Veronika Wild

Entrance to Freetown Christiana, Copenhagen -Image by  Neptuul , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons I must say I had quite a dim view of manufactured communities. After reading about and watching the videos about Prospera, I immediately thought of all the spectacular failures – those that have ended in gunfire and flames, fraud or mass suicide. Then those that kind of just whimpered away like New Australia in Paraguay or some of those noble alternative lifestyle experiments of the 1970s, but looking just a little more deeply some historic ones have been so successful that they have become part of the furniture. I am thinking here of the Amish in Pennsylvania, the Mormons in Salt Lake City in the USA and even the Exclusive Brethren, now the Plymouth Brethren, here in Tasmania. They aren’t all religious communities either. An older, secular forerunner belongs here too. The Kibbutz Movement  in what is now Israel, began in 1909 and was built on collective ownership, share...

- Beautiful free image by Barbara Brown via Pexels Sun Day –Not everyone celebrates Sun Day on September 21 -22. Some do not celebrate it all and others such as the USA do so on a different date and the UN’s own day is the Solstice – June 21. Regardless, this weekend is the day the day that many parts of the world celebrate solar energy. Australia certainly should as it is now being recognised as a global leader , not only for its rapid adoption of rooftop solar, but   for its   clean energy policy. Not bad after being labelled the worst on a global list of 57 countries in 2019. Marvellous what a change of government will do, not that you will read about it in our mainstream newspapers. In 2025, Australia became the third largest market for utility scale batteries after China and the United States. The uptake of subsidised home batteries has been so successful that subsidies on larger ones have now had to be restricted. On the other hand, the latest push is to help sm...