heater is regulated by computer.  Today this setup is found throughout Sweden, including at Mjölnatorpet.

Touring with Albert

Near the common house, we also found the garbage.  Tuggelite’s residents sort their garbage and recycling; the garbage goes to the municipal bio-gasifier, where the gas released from its decomposition is captured and used to run Karlstad’s bus fleet.  This was another innovation that Albert and the other founders worked to develop.

Common house with greenhouse and original 1984 solar panels

Wood Pellet Storage

Inside the heating room

Tuggelite means something like “chew less” in Swedish.  The story goes that long ago, the adjacent land was owned by a wealthy, titled family, while the area around Tuggelite was left for the peasants.  The rich folk had ample food to sustain themselves and always had something to chew, while those at Tuggelite had less to chew.

Exercise on the lawn

Today, the name has taken on new meaning.  Residents at Tuggelite ecovillage are generally well-off, well-educated people that have a degree of freedom in where they choose to live.  For many, the choice to move in to Tuggelite was a conscious choice to chew up less of the Earth’s resources – rather than being a negative thing, chewing less can now bring its own rewards.  A strong sense of community, lower energy bills, living in a well-designed, efficient house are all commonly cited benefits of living here.

Each family has its own compost bin

Grapes growing in Albert's greenhouse

Tuggelite was our first glimpse at a fully established ecovillage.  While Hurdal is abuzz with new energy and countless projects, and Mjölnatorpet is settling down into its adolescence, Tuggelite’s fruit trees are grounded in 25 years’ worth of soil.  The average age of the residents is somewhere over 50 – the same phenomenon of extremely low turnover is occuring here – only 2 or 3 of the units have come up for sale in the past few years.  The energy of the place is very welcoming, and also subdued.  It’s immediately obvious that the residents have achieved what they wanted to and are enjoying the rewards of the place they’ve built together.

Rhubarb for our pie!

Before we ended our visit, we had to sample the local specialty crop.  Rhubarb plants the size of small trees covered the lawns, and Albert’s wife Margretha was kind enough to let us take some to make that pie you read about last time.

Radu's first rhubarb

Hammock in the greenhouse - perfect after a long day of interviews

Thursday, May 21 – Radu, Etienne, and I (Micah) leave Hurdal and Norway behind in the morning.  We mentally prepared, turning our “ø”s into “ö”s and learning new birthday songs.  Through the kindness of friends, strangers, and paid bus drivers, we make it to the city of Karlstad, Sweden by the end of the day, covering a distance of about 250 kilometers.  We caught a bus out of town to Mjolnatorpet Ecovillage – our host Jonas was out with his family when we arrived, but he had left a key giving us access both to his house and the common house (the building above covered in solar panels), where we’d be staying.

Mjolnatorpet was founded in 1995, during a very slow economic period in Sweden.  The building firm went bankrupt before construction was finished but the residents worked their way through that hurdle, among many others.  We had a chance to talk with Gunnar, the architect of the village – he lives here, a few houses over from Jonas.  The creation of a strong social structure was his main goal in creating the layout of the village.  The common house stands in the center of a ring of houses, all of which face inwards on it.  There are no fences in sight, and much of the land is held in common between all of the 16 households.  

Stefan is one of the youngest owners in Mjolnatorpet.  One common issue in ecovillages, we’re learning, is that there is very little turnover – people enjoy living in them so much, they rarely choose to leave.  While this is certainly not a bad thing, it does mean that the average age in an ecovillage tends to get older each year after the founding.  After 14 years in existence, Stefan and other residents estimated the average age at Mjolnatorpet to be somewhere over 40.  

Each of the house-buildings is home to two separate units.  This building choice was made both for energy efficiency (one less exterior wall) and for social (closer contact with neighbors) reasons, and it works very well at Mjolnatorpet.  Everyone is able to spend as much or as little time with their neighbors as they choose, but the very design of the place means you’ll see other people in the village whenever you go outside. 

Many people mentioned the benefits of the design, in that each house has a social and a private side.  The frontyards all face in towards each other and the common house, but the backyards are more secluded and offer a bit more privacy for those who want it.

Breakfast on the common lawn

Jonas and his family were very helpful to us, giving us loads of information, delicious food, and contacts throughout the ecovillage and the city of Karlstad.  We spent the nights with them during our visit and spent the days visiting the city, conducting interviews, and planning for the rest of the trip.

One of four wastewater ponds

One of the biggest innovations here is the waste treatment system.  Rather than connecting to an overused municipal sewer, Mjolnatorpet treats their own waste.  All the toilets in the village were built to separate feces and urine, so that the urine could be composted and sold to farmers for use as fertilizer.  E.U. regulations don’t allow this, however, so now everything goes to the same place – the ponds.  Full of plant varieties that purify the water, the wastewater travels through a series of four ponds before being released into the stream – when it reaches that point, it’s clean enough to support a healthy ecosystem with fish and aquatic life.  

We spent four days at Mjolnatorpet, conducting interviews with many of the residents.  Jonas told us of another ecovillage in Karlstad, the oldest in Sweden.  We made a day trip there (look for it in the next entry) and came back with a healthy load of rhubarb, which Etienne performed his French magic upon – rhubarb meringue pie!  A delicious end to a very interesting visit.

Etienne marveling at his creation