Editorial
It is rare to see a public document these days without the word “sustainable” in it. Sustainability is the new buzzword of our age, yet most public bodies have no real understanding of what it means.
A new road or building development can be described as sustainable because there’s a wind turbine attached, with no regard to the economic, social and cultural sustainability of the project.
In short, the powers that be pay lip service to worthy concepts while allowing free market capitalism, which is in herently unsustainable, to continue unhindered.
Lip service is also paid to “community initiatives” - these usually involve professionals being parachuted into a deprived community and “empowering” said community. Needless to say, the concept is absurd and usually means three or six years of grant chasing to maintain the initial momentum. What remains depends very much on the extent to which the community was engaged, if it all, in the initiative. But at least it’s another box ticked.
A far more sustainable model for Welsh communities, especially rural ones facing the loss of basic services such as shops, post offices, pubs and schools, is offered by the North Pembrokeshire village of Hermon.
The fight to retain the local school was lost but something more precious was won - a passion to save the community. From that, the community was galvanised and took on the school as a new community resource centre.
Realising that dependency on grants - that can be switched on and off at the whim of unaccountable bureaucrats - the villagers decided on a truly sustainable funding source. They want to build two wind turbines that, when operating, will generate £100,000 annual surplus for the community.
Because it’s not a large multinational imposing a large-scale development on the community and reaping the profits, the community is fully supportive of the wind turbines.
More importantly, Cris Tomos and his community association (see page 16 for the full story) are a lesson to all grassroots initiatives in terms of engaging with the people and ensuring that that word “sustainable” is more than just a trendy term.
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This edition of Celyn also looks at the green energy opportunities we have in Wales, in particular in the Severn estuary.
That word sustainability is again much in use - but is the barrage really a sustainable model or is the idea of a large-scale engineering project overly appealing to politicians seeking a silver bullet answer to our energy problems?
