The Findhorn Foundation and Ocean Arks An interview by Rod MacIver
I had wondered why within Findhorn there was the absolute absence of dogma and proselytization. I knew then that it was because there was nothing to preach, nothing to defend, nothing to hold on to. At Findhorn, people don't talk about planetary service, yet demonstrate it in their everyday life by emptying ash bins and selling potatoes in the shop. It is not what they do -- it is the manner in which everything is done. It is the extraordinary care, love, and dedication that you see in Don taking care of a patron at the store, or in Richard when he pours a concrete slab, or in Joanie when she counts the sheets and towels, or in all the people living their daily lives, serving the whole, knowing that God and they are one.
- Paul Hawken, The Magic of Findhorn
The real world is not made up of magic bullets, but of symphonies of organisms. There is a new kind of relationship that humans can have with life forms that can turn the tragedy of the twentieth century around.
John Todd, founder of Ocean Arks
Michael Shaw is the Executive Director of Ocean Arks, a non-profit birthing a new, environmentally-benign process for the treatment of human and industrial waste. At one time, Michael ran an international engineering firm with six thousand employees involved in the design and construction of mines, oil refineries, docks, airports and military bases. A series of events in the early 1970s led him to question the impact of his work on the planet. One was his reading of a book, Limits To Growth. Another was the discovery of the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community in the north of Scotland renowned for its gardens. Living in that community led to an interest in how nature maintains its life-support systems and treats its wastes.
Michael is a Scotsman, originally from Glasgow. Whenever we have gotten together, what has impressed me most has been his upbeat, positive nature -- a genuine pleasure to be around. He is also interesting. The same is true of Gail, his wife. They've just finished building a straw-bale home at Ten Stones, an intentional community they helped found. During our interview, I asked Michael to talk about his transition from president of an international construction firm to Findhorn house-painter.
"The penny really dropped during a long flight from Sydney, Australia to London, England. I had the upstairs lounge of one of those old jumbos all to myself for twenty-four hours. Just before the flight, a good friend had handed me Limits To Growth by Donella Meadows. The book examines the impact of industrial growth on the earth's life systems.
"As I was reading, I kept looking out the window. Over New Guinea, I remembered a copper mine we were building. Over Malaysia, I thought of our port project. We flew over India and I thought, `My God, what are we doing here?' As I read about the impact of copper mines on the planet, it was occurring to me that the company I worked for was the largest copper fabricator -- still is the largest copper fabricator -- in the world. My division didn't do much in the copper industry, but we were part of the same corporate empire. The book spoke to me very deeply about the destructive impact of industrial growth on the planet. It was almost like a message from outer space. Until then, I hadn't thought through the implications of what we were doing, but what I was reading made sense to me.
"I remembered a Scottish engineer writing to me from Salalah in Oman saying, `We are installing a power station and power lines here....You can actually watch the breakdown of the local tribal culture. These people don't need refrigerators. What they really need is to be left alone. They have an incredibly sophisticated culture that enables them to live off the desert on very, very little. The consumer goods they are going to get in return for their oil wealth will totally destroy their culture.'
"Then I remembered being in Africa in a place called Kaduna -- a Moslem/Arab part of Nigeria, where it's very dry. We had just built a palm oil mill there. The day we opened the plant, I sat having a beer with the manager. I said to him, `Well, this is a really great project.' In response, he pointed out that the desert was coming towards our palm oil mill at six miles a year, or a mile every two months. He said there will be no palm oil trees left in about ten years' time. They'll be overrun by desert.
"As I looked around at the other things we were doing in North Africa -- building a football stadium with full flood lighting, street lighting, telephone cables, a hotel -- it was clear that these things were totally unnecessary to the people there. What they needed was a clean water supply and something done about desertification.
"Around this time, I started to spend a lot of time in northern Scotland at a large yard we were building for North Sea oil rigs. When I went up there, I would spend the weekend at the Findhorn Foundation.... And I had gone up there many times answering for my sins -- we constantly had labor problems. ... Actually, it wasn't that acrimonious. Everyone was on strike in those days.
"Going from the oil rig yard to Findhorn was quite a transition. At Findhorn, before you painted the building, you held hands and attuned yourselves to the paint and then to the building. It was such a contrast, such a relief -- knowing that there was another way to live. At Findhorn, things got done just as effectively and quickly, but without the conflict. That experience also led me to think about my life."
In its early days, Findhorn was best known for growing huge vegetables -- forty pound cabbages -- on a cold, sandy beach in northern Scotland.
One of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation, Peter Caddy, had run the Catering Corps of the Royal Air Force. During the Second World War, he was responsible for feeding a million men in the Far East. After a series of reversals -- including a failed marriage and dismissal from the management of a resort hotel -- Caddy and his family were living on welfare in a trailer park on a North Sea beach. There, after a short period of bewilderment and disorientation, he planted a garden. Combining composting and the horticultural techniques with the spiritual practices he, his wife and a friend had been exploring, huge vegetables began to grow. This generated curiosity, particularly when Peter attributed the garden's results to attunement with Pan and other nature spirits. People from all over Britain, and then all over the world, came to visit, and a spiritual community was born.
A number of books have been written about Findhorn including Caddy's autobiography, In Perfect Timing. The most striking feature in these accounts is Peter Caddy's belief in, and implementation of, the principles of positive thinking. At the end of his book, Caddy offers a number of guidelines that he based his life and Findhorn upon. Some are listed in the box.
Life principles from Peter Caddy's In Perfect Timing:
Think big. The universe is big. Whatever you think, you will bring about. Always see the positive in everybody and everything -- thus drawing it out. Affirm love, affirm light, affirm power.
Love whatever you do. Learn to love the place you are in, the people you are with and the work that you have to do.
Be at peace. Be the healer of all troubles. Be not troubled by troubles but be peaceful -- peace heals.
Be fearless. Fear is tantamount to the denial of God, and no good comes from it. It is unnecessary and a hindrance to the workings of spirit. There is no need for fears of any kind -- as they belong only to a realm of illusion and ignorance, and the incapacity to relax into the arms of God.
Have courage. Be true to your visions, be inspired and guided by God. Follow that guidance, even if you think it takes you to the brink. Go to the brink and look over -- you might see the face of God.
Be happy. Be joyful in the service of God, in the service of humanity, in the service of life. Joy and a sense of humor are the hallmarks of the spirit and the freedom it gives.
Do your best and then trust God to do the rest.
In The Magic Of Findhorn, author Paul Hawken provides an example of Peter Caddy's philosophy in action. Caddy needed a greenhouse, and having no money, asked the universe to supply one. Nothing happened. What was wrong? He knew to the core of his being that "it was a need and that our needs would be met...I just couldn't understand why we didn't have a greenhouse!"
"And then I suddenly realized what the problem was. I had been too vague. I came here, measured the space, and asked for an eight-by-twelve-foot cedarwood greenhouse. It came the next week!" (Paul Hawken, The Magic of Findhorn.)
The more time Michael spent at Findhorn, the more he wanted to live there. His firm agreed to a one year sabbatical, which eventually stretched to six years. I asked Michael why he decided to stay that long.
"It was such a low-stress, contented way of life. Our lives in the urban world are so pigeon-holed. You've got your work life and the people you deal with at work. Then you've got your community life and the people you live with in your community. Then you've got the people you sail with and the people you party with or canoe with or whatever it is. Those are all different worlds with very little connection between them. It doesn't feel like a whole picture. There isn't a view of the horizon. At Findhorn, you can see the horizon. There, your spiritual life is integrated with your physical and intellectual lives. Your family life and your work life co-exist as one. You live twenty-five yards from where you work. The simplicity of it all is so much more harmonious and less stressful....
"Each day, before work, we began with meditation. Workdays were interspersed with special events. Quite often the director of the community would say, "Okay, let's go to the beach for lunch," and two hundred people would climb into busses and go off to the beach. It wasn't as if we were trying to make a profit. We tried to be there for each other, and make enough money to keep the publications and everything else going, but there was a great sense of freedom. That doesn't mean that people didn't work extraordinarily hard at times, but we also had many times devoted just to fun and community.
"The basis of Findhorn is the exploration of individual and group consciousness of spirit. Instead of experiencing spirituality on the side, at Findhorn spirituality is connected to all aspects of your life. You experience being in touch with all the levels of existence -- from the universal spirit right down to your own body. You live without any great division between those things. That is central to many spiritual traditions. I just came back from a Buddhist retreat, and the Rinpoche said exactly the same thing. Before enlightenment, wash bowl. After enlightenment, wash bowl. Whether chopping wood or cooking dinner or writing letters, there is a harmony. Pieces fall into place. Living like that is such a huge relief. You feel whole as opposed to fragmented. At Findhorn, I was opened up to different spiritual traditions -- the esoteric or mystical branches of Christianity, Sufism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, but without the dogma. There is little dogma there. It is okay to have spiritual experiences without the help of a minister or priest as intermediary. I came to believe in spiritual experiences because I had them."
I asked Michael what it was like to go from running a six thousand person international construction company during the week, to painting buildings on the weekends.
"It was good for my ego to go down in scale. When I moved to Findhorn, I went from earning quite a lot of money to having no salary for a long number of years. It was very good to live on a lot less. The small amount of income we had was all disposable. We ate there -- did everything there. When we got a few quid, we went to Greece. It was the happiest time of my life."
When he moved to Findhorn, Michael became the manager, or "focalizer" of the three-person administrative department, taking care of everything from buying insurance to negotiating the acquisition of the Cluny Hill Hotel to be used as a workshop center. (Ironically, Cluny was one of the hotels Peter Caddy had once managed.) During this time, Michael was thinking through what he might do after Findhorn. There was an expectation that residents would leave after a few years and take what they had learned to the rest of the world. Findhorn saw itself as a training ground for a new consciousness.
In the mid-1970s, John Todd, a biologist and environmentalist came to Findhorn for a conference and discussed with Michael his interest in the methods nature uses to sustain Herself. Todd's views paralleled those of one of the "grand old men" of Findhorn, R. Ogilvie Crombie (affectionately called Roc). Roc often said that nature would clean up the planet if we cooperated and listened to Her, and if we made an attempt to understand what Nature was trying to do. When Michael's wife, who is American, developed a longing to return to the States for a while, Michael helped start a Burlington, Vermont firm to develop a technology based on John Todd's work.
A firm Michael co-founded the Findhorn Ecovillage, builds non-chemical waste treatment plants that use the same processes nature has used for billions of years, adapted for concentrated wastes. Tanks, pools or lagoons are constructed, above which are placed plants whose roots hang down into the water. The waste is converted or digested by thousands of different species of plants and animals that are introduced or occur naturally, including bacteria, microorganisms that live in plant roots, zooplankton, snails, mussels, clams, fish, etc. These species self-manage, multiplying and establishing themselves at locations where they can most efficiently digest the waste. Air is pumped into the water to increase oxygen content. Michael explains: "If you dump raw sewage into a river, the fish die. They don't die because they are killed by toxic substances in the waste. They die because the bacteria feeding off the waste multiplies to the point that the river becomes oxygen-depleted and the fish can't breathe."
Gail took me, two of my three sons and a Heron Dance subscriber who had turned up unexpectedly in Burlington through a Living Machine. At the end of our tour, she took two beakers, filled one with water entering the Living Machine and one with water that had gone through the system. The first was dark brown in color. The second was perfectly clear -- in fact, she said, it met World Health Organization standards for potable water. To the eye, all that had happened was that the sewage had circulated through a series of aerated tanks into which hung plant roots.
This method of treatment is highly effective for water-soluble, organic wastes. At a chocolates plant, for instance, the cream, nougats, sugar and eggs washed off the machines can be treated effectively but chocolate can't because it doesn't mix well with water. The sludge left after the process is turned into compost. These treatment facilities have been built to treat waste from breweries, cosmetics, fruit juice, meat and cereal processing plants as well as schools and towns.
In an effort to develop the technology, Michael and Ocean Arks founder John Todd founded a company called Living Machines with $150,000.00 in 1989. The company grew to the point that it had nineteen employees, annual sales in the millions of dollars and thirty projects around the world. Ultimately, the company was sold. Michael and John continue doing somewhat similar work on a non-profit basis in Ocean Arks.
The cost of a treatment plant ranges from thirty thousand to one and a half million dollars -- often about two-thirds of the cost of competing chemical plants. Cost is, however, of less concern to most potential customers than dependability. Corporate customers want to know that the contractor will be there in three years or twenty years' time to solve problems, increase capacity and maintain service. The Findhorn Ecovillage is a small company operating in an out-of-the-way place using a new technology. Its over-riding advantage, to some customers, is its environmentally-friendly process.
Michael said to me: "Some corporations are beginning to take responsibility for good energy stewardship, good environmental policies and good transportation policies. Those companies were Living Technologies' market. Nevertheless, with most companies, the old strategy of zero responsibility for the Earth still dominates. If industry can evade it, avoid it or otherwise finesse the situation, they do. No responsibility is accepted for the local people or the planet. And now, many multi-national corporations are building their new plants in places like Brazil, Malaysia and Thailand -- countries with minimal environmental regulation. The norm in those countries is to discharge wastes into the Ganges or the Volta or pump it out into the ocean, where hopefully nature will run its own giant Living Machine and take care of it all.
"This wasn't a problem as long as populations were relatively low, but as populations have increased, our waste has become more concentrated. Half a million pigs on one farm are much more of a problem than a million pigs spread over a hundred thousand farms, as was the case thirty years ago. When you concentrate all that feed, all that energy, all those animals into a tiny area, they produce enough waste to overwhelm nature. It is the same with any industrial process. Mercury is tolerable distributed in little quantities all around the landscape but if you concentrate it into mercuric salt in an industrial process, and it goes into the waste stream, you can have big problems. That's what most industrial pollution is -- too much of something that spread around in tiny quantities is fine. The Ocean Arks processes break down, redistribute and convert waste. You can't dissolve metals -- iron is iron -- but you can distribute them in plants or compost and spread them around."
I asked Michael why we started using chemicals instead of this natural process. He answered:
"You could say that about almost every branch of our lives. With the industrial revolution, man-made energy and man-made chemicals became more attractive to us than natural substances. Chemicals are suitable for large-scale manufacture and distribution. Rather than buying paint, people used to mix milk, lime, rock dust and rabbit glue. That created a very adequate paint that kept walls an interesting color for years and years. Now we go to Sherwin Williams for a can of paint that has many more toxic chemicals in it, but also has an absolutely consistent color, is easy to put on and doesn't drip.
"We are not just doing this with a few things but with absolutely everything from beer to food to clothes. Everything. All our building materials -- sheet rock, glues, papers, gypsum -- contain formaldehyde to retard molds. There is very little that is straight out of the cow or straight off the tree or straight out of the lake. Processing is an integral part of our economy. Even with the increased transportation cost, multi-nationals have such incredible economies of scale that their highly-processed products undercut manufacturing by local trades. Not only are these products destroying local economies, they are not good for the planet. There is no incentive for large corporations to look after the planet except through laws and regulations, and often the regulations are inadequate. Global warming is a clear example.
"Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce, shows, with statistics, that of all the inputs into the average factory, only ten percent leaves as product. The rest is consumed within the factory itself or disposed of as waste. Ten tons of stuff to produce one ton of product. That is a design flaw. We should not be designing manufacturing processes that take ten tons of material to produce one ton of stuff. We need to adopt a system where Sony owns your stereo instead of you. You have a lease for as long as you like, but when it's time for a new one, Sony recycles the old components into a new set of electronics. Ninety percent of all manufactured products must be recyclable. Every consumer item should have a stamp on the lid listing exactly what is inside, so that in twenty years when it goes back to the manufacturer, it can be broken down easily into steel, titanium and whatever else. Instead, these things are now being designed to be as cheap as possible.
"I am not saying that there aren't also problems with our consumption patterns, but a lot of our environmental problems stem from poor design. Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken are writing a new book called Factor Four. Factor Four means we have got to do things four times more efficiently. Cars have to be designed that run four times as efficiently and last four times as long. Refrigerators have to last four times as long, be four times as energy efficient and, when their life is over, have to be recyclable. So instead of a refrigerator lasting ten years, it is built to be recycled ten times, at least ninety percent every time. Gains through better design are the easiest gains we can make as a society.
"We are designing treatment facilities so that we can dismantle and recycle them, maybe for ten percent of their original cost, and recycle them. We're not there yet because it is terribly hard to recycle buried concrete, and a lot of our customers specify concrete. That's a design problem. We don't need to build things so that they are so hard to recycle. When people say, `We would recycle, but it is too difficult,' that's not the recycler's fault, that's the designer's fault.
"Living Technologies is just now beginning to see `recyclable content' specified on jobs. Some clients are requiring us to report on which materials will be ultimately recyclable and not recyclable before we build a treatment plant, which is great. I am going to a meeting Thursday this week, in New York, where we will sit down and discuss whether or not a tank on a particular project will be made of steel, concrete or plastic. Steel is recyclable, but requires a lot of energy to manufacture. Polypropolene doesn't take a huge amount of energy and is very recyclable. If you pour concrete, you can't do a lot with it later, except maybe make rubble. So the decision should be polypropolene, and that material should be stamped with something that says that after its useful life is finished, say in twenty-five years, it needs to go back to the manufacturer for recycling.
"There is also a consumption problem, but the big polluters, the big destroyers of the earth, tend to be the larger concerns. For instance, do you think we could consume fifty percent less than we consume now? That would require a major, major social change. But it's only a factor of two. If you can get industry to do a factor of ten and consumers to do a factor of two, then you have a factor of twenty. That's what we need to accomplish.
"The easiest way to implement these changes is probably through tax as opposed to regulation. Tax the hell out of anything extracted. A thousand percent on every ton of steel that comes out of the ground. Nothing on every ton of recycled steel. Suddenly there is a huge incentive to recycle steel. The same is true of plastics. For every gallon of oil you pull out of the ground, a thousand percent tax. For every gallon of oil equivalent obtained from recycling, no tax. Immediately, used plastic becomes worth a lot of money. Oil extracted from the ground becomes incredibly expensive. Those kinds of steps could immediately transform the recycling industry."
On a couple of different occasions, Michael has talked to me about the applicability of Living Machines to developing countries. I asked him about that interest.
"As populations increase, there is a huge increase in water-borne diseases. Every hour, four hundred children die from cholera, acute diarrhea dysentery. Living Machines are very good at dealing with the pathogens and organisms that carry those diseases. We can get a ten to the power of seven reduction in pathogens through a Living Machine in a couple of days, without chemicals. We could go into poor, highly-populated countries and convert elementary lagoon-type systems into highly effective, safe systems at and an affordable cost.
"In the U.S., a sewage treatment system probably costs $300 per family, per year to run. In India, a Living Machine-type system might cost three dollars a year to operate. The Living Machine we would install is maybe one hundred times more effective than what they are currently using, even if it wouldn't pass U.S. EPA standards. It wouldn't pass because, for ten days a year, rain or heaving loads might mean that the system isn't functioning optimally. But for the rest of the year, the bacteria, the plants, and the fish do the work at no cost.
"We are still working on these small system designs -- they have to be engineered so that any energy required to, for instance, blow air into the system is generated from sun, biology and wind power. We have all sorts of good ideas and some good sketch designs. The system we are working on will utilize Peace Corps-type assistance combined with local labor and expertise. It's simple technology."
Referring to the quote that proceeds this profile, I asked Michael if loving the work, the designs and the plants was a part of the daily routine at Living Technologies. He laughed and said, "John Todd recently came into one of our plants and commented to me, `This Living Machine is not loved.' It was tidy. Clean. But it just wasn't loved. It was a bit sort of sad. So we made some changes. You go to the plant now, there are flower beds at the front door. The place is no cleaner, but its loved. It has a vibrancy about it. You can see that the new operator really adores the plants and animals that are doing the work. That makes a tremendous difference."
Ocean Arks International
176 Battery St. Suite 1, Burlington, VT USA 05401
Tel: 802-860-0011 | Fax: 802-860-0022
The Findhorn Foundation
enquiries@findhorn.org
or telephone +44 (0)1309 690311
