Milbeg Arts: Teaching the Art of Sustainability

The Entrance to Milbeg Arts (we've drank tea out of that polka-dotted teapot). 

In Bantry, a smiling woman with a wide-brimmed leather hat and dirt covered jeans greets us with a warm hug. This is Annie, our first WWOOF host. After stuffing our bags into her car, Annie drives us to the dump to drop off some trash. Chatting a mile a minute, she tells us that she tries to live waste free by composting, recycling, and reusing everything. For this reason, she doesn’t produce enough trash to pay for a collection service. Parking the car, she asks us to help her to look through the wood scrap heap at the back of the dump. While searching for a doorframe and some trim for Annie’s latest project, we pick up some wood scraps for firewood. In this process, Annie joyfully saves a perfectly good basket from rubble. And thus, she introduces us to her sustainable lifestyle.  

A Poetic Lesson About Water Conservation From Milbeg Arts :)

About 20 years ago, Annie bought a five-acre piece of land in Coomhola, Ireland. The property held the remains of a 250-year-old farmhouse and several decrepit storage buildings made of rocks haphazardly piled into a few walls. Annie, a woman of vision, looked at the mess and saw its potential to become a community arts center for art classes and performance arts festivals.

Over several years, Annie built the farmhouse back up to its two-story height. With the help of family and friends, she tiled the roof with slate tiles, installed electricity and running water, and finally, fashioned a cozy home for herself. Almost all the windows and doors were salvaged.   After three years of commuting back and forth from England to Ireland, Annie completed the restoration.

Annie's Restored Home:
In order to save energy, they hang dry all clothing.
(Photo Courtesy of Kyle Ackerman) 

Not long after Annie moved to Ireland fulltime, she began to host WWOOFers. She estimates to have hosted over 500 volunteers since the late 1990s. Everything from the greenhouse to the compost toilets to the garden walls and tool sheds have been built by volunteers. This includes the small stone house we have called home since arriving. The space used to be just a few broken down walls. Over six years, WWOOFer built up the walls, attached a roof, and insulated the walls with sheep’s wool. Now, the WWOOFer house has a full kitchen, running water, electricity, and excellent Wi-Fi.

The Building of the WWOOFer House.
(Courtesy of the WWOOF Ireland Newsletter)

Hanging in the WWOOFer House.
(Photo Courtesy of Kyle Ackerman)

Nine years ago, Annie’s community arts center plans were put on hold. After Annie’s own WWOOFing trip to New Zealand, she was inspired to found the official WWOOF Ireland organization. In the time since, she worked incredibly hard to nourish sustainability and cultural exchange in Ireland by running WWOOF Ireland out of her home. Now, the WWOOF Ireland website has 473 farm hosts and close to 4,000 WWOOFers.

A schoolteacher at heart, Annie has donated her property to the learning process of volunteers. The place is filled with the disjointed growing pains of hundreds of passionate and often, inexperienced students. Some walls are slanted and tiling uneven; a dozen soon-to-be finished projects are scattered about the property. Despite the visual chaos, communal ideals hold the physical environment together. Milberg Arts may not yet host painting classes, but it will always welcome pupils interested in the art of sustainable, self-sufficient, do-it-yourself life skills.

This is a book I found at the Bantry public library that I thought
 accurately summed up the lesson of our first WWOOF host.