This is an opportunity to represent and to support our friends at the Steward Community Woodland in their application for permanent planning permission. After 15 years of successful experimentation in sustainable living, they are now applying for permanent planning permission to be able to continue this project into the future with certainty.

Steward Community Woodland is an intentional, off-grid community, powered by renewable energy, where they grow food using permaculture principles and manage the woodland they live in sustainably. They live on 32 acres of plantation woodland on a steep hillside, located in the beautiful Wray Valley on the edge of Dartmoor. The community was founded in 2000 and is currently twelve adults and nine children.

Widespread and well-informed support will serve to illustrate to planning authorities the viability of projects like this (and maybe your own). Remember that although off-grid/low-impact living makes sense to many of you, the planning authorities in the UK, to a great extent, are in need of enlightenment. Helping to make applications like this successful will help create precedents, spread knowledge and ultimately, we hope, inform policy.

Follow the link to learn more about the community and to comment on the application. On that page there is a link to the Dartmoor Planning Authority’s website, and it explains how to find their application and how to comment on it. Thank you!

http://www.stewardwood.org/index.ghtml