by Dylan Evans
In April and May, as I made my final preparations, I visited a number of eco-villages and alternative communities to learn about living off-grid. My first port of call was Coed Hills in South Wales.
Coed (pronounced coyd, from the Welsh word for woods) was set on the top of a hill amid the lush greenery of the Vale of Glamorgan, not far from Cardiff. When I arrived, slanting rays of evening sunshine bathed the strange assortment of buildings – railway carriages, Mongolian yurts, log cabins, teepees and straw-bale huts – in a warm golden light. I parked my car and wandered into what looked like the main building, an old stone barn that had been converted into a large living area and meeting space.
Inside, a motley crew was preparing supper. Dressed in a strange assortment of woolly hats, old jumpers, puffa jackets, combat trousers and muddy boots, they shuffled around the stove without even a glance towards the newcomer. All I had to go on was a name that my friend Angus had given me.
‘Is Rawley here?’ I asked.
‘No, he’s away,’ replied a tall guy with ginger dreadlocks and a bushy beard.
Rawley Clay was the great-grandson of Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell. Coed Hills was his brainchild, and the land had belonged to his father. Angus had told me to look for a man in a felt suit surrounded by lots of dogs or reciting poetry in a large homemade birdcage. I was very disappointed he wasn’t at home.
Eventually one of the residents took pity on the stranger in their midst, and offered to show me round before the sun went down. I nodded eagerly, and we headed off while the others put the final touches to supper.
We walked past the permaculture gardens, where a variety of vegetables and herbs grew in raised beds, and along a trail dotted with rustic sculptures, into the woods, where a sawmill and green woodworking area emerged from a carpet of fresh sawdust. Further into the woods, more benders and homemade yurts nestled among the trees, with faint wisps of smoke winding out of aluminium stovepipes.
Making our way back to the buildings, we passed a row of compost toilets, a couple of goats, and a mysterious building that seemed to contain a pile of large batteries.
‘Storing energy is the hardest bit,’ said Richard. ‘Generating it is easy, but to store it we still need to rely on dirty old batteries.’ The whole site was run on alternative energy, he explained, from a high-tech wind turbine and a large solar panel that tracked the sun like a flower, to biomass underfloor heaters and solar showers made out of scrap radiators.
This was all new to me, and I was taking copious mental notes as Richard explained how the various systems worked. If civilization collapsed, I thought, this is the kind of place where I would want to be. It was pretty much self-sufficient in terms of energy, food and building materials. And it managed to achieve this with a kind of elegance, ingenuity and simplicity that was aesthetically appealing too. I felt inspired.
A week later, I received an email from a man called Adam. He said he had heard about my experiment from some people at Coed Hills, and was drawn to my vision of a perfect community.
I was intrigued, and invited Adam to visit the lab a few days later. I guessed from the email that he was a bit eccentric, but nothing prepared me for the ragged traveller I saw when I greeted him at the reception desk. In his early fifties, he was dressed in a British Airways blanket and a cowboy hat, with a feather poking out of the hatband. His grey beard and gnarled face made me think of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, but his soft blue eyes and friendly smile made him seem much more approachable than that intimidating wizard.
I could only imagine what my colleagues thought of me as I showed this eccentric figure briefly round the lab, before whisking him off to my cubicle, out of sight. I felt slightly guilty about my embarrassment, though. After all, wasn’t I determined to break away from the conventions of society, to leave this respectable existence behind? I saw Adam as a sign of the new life that awaited me in Scotland, one in which we would no doubt all have to dress in whatever clothes we could find or make ourselves. Perhaps I would come to look as strange as he did.
I would later learn that Adam was not his real name (or at least, ‘not the name the humans gave me’, as he put it), but one he had given himself when he ‘left the world of man’ in 2004. Before then he had lived a fairly normal life, but after he received his ‘call’ he set out on the road as a ‘spiritual pilgrim’. He gave away everything he had except for a few hundred pounds. Within three weeks, all the money was gone, and Adam was homeless. Now he wandered the country from one community to another, seeking to promote his strange gospel, which was a mishmash of New Age ideas and an idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity that seemed to draw heavily on Dan Brown.
But at that first meeting, Adam told me none of this. He confined himself to making practical suggestions for my experiment, in what I later suspected was a deliberate attempt to hide his wacky beliefs.
‘Why don’t you build some yurts!’ he urged, his eyes gleaming.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Can you teach me how?’
‘I’ll do better than that!’ exclaimed Adam. ‘I’ll start building a couple of yurts now. I’m heading off to another community next week in Hereford. They have plenty of wood there, and some canvas, and a sewing machine. If you come out and visit me there next month, you can see for yourself.’
So a few weeks later I drove out to Hereford. Eco-villages, yurt camps and other kinds of alternative community vary widely in their visibility to the outside world and openness to visitors. Coed Hills had official opening hours, ran courses in sustainable living, and had a beautiful website. The place I visited in Hereford was at the other end of the spectrum. It had no planning permission. Nobody except the residents and a few travellers knew it was there. It didn’t even have a name.
Adam had given me directions to the camp, which was tucked away in a wood on a private estate near the Welsh border. I turned into the estate and drove on an unmarked road with oak trees and pastures on either side. After about a mile the road became a dirt track and entered a thick forest. Then, to the left, I saw an opening with a campfire and a few yurts. I parked my car and Adam came to greet me as I got out. He briefly introduced me to a ragged bunch sitting around the fire, before leading me over to another clearing and proudly pointing out the two new yurts he had made for Utopia. They did look rather impressive. The blue canvas coverings had been expertly stitched together on an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. Bending down to roll up the flap covering the doorway, Adam ushered me inside.
‘This is your yurt,’ he said.
A couple of candles were burning, casting a flickering light on the lattice of hazel poles – still with the bark on – that formed the yurt’s skeleton. I spread out my sleeping bag on the floor and lay down on top of it. This would be the first night that I had ever slept in a yurt, but I already felt at home. The rustic, circular structure seemed to emanate a calming influence, stilling the mind and slowing the pulse.
Adam broke my reverie by thrusting his head through the doorway to tell me supper was ready. Back at the campfire a waif-like girl with long tawny dreadlocks was dishing out bowls of bean stew from a steaming cauldron, while her two-year-old son ran naked around the dusty clearing. Her name was Shakti, she said, and she was from the Rainbow People, who were here on a scouting mission to find a suitable spot for the next international Rainbow Gathering. As we sat around the fire eating supper, I learned that this place was very different from Coed. There were no vegetable gardens here; people bought what they needed in the local town, using the meagre proceeds they raised by busking and begging. Nor did they generate their own electricity. Their camp was, in fact, entirely parasitic on the civilization they rejected, and if that civilization collapsed, the inhabitants would not survive any longer than those leading more comfortable lives in the towns and cities. It was, in essence, no more than a refuge for hippies and dropouts. But in one sense it was still very like Coed: here, as there, the land belonged to the founder’s father, who had allowed
his son to indulge his alternative lifestyle, and the other inhabitants were mostly hangers-on.
‘I can do better than this!’ I thought to myself. I might not be able to put together something as impressive as Coed Hills in the eighteen months I had given myself, but those of us at Utopia could surely grow our own food. We certainly wouldn’t be popping down to the supermarket every week! And we would have a vision, a mission even. We would be exploring an apocalyptic scenario, which would endow our every action with meaning and send a warning to the whole world about the dangers of climate change and peak oil. There was no shared value system in this ragtag community beyond a vague antipathy to work, I scoffed.
After supper, I made my way back to the yurt Adam had built for me. It was a warm and dry spring evening, but as I slid into my sleeping bag I thought the yurt would be sturdy enough to withstand a strong Highland wind. Yurts are perfectly suited for the harsh Mongolian climate. A stove in the middle is fed continually with yak dung to keep it burning day and night, while thick layers of felt trap the warmth inside and make it nice and snug. That, I thought, would be vital in the Scottish winter.
But, as I would be reminded frequently over the ensuing months, Scotland is not just cold. It is also wet – much wetter, in fact, than Mongolia. And though our yurts had an extra layer of rough homemade canvas on top of the felt, this was not enough to keep out the kind of persistent, unrelenting rainfall that makes Scotland such a wonderful place to live.
A considerable amount of our time in the Utopia Experiment would, therefore, be spent trying to keep the rain out of our yurts. This did not make for particularly pleasant sleeping conditions. Often I would drowse off warm and dry, the stove burning (with wood, not yak dung) and the canvas firmly tied down, only to awake in the dead of night, bitterly cold, to find the stove had gone out and the rain was dripping through gaps in the canvas that had been fumbled open by the wind. I would lie shivering in my sleeping bag, unwilling to get out and tie the canvas back down for fear of getting even colder and wetter, cursing Adam and his fucking yurts.
The eco-villages of today, and the hippy communes of the sixties, are just the latest in a long line of utopian experiments, stretching back thousands of years. The first Christian monasteries were established in Egypt in the fourth century CE, and the first Buddhist monasteries some five centuries earlier. Plymouth Colony and Pennsylvania were different kinds of religious utopias, as were the Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay. Socialist utopias, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana and John Vandeleur’s Ralahine in Ireland, began to spring up in the nineteenth century.
What is remarkable about all these diverse experiments is how much they have in common. A relatively small group of people – rarely more than two or three hundred, and often a lot fewer – live and work together, with at least some property held in common, and a relatively non-hierarchical, communal system of decision-making. There is often an emphasis on simple living and self-sufficiency, which usually includes growing much of one’s own food. There is also typically an explicit ideology that justifies these practices, though the nature of this belief system can vary widely, which suggests that it is the practices that come first. It’s as if there is a perennial urge to return to a simpler way of life that manifests itself in similar ways at different times and places. When this urge overtakes them, people justify their behaviour in terms of the ideas available to them at the time.
Some of these experiments last for decades, but most seem to fall apart within a few years. Brook Farm, one of the most famous utopian communities of the nineteenth century, was typical in this and many other respects. Founded by the social reformer George Ripley in 1841, the little commune in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was already in decline after just three years. When the writer and preacher Orestes Brownson visited in October 1844, he wrote that ‘the atmosphere of the place is horrible’. Financial difficulties meant that the residents had to go without meat, coffee, tea and butter, and the following year an outbreak of smallpox infected twenty-six Brook Farmers, though no one died. When an ambitious communal building known as the Phalanstery, intended to house ‘a large and commodious kitchen, a dining-hall capable of seating from three to four hundred persons, two public saloons, and a spacious hall or lecture room’, burned down in 1846, the residents began drifting away. One of them recalled the closing months of Brook Farm in later life, observing that they ‘seemed dreamy and unreal’.
It was like a knotted skein slowly unraveling. It was as the ice becomes water, and runs silently away . . . It was like apple blossoms dropping from the trees . . . It was like a thousand and one changing and fading things in nature.
Such would be my experience when my own utopian experiment began to fall apart, less than a year after I had started it. The last few months still seem dreamy and unreal to me too. But I do not look back on them fondly, as John Codman did when he wrote those mournful words about the end of Brook Farm.
Why do these experiments usually fail, and fail so quickly? Why do utopias so often turn into dystopias?
I suspect it may be something to do with the very idea of wiping the slate clean, of resetting the clock to year zero, and building anew from scratch. For while the institutions that the idealists wish to replace are often riddled with flaws, they also embody the accumulated wisdom of many generations, of hundreds of years of R & D. Their bugs may be easier to spot than their features. And perhaps some of the flaws are not mere accidents of history, but inherent in any kind of social organization. People form groups because they have overlapping interests, but the overlap is always partial, and conflicts will always arise at the zones where they fail to coincide.
The rapid failure of these experiments may also be due to the kind of people they attract. Idealists are seldom very practical people. They have impossibly high expectations, and when reality does not live up to them, disillusionment sets in. And when they disagree about how the perfect society should be organized, as they inevitably will, their quarrels will be more bitter, because they care so much more. Utopias also attract misfits, whose inability to integrate may not be due to the society they blame, but to their own cantankerous personalities.
Scale also plays a part. Small communities are like pressure cookers, with no relief valve. Tensions are exacerbated when you rub shoulders with the same few people all day every day, absent the balm of consanguinity to soothe the irritation. It is one thing to live in a large extended family group, as our ancestors did before they started farming, and quite another to spend all your time with a bunch of strangers, with little opportunity to escape from those you dislike. Jealousy and resentment find fertile soil in such confined spaces. Those who live in towns and cities may yearn for the intimacy of village life, but if they were to find themselves transported to some rural hamlet, most would soon long for the anonymity of urban existence.
I certainly failed to anticipate the extent to which the volunteers would end up getting on my nerves. ‘Evans,’ wrote one journalist who interviewed me about the project a month before I headed to Scotland, ‘has an extremely rosy view of how the community will sort out disagreements.’ She was right: I pictured a harmonious group of fellow survivors, all glowing with affection for one another, like the beautiful young things the protagonist finds when he first arrives on the island in The Beach. I had conveniently forgotten the later scenes, when a wounded member of the community is taken out into the jungle and left to die, so his cries of pain won’t interfere with the merry-making. Or when the leader is prepared to kill to preserve the community’s isolation. For someone who claimed to know so much about the theory of human nature, I sure didn’t seem to understand it very well in practice.
The few utopian communities that survive more than a decade are mostly religious in nature. Some monasteries have lasted for hundreds of years, and many Amish communities in the United States still keep the customs their ancestors brought with them when they migrated from Europe over two hundred years ago. But I’m an
atheist, and I wanted my experiment to be free from any whiff of dogma. On my website, for example, I had stated that one aim of the project was ‘to see how a community can form around emergent values, values that emerge from the interactions of group members, rather than being adopted lock, stock and barrel from a religion or a political creed’.
The word emergent harked back to my research in robotics. In the swarm intelligence paradigm, lots of very stupid robots are programmed to work together in such a way that a kind of collective intelligence emerges from their interactions. When I began laying out the aims of the project, I assumed that people would be almost as easy to experiment with as robots. I would have laughed off such a suggestion, of course, if you had put it to me back then. But I now think that word emergent revealed a rather naive – and perhaps even callous – belief that I could simply put a bunch of humans together in the Scottish wilderness in the same way that I put a bunch of robots together in the lab. I could set up the initial conditions, flick a switch, and watch what happened. And what would happen would be some kind of marvellous coordination, as a new set of values – non-religious values, of course – simply emerged from their interactions. In viewing my volunteers as somewhat akin to robots in the lab, I overlooked not just the greater complexity of human beings, but also my own previous doubts about human coordination. After all, hadn’t I contrasted human societies unfavourably with robot ones? Back in the lab, it had always struck me that while a bunch of stupid robots could behave intelligently as a group, otherwise intelligent people seemed to behave like idiots whenever you put them together.
I was also naively egalitarian in my thinking. In swarm robotics, all the robots are exactly the same. There is no leader. And in my experiment there would be no leader either, no authoritarian figure to impose values from on high. The values would just emerge – right? – from interactions between equal individuals. But of course that was to overlook the peculiar nature of my own role in the experiment. I was to be simultaneously the founder and just another one of the volunteers. I wanted to join in the daily work with everyone else, to participate while I observed, and let things take their own course. But at the same time, it would be me who set the parameters. I had conceived of the whole idea in the first place and written the basic scenario that would govern our narrative. It was my experiment, after all.