By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor
In 2017 a fantastic experiment will take place in the Netherlands, a hi-tech village will be built and will live totally off the grid. It is hoped it will be 100 per cent sustainable.
Currently industrial agriculture techniques for crops and livestock damage the environment, the earth needs to find a way to sustain itself without destroying the planet.
This new community, in Almere twenty minutes from Amsterdam, will have one hundred homes and will manage its own waste, energy sources, grow and provide its own food and also recycle water.
The village will principally be a communal farming community, Amish people still live practically in isolation, which is nothing new, however, this time the inhabitants will be monitored to ensure they live at total self-sufficiency.
ReGen Villages CEO James Ehrlich told Fast Company: “We are redefining residential real-estate development by creating these regenerative neighbourhoods, looking at first these greenfield pieces of farmland where we can produce more organic food, more clean water, more clean energy, and mitigate more waste than if we just left that land to grow organic food or do permaculture there.”
If it is deemed a success the project will be rolled-out in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and also Germany. It could possibly revolutionise the way we all live and work.
If the project works in Europe the plan is to expand into the Middle East
Ehrlich said: “We tackle the first two hardest climate areas, Then from there we have global scale – rural India, sub-Saharan Africa, where we know that the population is going to increase and also be moving to the middle class. If everybody in India and Africa wants the same kind of suburbs that we’ve been building so far, the planet’s not going to make it.”