A FEW weeks ago, HRH Prince Charles conducted a one-week tour of Britain’s finest examples of sustainable living and sustainability in action.  The tour was the focal point activity of the Prince’s START initiative, which aims to help people across the country lead more sustainable lives and to show what a more energy efficient, cleaner and healthier future could look like.

One of the stops on the tour was the former mill town of Todmorden in the Pennines.  Over the past few years, Todmorden has been hailed as Britain’s greenest town.  It’s a great example of how the community has come together and transformed local food production and translated wider global environmental issues into a meaningful agenda that is relevant to the community.

It’s great to shine a big spotlight on this kind of ground-up, community-based activity and there are definitely good green lessons for us all in the story of Todmorden.  And, thankfully, it’s not an isolated example of sustainable living.  There is now a growing movement gathering real traction that is inspiring more and more people and communities in Britain to do their own green thing.

But, while we celebrate positive action on our doorstep, it’s vital we look further afield to see what can be learnt from other countries.  Whereas Todmorden can justifiably lay claim to being Britain’s Greenest Town, the Colombian village of Gaviotas is a very worthy candidate for Green Capital of the World.  It’s a big shout if you’ve never heard of the place. And I only ‘discovered’ it myself recently thanks to a great Colombian friend of mine, Sebastian Franco.

In a nutshell, Gaviotas was founded in 1971 by a visionary eco-pioneer Paolo Lugari who assembled a group of engineers and scientists in an attempt to create a mode of sustainable living in one of the least hospitable political and geographical climates in South America.

Sustainable living is in the DNA of Gaviotas, which generates its own energy from a variety of renewable sources, has tackled local food production and distribution at prices the local community can afford, and has also successfully identified and tapped natural water resources.  Everything is part of, and contributing to, a big ecological plan; even the children’s roundabouts in playgrounds are used to generate power that in turn helps pump the town’s water supplies.

Fortunately, thanks to Google and Google Earth, Gaviotas is accessible to anyone interested in finding out more, and I hope this post prompts you to take a look!  It’s a fascinating story that has captured the attention of many, including the American author, professor and journalist Alan H. Weisman, who wrote about it first in 1995 and than again in 1999 in his book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World” (still in print and available on Amazon, published by Chelsea Green Publishing).

Gaviotas and Todmorden are of course not isolated examples of communities working together to tackle big global environmental challenges.  There are scores if not hundreds.  The common thread running through all the best examples, however, is the power of the  community itself.  To achieve real lasting impact, it is at a community level where the good work is achieved.  What a shame then that all these ‘dots’ of great action can’t be somehow joined up on a big, green global map, so that ideas can be shared and inspiration found?  Maybe we should encourage communities to identify and build links with their Eco-Twin Town?…

A long time ago in a previous job I was lucky enough to be involved in something called the Twin Town Awards, run by a now defunct Government quango called the Local Government Information Bureau (LGIB).  I was working for the Royal Mail at the time and my employer was the main sponsor of the annual event.  The Twin Town Awards celebrated the best examples of  communities in Britain that ‘twinned’ with their counterparts in other countries, built good links and had jointly done something worthy of recognition.  It gave a context to the road signs outside most towns and and cities in Britain such as: “Welcome to Northampton… Twinned with…Poitiers, France and Marberg Germany” etc.

It was a good scheme, designed in the post-war era, to foster good relations between nations and encourage education and community interaction.  Perhaps we could blow off the dust from something like this and encourage towns, villages and cities all over the world to identify and build links with their ecological ‘twin’ and in so doing spread and share the best practice that was happening in Gaviotas 40 year ago much more quickly.  Todmorden and Gaviotas would be an ideal first match.