Illinois community aims for sust

Illinois community aims for sustainable living

MARTHA BLUM
mblum@agrinews-pubs.com


	“It’s really happening from the inside out, we haven’t gone about to purposely create a community,” Bill Wilson added. “But if there is a need for something, we create it.”

STELLE, Ill. — In order to develop a sense of community, it is important for people to work together, eat together and play together.
“When you create those opportunities, you create a community and that’s what’s happening here,” said Bill Wilson, a resident of Stelle, a tiny community in Ford County.
“It’s really happening from the inside out, we haven’t gone about to purposely create a community,” Wilson added. “But if there is a need for something, we create it.”
The town includes 44 current living units, and 15 new lots have recently been added to Stelle.
“After that we are land bound,” Wilson said during a tour last week. This was the first of a series of sustainable agriculture tours sponsored by the Agroecology/Sustainable Agriculture Program at the University of Illinois.
Residents of Stelle have established several informal co-ops in response to community needs including a Monday night dinner co-op, a learning co-op, a community garden co-op and a tool co-op.
“These co-ops change from year to year and that’s OK because they reflect what is needed at that time,” Wilson said.
Members of the community are also experimenting in several areas with the goal of moving toward a more sustainable way of living by utilizing green technology, solar power, and wind power.
Several years ago, a group of four couples created the idea for the Center for Sustainable Community.
“We wanted to share some of the things we’ve done here so we created a non-profit organization,” Wilson explained. The CSC was created in the fall of 2001.
“We then realized that if we really wanted to do this right, we needed someone to focus on the CSC full time,” said Wilson, who quit a full-time job about one and a half years ago to become the director of the Center for Sustainable Community. “That allowed us to get our Website up, create regular programming and do some events.”
But, Wilson said, the center and the community are “works in progress.”
“We have some dreams to bring in more aspects of sustainability,” he stressed.
Many Stelle residents have added solar power systems to their homes.
“One-third of our homes have active or passive solar systems,” the CSC director said.
During the event, participants had the opportunity to tour Mark Wilkerson’s new home.
“This is our version of the greenest house we could build,” the homeowner said. “On the roof, we have photo voltaic panels that produce electricity when sunlight shines on them and they charge a battery bank that stands ready to back up the whole house.”
A second set of panels on the roof is solar hot water panels.
“These heat my domestic hot water, which is the second largest expense you have for a house after space heating,” Wilkerson said.
The passive solar house features lots of glass windows on the south side of the house.
“With this overhang, the sun doesn’t get in the house at all, but during the winter, the sun comes through the windows and heats the floor,” the Stelle resident said. “The house is designed without central air conditioning. Since hot air naturally rises, we open the sky lights in the ceiling and open the basement door which allows the cool air to come up.”
The next stop on the tour was the Stelle Telephone Co., which was formed many years ago through a provision in the State of Illinois statutes that allowed the town to create a telephone mutual corporation. The solar-powered telephone company also provides Internet service to the residents of Stelle.
“We are the first solar-powered Internet service,” said Tim Wilhelm, general manager of Stelle Telephone Co. “The reason we went solar is because we are on the end of a spur line that starts in Streator, so our town gets lots of brown outs and surges.”
Steve Bell showed his wind and solar systems at his home in Stelle during the tour. In addition to his own wind turbine, Bell also has two sets of solar panels to create energy for his house.
“Those three things in combination basically run my house,” Bell said. “I normally generate more power than I am consuming, so I sell my excess power back to the utility.”
Anyone visiting Bell’s home will probably be unaware that he is utilizing renewable energy to provide power.
“The big difference is I don’t have brown outs or power outages and I have a little electric bill,” he said.
The final stop on the Stelle tour was the community organic garden and orchard.
“There are from eight to 10 families who come here to garden together and learn together,” Wilson said. “We’ve had the garden for eight years, and the idea is if you work a lot, you take a lot of vegetables, and if you work a little, you take a little.”
The garden features a wide variety of crops including asparagus, rhubarb, beans, tomatoes, garlic, squash, onions, broccoli and potatoes, to name a few.
“Most of us are eating from this garden year-round, although it’s not 100 percent of our needs,” Wilson said.
The Stelle orchard was planted 33 years ago. It contains about 150 trees and five to six varieties of apples, as well as eight to 10 pear trees.
“We have some trees that produce early and others that produce into November, so for a four-month window, our residents can eat all the apples they want,” the CSC director said. “And, I have never tasted pears like these, they are so juicy it is just unbelievable.”
As the residents of Stelle continue to focus on ways to develop a sustainable way of living, “I think we can create a model that other people can use in the future. as well,” Wilson concluded
For more information about Stelle and the Center for Sustainable Community, visit www.centerforsustainablecommunity.org.