Relocalising Hampden

Dugald McTavish: Dugald McTavish is the driving force behind Hampden Future Energy Inc.Today on route from Dunedin to Oamaru we stopped in at Hampden to meet Dugald McTavish and Rick Tanaka.

Dugald and Rick have been busy readying the Hampden community for the 'energy restrained future'. They have recognized that as a society we need to wean ourselves off oil for two reasons.

1. Oil is a fossil fuel that contributes to climate change.
3. At some point in the near future oil is going to start running out. This is the 'peak oil' phenomenon.

With this in mind Dugald, Rick and a few other people have set about making some changes in Hampden.

They began by organising the Hampden Future Energy Forums - a series of talks by experts in climate change and renewable energy and inviting people along to hear about peak oil and climate change. Amazingly enough they got fully one third of the Hampden population along and out of those initial meetings have formed Hampden Future Energy Inc.

Some of the initiatives that have come out of this include:

• A regular market day
• A waste management project
• Tree planting workshops
• A 'community inventory' to assess how much wood, water and other resources exist in the community
• A skills audit to determine what skills exist in the community

Rick Tanaka: Rick Tanaka of Hampden with their cob oven.They're also considering setting up their own distributed energy generation using a wind turbine, setting up a community garden and establishing a local currency.

Amazing stuff! So great to see a small community like Hampden leading the way in sustainability, but perhaps it isn't that hard. As Dugald said "We were just looking for ways to make ourselves a stronger community and, just by looking, we found that we became a stronger community simply through getting to know one another a little better".