http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/29/when_the_glacier_left/?page=full
When the retreat of a glacier left this village without water each year, they decide to move their village and build again nearer the river. Their new homes will have solar power and they plan to put in microhydro in the river.
Take Skibbereen, a town of about 2500 people on the Ilen river that floods regularly. If you compared the cost of endless repairs and capital costs of fighting the river against moving the town, how long would the payback period be? Financial and emotional. 10 years, 20 years, 100 years? This is a question that many low lying towns will be asking themselves over the next decades.
What could New Skibbereen be like? Warm, dry, cheap to run with renewables built in, cars separated from people, a square, trees, under cover market area, covered shopping area, A comfortable place for tourists to visit with trips, by boat, around Old Skibbereen!
3 comments:
Here's a town, in Wisconsin, that did it right:
http://www.soldiersgrove.com/History.htm
Well, apart from not replacing the apostrophe before or after the last "s" in "Soldiers", which I assume got washed away in one of the earlier floods.
Looking at the footer for their Solar Town page I remember which I originally came across it:
http://www.ece.vill.edu/~nick/
See the PDF linked in the middle of that page.
Great links - thanks Ed.
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