The question of food security seems to be very alive in the community at the moment. This is an area where I think it is fair to say that there has been a pretty high level of satisfaction with our efforts over the years.

Our Earthshare scheme was the UK’s first organic, community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, providing weekly local, fresh veggies to the equivalent of 200 families every week of the year. (CSA is a now widespread model in which the subscribers divide the harvest between them, thus sharing the risk with the farmer.)

Moreover, the 2006 ecological footprint study of our community found that our food footprint is about one third of the national average due to the relatively high level of local, organic, seasonal and vegetarian food in our diet.

However, it has become clear in recent months that all is not as rosy in the garden as appears at first sight and that there remains much to be done.

An internal study found that while 32 per cent of the vegetables served in the community kitchens are organic and 27 per cent are locally-sourced, only 18 per cent are both. Most of us were surprised and a little shocked by how low these figures were.

They can be explained partly because of the large number of mouths that need to be fed – remember that we host in the region of 3,000 guests per year in addition to the resident community; partly because of the higher cost of local, organic food in a global market so heavily weighted towards large-scale, industrial production systems; and partly because of an appetite for foodstuffs that the local climate and soils cannot provide.

Photography by Adriana Sjan Bijman

Dissatisfaction with indigenous foodtuffs is a growing problem for those among us who believe that it is important to increase our local food security. Christopher, one of the mainstays of our gardening team over the years, notes: ‘for every cabbage that gets sold in the community shop, we sell 20 aubergines’. The Mediterranean diet is going global.

This is certainly a factor in the reduction over the years in the number of subscribers to Earthshare. It is currently around 20 families short of its optimal level.

Every so often I hear of a community in France or Italy boasting of the fact that it has decided to increase its consumption of local, seasonal food. They really want recognition for that, I think? Let them try it here!

So, in this context, we need to be clever in our efforts to increase production and consumption of food that truly nurtures us without depleting ecosystems on the other side of the world.

The main avenue we are exploring at the moment is the introduction of greater food storage and processing facilities – and the Climate Challenge Fund mentioned a couple of blogs ago may just be a useful source of funding for this.

Doesn’t root vegetable pâté with chives sound so much more appetizing than another plate of beetroot and parsnips? Doesn’t a good, local apple and blackberry pie can beat the pants off any fancy, Mediterranean fruit picked before it is ripe and squished by the journey?

Meanwhile, in the week’s Rainbow Bridge (our weekly community newsletter), I note that we are receiving a visit from Frank Cook from Schumacher College who has studied with ‘herbalists, shamans, vaidyas, sangomas, green witches, doctors, professors and medicine men’. Great stuff!

Frank will be giving a talk on ‘Community as Food and Medicine Security’ and leading afternoon workshops on identifying and eating wild weeds and food fermentation techniques. I will certainly be attending both. We need all the help we can get in our efforts to glamourise the nettle and the humble broad bean.

www.newstatesman.com - Glamourising the nettle

Another camera crew is in town at the moment, shooting another film about life in the community.

We have become a good deal more careful about who we let in with movie cameras following the debacle several years ago with the three-part Channel Four series, The Haven, that made us look and feel rather foolish. Our naive hope had been that the film would try to depict something of our philosophy and work in the world. In fact, it turned out to be a fairly standard 'reality TV’ romp that was interested primarily in seeking out the whacky and the tacky.

Still, even though we exercise more control than we used to, a good number of film projects continue to get the nod. We are no strangers to cameras moving among us as we meet, eat and go about our daily business.

The question of privacy in the context of research, training and demonstration centres that also happen to be people’s homes is a common one for ecovillages. The community at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Wales (a founder member of the Global Ecovillage Network), for example, mostly moved off-site when their visitor numbers grew to today’s levels of 70,000 per year. Just too much human traffic to make any sort of normal home life possible.

The theme is taken up in Violet’s letter this week in the Rainbow Bridge, our weekly community newsletter. Violet is a gorgeously irreverent teenager whose letters provoke regular frissons of delight as she dares say the things that most of us too-careful adults keep carefully under wraps. In this respect, Violet has one great advantage over the rest of us; she is fictional.

The address on this week’s letter reads:

"Violet’s bedroom
(What is like a goldfish bowl in summer)
Feeld of Dreams"

Violet has no doubt where the problem lies:

"I blame all the programmes on British telly what tells you how to bild a house or sell a house or clean a house or make a house better or sell or swap a british house for a house in spain and make money too. I mean where else in scotland can you see a big fancy ecohouse near a yurt near a barrel house near a rusty old caravan. We got like everything."

We have nothing like CAT’s volume of through traffic. Nonetheless, with around 3,000 paying guests a year doing programmes plus several thousand more wandering around looking at the houses, the goldfish bowl metaphor can sometimes feel all too appropriate.

For most of us, most of the time, this is simply part of the package that comes with the choice of living in a social and ecological laboratory. In fact, more often than not, my feeling is one of pride that folk tend to be so interested and impressed.

Violet seem to have a different perspective. Her letter this week concludes: "Chow for now fans. I just got to go and moon at some folk who have been starin at our house too long."

www.newstatesman.com - Life in the goldfish bowl

It is a great time just now to be in Scotland. There is a tangible sense of freshness, excitement and opportunity in the air. Most surprisingly in this age of disenchantment and cynicism with all things political, a significant source of this new energy is developments in the sphere of mainstream, party politics.

In short, we have a new, fresh SNP administration in Holyrood that almost overnight seems to have propelled politics in Scotland out of the tired, grey sleepwalk of the semi-conscious sound-bite into new and fresh approaches that seek to truly address themselves to the challenges of the new world we are transitioning into.

This is not to say that the Green dawn has arrived – there are far too many cases where given the need to choose between ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’, the administration has plumped squarely for the latter.

Nonetheless, the gust of political fresh air, fresh thinking and truly radical approaches that is sweeping the country stands in stark contrast to what is happening south of the border. Given this context, the Glasgow East by-election result seems almost predictable.

One of the most interesting and exciting new innovations is the Climate Challenge Fund, a 3-year, £18.8 million programme (that was launched at the Positive Energy conference we hosted here in Findhorn at Easter) to provide financial and technical support to Scottish communities undertaking initiatives to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

This last weekend at the Big Tent eco-gathering in Fife, a senior member of the Scottish Sustainable Development Commission (that is one of the partners responsible for the administration of the Fund) came to explain in detail how the fund will be implemented.

(Already, the Fund has committed itself to providing grants to Transition Support – an organisation set up to help Transition initiatives get off the ground – and the Going Carbon Neutral Stirling programme.)

We have had festivals like this for years. Motley gatherings of permaculturists, ecovillagers, peaceniks and representatives of assorted causes talking, apparently, primarily to each other. Now, all at once it seems, we are being joined by local government officials, parliamentarians and even cabinet ministers!

In a blog earlier this year, I mentioned that I had been to two events around Easter organized by green activists – Positive Energy in Scotland and the Ecocities, Ecovillages and Transition Towns conference in Dublin, both of which were addressed by their respective Ministers of the Environment, both dialoguing comfortably with the eco-literate audiences present in a language that all were comfortable with.

The Big Tent gathering was preceded by a one-day meeting of folk interested or already involved in Transition initiatives across Scotland. A good number of the 90 or so folk participating – far more than we had anticipated – were local government officers, some there in a private capacity, some representing their authorities. All were exploring in how local government could best support the emerging transition initiatives.

The speed with which the doors of power – and of official financing – have flown open still comes as something of a shock. The team manning the Findhorn exhibition stand at Big Tent and events like it now need to be able to respond not just to enquiries of spiritual seekers and would-be eco-house builders but also, increasingly, to politicos, professionals and planners wanting to explore how our models can contribute to societal transformation.

This enriches us all. It forces us to think more deeply than we sometimes have in the past about our strategy for contributing meaningfully to the emergence of a just, equitable and contented low-carbon society.

Specifically, since applications to the Carbon Challenge Fund can come only from communities, it invites us to create conscious and rooted alliances with our neighbouring towns and villages in a great sharing of dreams, expertise and perspectives.

This is all for the good.

www.newstatesman.com - Great time to be in Scotland

Last week I drove my friend Judi Buttner to Loch Ness to officiate at a wedding. Judi is the Findhorn Foundation’s official marriage celebrant and can legally perform weddings not only in the community but anywhere in Scotland. The Foundation has, for at least ten years, had its own celebrant so that community people who do not, as a rule, want a traditional church wedding could have the kind of ceremony they prefer without needing to go the Registrar’s office to formalise it.

She is very busy these days with engagements throughout the Highlands, hence the trip to Lock Ness. More couples and not only those with an alternative outlook want to create individual ceremonies that incorporate words that are meaningful to them. I have been to a number of these events and each one is different and all are moving in their own way. This particular wedding took place on a boat in the middle of the loch in the shadow of Urquhart Castle. It was a very small and informal affair with family only, nevertheless the bridal pair was decked out in full wedding kit. Unusual as the venue was, some conventions do persist.

While waiting for the ceremony to begin I was chatting with a young woman who was one of the crew and learned that the number of visitors to the Inverness area is down on last year by 300 a day. Why, is no mystery. The cost of fuel, the credit squeeze and economic shambles we are in are keeping people away.

As a result of that conversation I was curious as to whether the Foundation was also experiencing low guest numbers. Fortunately, it seems not, or at least not yet. The numbers are pretty much the same as last year. This is good news for us but it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the economic downturn will reduce guest numbers eventually.

I wonder, however, if the reverse may not happen. When times are tough, people begin to question accepted truths like, for example, the superiority of free market economics, and will look for alternatives. An eco-village model such as Findhorn provides alternatives on many levels. The free market is increasingly becoming unsustainable and people may want to look for something that is.

Only yesterday, I spotted an interesting alternative in the front garden of my friends, George Goudsmit and Mary Inglis. There was a large metal object that looked like a cross between a bird and a modern sculpture, turning gently in the wind. George, who runs AES, a solar heating company in Forres, explained to me that it was a wind turbine designed to operate on the roof of an ordinary house. He and his neighbour hope to promote it and had placed it in the garden to see what interest it generated.

It certainly got my attention. Single-dwelling windmills have already been manufactured but some have the unpleasant side effect of making the house shake when they are going flat out. Apparently this turbine does not do that. What it does do is produce about 500w of electricity. The cost is reasonable too. George thinks it could pay for itself within three years. It’s encouraging to learn of a green energy option that doesn’t cost the earth.

It’s a bit of a ramble from weddings to windmills and sustainability. The common theme, if there is one, is change—change of status, change of lifestyle, change in the world. In the community we talk about change as a good thing, generally. The changes afoot in the world at the moment are challenging and it remains to be seen how we meet them, individually and collectively. The thought I am left with is that in the I Ching the hexagram symbolising ‘danger’ is the same as ‘opportunity’.

www.newstatesman.com - Wedding and windbills

Following on with the theme of the ageing population of Findhorn and (everywhere else, really) I would like to approach it from the perspective of one of 60s generation who is now in her sixties. Since it was we who instigated the cult of youth and coined the phrase ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’, we can hardly complain if there are those who now feel that there are way too many old people around, and that this is somehow a bad thing. It is the natural order of things that the old make way for the young, who in turn will become old and make way for the next generation. What is different now, however, is the timing of it. People are living longer and staying active longer.

Is this a bad thing? Perhaps, if you are young and want to find your place in a world full of oldies who won’t get out of the way.

Over that past two decades I have seen the demographic pattern change in accordance with the state of the community. When the community was young, most of the people were in their twenties and single. They were enthusiastic and energetic. They didn’t mind roughing it or sleeping six to a caravan because, hey, they were building the new age and having a ball doing it. Most didn’t stay long and moved on. Those that did aged along with the community.

When I arrived in the 80s I, like almost everyone else, was in my forties. There were a handful of older people, a few young people and even families with young children. We bemoaned the fact that we were a middle-aged community, and even worse, that there were hardly any men. I would say that no more than 20 – 30 per cent of the population was male. It seemed at the time that men weren’t that interested in spiritual journeys and self-exploration. The focus of the community at that time was personal growth, which appealed predominantly to forty-something women.

In 1990 I left for five years. When I returned things had changed enormously for the better. The energy had shifted to environmental concerns like building energy-efficient housing and creating the eco-village. Whereas when I left there had only been the Foundation, there was now a vibrant outer community surrounding it. The boundaries were dissolving as people who shared the Findhorn ethic but didn’t want to join the Foundation arrived. They created their own projects and businesses. As a result, there were more men, more young people and more families. The demographic is now far more normal, but there is still the issue of a large ageing population here as elsewhere. We have to get used to it and begin to see it as an asset rather than a problem. Believe it or not, the old do have something to offer.

We all have to get old somewhere, and some of us are doing it at Findhorn. It’s an excellent place for that, and the reason is that age doesn’t matter. In all my time here it has never been an issue in the friendships I have formed or the work I have done. For example, I designed the Foundation brochure for four years. I was sixty-two when I got the job, although nobody asked. Would I have obtained a job in graphic design, a field that is dominated by the young, in the ‘real’ world? I doubt it. And where else would I be invited to a 30th birthday party and seriously be expected to come?

There are a lot of older people here but they are active and engaged and don’t view the community as a retirement home. There is an easy flow between the generations that happens here that I like. The varied perspectives and strengths of people at different stages of life’s journey complement one another to the benefit of all.

www.newstatesman.com - Ageing naturally

One of the early Findhorn luminaries, David Spangler, once famously said that a major challenge for Findhorn would be to avoid becoming a New Age old people’s home. I notice that I have been recounting this anecdote over the years with a certain self-satisfaction, sure in the knowledge that this is a fate we have managed to escape.

After recent visits to a couple of ecovillages where youth truly are in the driving seat, all at once I find much less for us to be smug about. In truth, it really does feel like we face a significant demographic challenge.

Nor is this the case in Findhorn alone. With some notable exceptions, I would say that the European ecovillage family in general is ageing, with the proportion of young people among ecovillage residents unhealthily low.

This insight comes as something of a shock, not least because it carries a strongly personal dimension. Like many others, I have failed to recognise that I myself am ageing.

A youthful 52-year old I may be – but still, 52 is some distance from the young man I can all too easily imagine myself still to be. Now, as I begin to find myself referred to as an ‘elder’ of the ecovillage movement, this realisation is becoming sadly inescapable.

Two main reasons appear to lie behind the marginalisation of young people within many of today’s European ecovillages. Neither of these, thankfully, seem to have much to do with a decline in the appeal of an idealistic communitarian vision – all the indications are that young people remain engaged and excited by the concept.

The problem seems to lie more in the realm of practicalities. On the one hand, rising land prices in a context where a growing number of ecovillages are experiencing some degree of privatisation of assets is simply driving the young out of the market. As in society as a whole, the wealth of the boomer generation is provoking a crisis of access for youth.

On the other, most of the juiciest niches in our now mature communities – many of which are 30 or more years old (Findhorn celebrates its 46th anniversary this year) – are more or less full. Our early pioneering days, illuminated by now fading photographs of gangs of young people in great smiling work parties, now lie far behind us.

In this context, it is really encouraging to see our young people pick up the challenge and embark with zest on the task of injecting some vital youth energy back into the community. Most recently, this has manifested in the launch of a series of evenings under the banner of Café Culture.

Michael Mitton (who last appeared in this blog under the guise of Scotland’s Young Thinker of the Year), Elliott and Lucy from NextGEN (GEN’s youth council) have set up these evenings as an opportunity for Findhorn’s young people to get together in the evenings, to make music and to share their ideas and inspirations.

These evenings have been successful and well attended, with issues addressed including affordable housing, work opportunities and the idea of a youth community centre.

It is inspiring to see our young people find their voice and, in the best ecovillage tradition, engage with our current situation as an opportunity rather than a problem. May they help us rediscover and nurture the youthful spirit in all of us.

www.newstatesman.com - New Age old people's home

Last week’s blog saw me down at the Green Heart of Hawick festival, celebrating GEN’s recognition that the battle for sustainability would be won on the streets of our villages, towns and cities, with ecovillages more akin to research laboratories than models to be widely replicated.

And yet, as I come back from another working weekend away – this time in Sweden (of which, more below) – I realise that this is not the whole story.

Re-entering the community is to be plugged into a living, thriving experiment in sustainability – rather as if dry theories on carbon footprint reduction had leapt off the page of their own volition to form a vibrant 3-D reality.

As I walk back into Findhorn on Monday early evening, the wind turbines are merrily dancing in the breeze, generating enough juice for the community here with plenty left to share with the national grid. Food scraps from the garden are making the journey back to the farm’s compost piles – with such sandy soils, soil enrichment is never-ending work.

Visitors are leaving the just-opened exhibition in the Moray Arts Centre – as far as we know the UK’s only carbon-neutral arts centre, equipped with hyper-efficient lighting, geo-thermal heating and photo-voltaic panels that also export juice to the grid.

Meanwhile, in our main meeting area, a group of sixty community members – what!......on a sunny, Monday evening, is this entirely healthy? – gather to discuss the evolution of our decision-making structures as the community grows in size and diversifies.

This is no cold and sterile laboratory. The models and solutions on offer are not off-the-peg selections aimed at bored shoppers in the sustainability saloon. Rather, the research that Findhorn and other ecovillages around the world are engaged in has blood in its veins and fire in its belly.

Dare we imagine a world in which communities like this constitute not just the research stations but, for some at least, the models they will choose to call home? Why not?! As Oscar Wilde has it, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at’.

One such emerging experiment is a retreat centre in Sweden called Angsbacka, around which a small community intends to build a village on ecological design principles. It was here that I spent this last weekend, facilitating their process of creating a shared vision and transferring ownership of the site from private individuals to a cooperatively-owned association.

Angsbacka has the great advantage that it is already an inspiration for many in Scandinavia as a spiritual and personal development retreat centre; its No Mind festival in early July has drawn upwards of one thousand people every year for the last decade. The aim now is to expand the initiative so that it also models and eventually teaches sustainable living on all levels.

There is a great hunger – especially among the young – for practical hands-on examples of sustainability in action. Angsbacka is one of a number of emerging initiatives across Europe and beyond that are seeking to respond to this hunger in a very immediate way.

Centres of research, training and demonstrations for the likes of Hawick, undoubtedly. However, who knows – as property prices tumble and cooperation replaces individualism in our energy-lite future, ecovillages may just also resemble the community model of choice for a growing number of people.

www.newstatesman.com - Fire in its belly

Green Heart of Hawick
I spent the weekend down at Hawick, a picturesque town in the Scottish Borders. The event was an environmental fair and conference called Green Heart of Hawick, put on by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Michael Shallis and his team.

The fair had everything, from films (including Al Gore’s "An Convenient Truth" and the wonderful "Power of Community" about Cuba’s response to its peak oil crisis), talks from a variety of speakers and exhibitions of local initiatives such as eco-schools, tree-planting programmes, compost making, local food schemes, allotments and the like.

It is tempting at times to despair at how few basic skills we have retained in our communities as the economy has globalised, but in reality, fairs like this demonstrate that the great British art of amateur tinkering has kept alive many older and more traditional ways of doing things. As if to reinforce the point, towards the end of Saturday afternoon, the town’s streets filled with an army of mounted riders, tracing the boundaries of the town’s lands on horseback in an annual practice that dates back to the 15th century.

I was there by kind invitation to talk about how to build and nurture local economies and how Hawick might go about creating its own transition town initiative. I have referred to transition towns in several previous blogs; these are community-led initiatives that embrace the reality of energy descent as fossil fuels run down as an opportunity to create more convivial and resilient communities.

So why, you might ask, was I advocating on behalf of transition towns rather than ecovillages? Why was I not trying to persuade the citizens of Hawick to model themselves on Findhorn?

Track back to February of this year, the most recent Board meeting of GEN – the Global Ecovillage Network – at the Los Angeles Ecovillage. There, a coin that has been wobbling on the edge for some time fell finally and firmly into the slot of our collective understanding.

This new understanding is reflected in the GEN Manifesto that emerged from that meeting. One section of the manifesto concludes: ‘…it may be of value for us to see today’s ecovillages less as ends in themselves and more as research, demonstration and training centres for sustainable community initiatives in conventional towns and villages worldwide’.

This is a substantial and significant shift in perspective. No longer, it suggests, is the good society that we promote to be created primarily by way of replication of the ecovillage model. Rather, the core purpose of these distinctive, charming, but somewhat artificial communities is to act as laboratories for the development of sustainability models of all kinds that can be scaled up into more conventional communities.

This insight comes to me as a breath of relief. The extent of Findhorn’s distinctiveness cannot be overstated. How on earth would one go about replicating such a unique model – especially given the growth in land prices and tightening of planning regulations over recent decades?

Just as we are coming to recognise that greening Britain’s housing stock will be primarily about intelligent retrofitting rather than new-build, so the building of a more healthy and resilient society needs to happen in existing communities like Hawick.

www.newstatesman.com - Green heart of Hawick

This week, as many others, our community newsletter, the Rainbow Bridge, carries news of one or more members leaving the community. In an ecovillage of around 500 souls, this level of turnover does not present too much of a problem.

There are still several people here who first came to Findhorn in the 1960s and a good number who have been here for 20 years or more, so there is little danger of a loss of institutional memory.

Compare this to a much smaller community, of around 20, where I used to live in Dorset. The high rate of turnover there left very few who had spent more than a couple of years in the community. As in many other intentional communities of this size, this threatened the stability and indeed the very survival of the community as lessons needed to be learned over and over again, amidst much often acrimonious process.

One of those whose departure is announced in this week’s Bridge is my friend, Hide Enomoto, who will be returning to Japan with his wife and daughter, Maho and Minato, after spending a couple of years here in Findhorn.

Hide has been a graceful and gentle presence around the place. A life coach by profession – in fact, he has written the most authoritative book on the subject in Japan – he has been here to learn about community-level sustainability, with the aim of going back to Japan as a more effective change agent.

He has worked closely with us on the UNESCO-endorsed, month-long Ecovillage Design Education training programme we run here each autumn. In fact, I am unable to think of him without remembering one particular exercise he led in this training.

Deceptively elegant and powerful (in this respect, much like Hide himself), it invites those in dialogue to listen deeply to what the other is saying and to begin one’s reply with ‘Yes……..and’ (rather than some variation of the usual ‘Yes…….but’) – irrespective of how much one disagrees with what has just been said.

It sounds like there is a fair potential here for creating shallow and superficial consensus – no? And yet, provided your interlocutor is not truly off the rails, it is astonishing how effective this little device can be in building empathy, encouraging deep listening and identifying ‘both/ands’ where only ‘either/ors had previously appeared to exist. Try it!

Now, having recently completed a Transition Town methodology training and having richly learned from and contributed to our own community here, Hide heads off today on a tour of UK sustainability initiatives before travelling back to Japan, where he hopes to be instrumental in helping the ecovillage and transition towns models to land.

At the recent Positive Energy conference, I likened ecovillages like Findhorn to eco-monasteries – I remain fascinated by the parallels between today’s ecovillages and the Celtic monasteries of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries. Both, it seems to me, are centres of light and learning that while being somewhat artificial and difficult to replicate, are nonetheless powerful places of refuge and study where folk can come to regenerate and find inspiration and new knowledge to take back to their home places.

Seen in this light, Hide is following an ancient and venerable lineage. I have a strong hunch that the world will be a better place for his having spent time with us here.

www.newstatesman.com - Yes……..and

What a puzzling time to be alive. In the world that surrounds us, beauty and the comforting familiarity of seasonal rhythms. The ospreys have returned from West Africa and are putting on a grand fishing display in Findhorn Bay.

The last of the winter snow still lies deep on the mountaintops, glistening and melting in the now warm spring sunshine. (I spent last weekend walking in the magnificence of the Highlands and am now sporting a deep sun-snow tan.) We wait for the return of the swallows in the next week or so and the long, northern evenings hold out the promise of the return of life in all its fullness.

And yet, news carried on the wind speaks of melting ice, food riots and starvation and, closer to home, fuel strikes and long queues and fights at the petrol stations. Meanwhile, oil expert Matt Simmons declares it to be entirely feasible that petrol will rise in price to $300 a barrel within the next five years.

All this focuses our minds sharply. Since the end of the Positive Energy conference a month or so ago, there have been numerous gatherings to re-watch DVDs of conference presentations and to explore what the building storm means for us as a community and for the bioregion of which we form a part. Plans for basic skills training programmes are hatched and a hundred plans to build resilience into our systems take shape.

But how does all this news of the unravelling of the natural world and of global society land with the young people who are on the point of moving into their inheritance? Old enough to understand the implications but not generally yet in positions of power to be able to do much about it, how must the current unravelling feel?

We have with us at present a group of 13 students from US universities, here under the aegis of the Living Routes educational programme http://www.livingroutes.org/. I would say that among the strongest emotions they display is one of impatience and a desire to get stuck in, to ‘do something’.

So, while there is a general appreciation of the need for a sound theoretical understanding of how the world works – and how it can be made to work a whole lot better – I find with this group of students, as with none I have worked with before, a real urgency to engage on a very practical level. They demonstrate a highly commendable desire to use what power and control they do have to make a difference in their own backyard.

So it is that today, they are hard at work beautifying the area around an old RAF bunker (the land that the community sits on used to be part of the neighbouring air base). This involves clearing it out, disposing responsibly of the rubbish and creating ‘seed-balls’ – flower seeds folded into balls of the earth they dig out of the bunker that they will then distribute around the area at the end of the day.

This is formally part of their educational programme – their ‘service learning’ project, where they have an opportunity to create something of beauty for the community. Through the summer and autumn, we will remember their smiling faces as the woods teem with colour and fragrance.

This may seem like a fairly paltry response to sheer scale of the challenges that lie before us. And yet, all journeys begin with the first, small steps. To identify that over which one has control and to choose to exercise that control to create beauty is a fine first step.

The woods this morning felt alive with the positive energy of young people choosing to make a creative difference in their own backyard. They will carry the memory of the morning in the cells of their bodies – and all will be the richer for it.

www.newstatesman.com - Strange times