Any embarkment to study the sui generis case of Auroville in India cannot exclude a study of “intentional communities”, choosing a lifestyle outside the mainstream population. The city of Auroville was founded in 1968 on the Coromandel Coast of South India. What was once a heavily eroded area has now become a green biosphere. Eclectic green practices, including reforestation, sustainable agriculture, conscious water management, coastal protection, and an omnibus urban plan inter alia, have contributed to this transition.
Having set this premise, at the very outset, the Author will try to demystify the concept of “eco-villages” definitionally as well as establishing the causal relation between eco-villages and sustainability. Following this, the Author will contextualise Auroville as an “eco-village”, followed by which, the unique experimented green methods, followed by Auroville, with respect to climate change, food security and renewable energy landscape inter alia will be canvassed.
Contours of “Eco-villages”
Since time immemorial, people have conglomerated together in small groups to figure out ways to live together in harmony with each other as well as with life itself, and “ecovillages” is a commendable concept on similar lines. Definitionally, Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) describes ecovillages as: “an intentional, traditional or urban community using local participatory processes to integrate ecological, economic and cultural dimensions of sustainability in order to regenerate social and natural environments.”
Ecovillages lead to sustainability
It would be trite to note that sustainability, no longer, remains a choice, rather it has become a non-negotiable pre-condition for our earthly existence. It has been a clarion call of scientists and environmental activists worldwide to ensure equilibrium between basic ecological support systems of the planet and human development.
Sustainability, per se, has various levels (personal, community, global) and ecovillages are connected to society and network with other communities, forging a link between the internal and external factors. A Harvard Business School (HBS) Review defines ‘sustainability’ as “doing business without negatively impacting the environment, community, or society as a whole.” Many eco-villages, including Auroville, have adopted the features, like community gardens and allotments into their design planning, which enables the residents to grow their own food, which in turn minimizes their dependency on the supermarkets, to procure food items. A fortiori, food, and agriculture sectors are the second largest contributors to climate change at the global level. It cannot be disputed that growing one’s own food reduces carbon footprint, thereby furthering sustainability.
In a similar vein, notably, the Findhorn Eco-village in Scotland, being the single largest intentional community in the UK, has the lowest ecological footprint in the world, through the incorporation of sustainable architecture involving passive solar features, viable heating systems, and the usage of sustainable materials like natural clay and surprisingly, even recycled car tyres too. The community is even capable to meet one hundred percent of its energy requirement purely through windmills and solar power plants alone.
The seamless connection between functional ecological systems and “sustainability” has been well-established through various classics like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, James Lovelock’s The Gaia Hypothesis, and so on. The human environmental footprint is surpassing the world’s regeneration capacity by about 30 percent in the ballpark, ergo any step towards sustainability cannot exclude the aspirations of energy conservation and reduction of emissions and wastes.
Contextualizing Auroville as an “intentional community” or an “eco-village”
As has already been established, the idea of “eco-villages” is not new, rather, it is ubiquitous and its vast heterogeneity makes it impossible to generalize the same. Auroville is an Experimental Township, which was founded in 1968, intriguingly with the support of UNESCO, bringing together people from 125 different countries with a common envisioned goal. This is intriguing because it has been a recurring phenomenon that plenty of such Intentional Communities (‘ICs’ hereinafter) are not backed by any governments and organizations, which concomitantly leads to the failure of the communities in many instances, for instance, this phenomenon occurred in ICs in Greece. Per contra, Auroville, as an “intentional community”, had received valuable endorsements from UNESCO in four separate instances through its resolutions.
A desert, plagued by extreme deforestation, was transformed into a lush green forested area and this transformation in itself became the first biggest environmental project of Auroville. What is unique about Auroville is the way in which “ecopsychology” played out in its development. Simply put, unless the residents or occupants of an IC understand the purpose of its design logic, the city will not work out as envisaged, and hence “ecopsychology” is the precondition for the long-term prevention of the misuse of the landscape.
Having set the façade, contextualizing Auroville as an intentional community, it would be much germane to glean various promising lessons from its green practices, as well as their nonpareil role in mitigating the bigger issue of climate change.
Experimented methods of Auroville to mitigate climate change
The importance of Intentional Communities (ICs) defies categorization in any discussion related to the SDGs. Basically, the slogan of SDGs is: “Transforming the world, and leaving no one behind!” Governments and other organizations take a top-down approach towards this and the local communities take the lead in the bottom-up approach.
It is to be noted that a brief conspectus of recent environmental disasters has shown that the sui generis town planning of Auroville can afford a certain level of protection from environmental disasters when compared to the other bioregions in the vicinity. For exemplifying this, let us take the instance of hurricane Thane, which hit Auroville on 31st December 2011. The hurricane uprooted around 60 percent of trees in Auroville, but it would be intriguing to note that the indigenous trees were not affected that intensely when compared to non-indigenous trees. Similarly, when the roads were unusable and almost all the electric cables were totaled, households powered with solar energy continued to function. Furthermore, the 2004 Tsunami did not have any direct impacts on Auroville but engendered a sustained recovery of Auroville.
Furthermore, most of the parts of South India were affected by severe drought in 2017, and agriculture suffered an intense setback owing to water scarcity, but on the other hand, the drought passed with little to no crop losses in Auroville by the employment of conscious water management strategies and agricultural methods followed.
Predominantly, reforestation and sustainable water management are the two-fold strategies, although hackneyed, employed by Auroville in furthering sustainability as highlighted in the following paragraphs. In addition to these, Auroville’s advancements in the renewable energy landscape are remarkable and its vitality cannot be understated in its pursuit of ‘sustainability’.
Reforestation
The reforestation attempts by the residents of Auroville have been commendable since they have contributed to the development of a salubrious microclimate and the refilling of groundwater aquifers in Auroville. It would not be an exaggeration to note that Auroville’s reforestation work alone accounts for 4 percent of the total area of TDEF (Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest) in India.
It is seldom acknowledged that the land on which Auroville, as an experimental township was built, was purchased from local villages at meager prices, and only the local labor was put into use to build the town as well as for reforestation of the barren land. In order for the Auroville Green Belt (AVGB) to achieve the target set out in Auroville’s Master Plan of 2025, still Auroville has to acquire 75 percent of the remaining lands for the expansion of forest, which does not seem plausible in the near future.
Sustainable Water Management
Another aspect, which deserves to be lauded about Auroville, is the employment of immaculate water management systems. Both food production and reforestation needed prompt attention to water management with a particular aim of achieving net-zero water run-off.
With regard to the treatment of wastewater, there are around 60 kinds of sewage treatment plants currently in operation in Auroville, which subsume a vortex vent, root zone cleaning, and importantly, sedimentation, and throughout this process, bio-degradable cleaning agents like the bamboo ash soaps and Effective Microorganism (EM) help in the reusability of effluent water.
Auroville’s Energy Scape: Lessons to glean
The trajectory to a sustainable energy system is neither singular nor linear. The origin of Renewable Energy in Auroville can be traced back to 1972 when the windmills were established. While much has been talked about the promotion of renewable energy, the question of storage of such power has been oft-left on the back burner. The relationship between Auroville and electricity is connected to grid intermittency, which fuelled large-scale investments in a wide range of alternatives for power. In 2014, Auroville even supplied electricity to the Tamil Nadu grid through the Varuna project, which evinces that Auroville has leapfrogged in the renewable energy race surpassing the other regions in India.
Conclusion
The general trend so far has been that the emergence of any IC or an ‘eco-village’ will be accompanied by the resistance of government, let alone any government support, but surprisingly, this is not the case with Auroville, since ‘Auroville’, as an Experimental Township, has received recognition even from the UNESCO via its resolutions and even from the government, since it took over the control of Auroville administration by virtue of Auroville Emergency Provisions Act, 1980. The resilience of these eco-villages cannot be overstated. Although, as far as the instant case of Auroville is concerned, the establishment of Auroville as a Township was premised upon a theological foundation, nevertheless, its goals are aligned with that of the modern SDGs.
The author also acknowledges that the strategies adopted by eco-villages like Auroville are well-nigh experimental in nature, ergo, its large-scale implementation is questionable. For instance, the costs and difficulties of using renewable energy in Auroville, whose land area is merely 20 sq.kms, initially even limited the power usage of its residents. Because solar energy is not just the installation of solar panels simpliciter, but one has to also incur an array of “balance of system” costs and maintenance complications. Upscaling the implementation of this renewable energy strategy is financially unsustainable since most of the renewable energy plant owners in Auroville came from ‘developed’ countries and were affluent enough to establish these plants. To top it all off, eco-villages are still considered as sites of “experimentation” with respect to various methods of living, and they focus predominantly on rural areas, whereas majority of the world population still live in urban areas.
Nonetheless, a thoroughgoing analysis of eco-villages as well as the dynamics of Auroville indicates that eco-villages are vital catalysts of urban sustainability and guiding factors to achieve sustainability in the long run. Indeed, eco-villages show that we can live with minimal negative impacts on the environment. Further, the study of ICs vis-à-vis modern environmental challenges reinforces the importance of a consensus-based approach and participatory governance models in mitigating the pressing environmental gauntlets, thrown up by the contemporary era.
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