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When the Lab, and the movement towards living labs more generally, began, it was in response to the energy crisis of the early 1970s. The oil flow had stopped worldwide, the arid seasons in many countries were causing irrigation systems to fail due to lack of fuel for the pumps. Food stocks were precarious, famines were occurring globally and long lines outside filling stations became commonplace. Sales of E.F. Schumacher’s book ‘Small is Beautiful’ (1973) soared, spreading the ideas of Leopold Kohr to ordinary people around the world seeking to take back control. Back then these works, interpreted by aid-workers first threat the challenge to climate change both visible and, to growing number, surmountable. Meanwhile. At our level, returning aid-workers rallied in the west of Ireland, as they did in Jutland and elsewhere, to create human-machine test beds to free the world from oil addiction, pollution, desertification and corruption.
It was in 1974, the author first started describing appropriate technology in a disaster zone as Band Aid i.e. basic technology patches from available skills and materials. It became a popular approach and proved a solid basis for the establishment of a distributed CORR-Caritas Energy Community Cooperative Test Bed. This was rolled out in Rajshahi and elsewhere in Bangladesh. Successful results were spreading organically. One desperate Band Aid fix to replace human labor in the lifting water for field crops resulted in a clever attachment of existing deep-well hand pump to tall coconut trees to drive it with the sways of the wind. Desperate times including floating paddle wheel pumps on the Brahmaputra River providing power for micro-irrigation caught on widely in Bangladesh.
The team returned from Bangladesh to Ireland in 1976, after two years in challenging circumstances of working in a country stricken by both violent conflict and the energy crisis. In East Galway they founded a “meitheal” (“meitheal” is an ancient Irish structure of local cooperation which remains popular) to continue their work. The community was eager to participate and ready to spur the government into forming a test bed in Loughatorick-Woodford. The community offered the home comers a shell of a factory and participated in setting up energy systems and electricity grids where none had existed before. To keep the momentum going, Alternative Energy Ltd. was formed and a full-scale rural electrification scheme (supported by EEC funding) got underway. Difficult locations were served by purpose-built wind and water turbines. When this last big rural electrification scheme in Ireland was completed, this meitheal was held together by a contract of honour, solidarity and values. This later proved fragile and not fit for purpose after the modernising influence of the EEC shaped the New Ireland. Only those areas that sought to modernise through commercial contract and legal structures were to survive. There followed a tug-of-war between test beds and encroaching commercial companies. This resulted, by necessity, in the development of robust contracts; the experiences highlighted for the author the centrality of legally binding contracts for prosumers.