A natural approach to waste management is the way forward - and farmers hold the key, environmentalist Marcus McCabe tells Eileen Battersby
'County Monaghan; Border country and a rolling landscape of drumlins. It is green, still lush, even on a dark, wet November afternoon, and full of surprises.
The outskirts of Clones town, where St Tighernach founded his monastery in the sixth century, gives way to a few modern bungalows competing with the more traditional farmhouses. It is a quiet setting, and by the standards of the rapidly suburbanising Irish countryside, still rural.
Despite the pounding rain, there's a sense of lakes, trees and animals grazing the fields. A few hundred metres from the Border with Northern Ireland, a fairytale cottage stands well back from the road. It is thatched and painted with a pale yellow limewash. It is attractively plain, not cutesy. But its aura owes little to the traditional notions of Irish vernacular design. Instead, it is as if a house from the tales of the Brothers Grimm had chosen to establish itself here. This looks like a central European dwelling, but is it? It is a circular structure. The chimney stands directly in the middle of the roof. The wonderful, triangular windows are small, dictated by the sloping roof, and discreetly placed. They are made of timber, not gingerbread. There's no sign of the expected black cat, although a small black and white collie looks welcoming.
Anyone might answer the door; possibly a hobbit or, perhaps, a friendly witch. The door is opened by Marcus McCabe, co-founder of The Ark Nursery and an expert on permaculture and wetland reedbed waste systems. Behind him and the kitchen area, around a bend created by the masonry stove, is a small sittingroom where his three children and a friend are playing the Harry Potter board game.
Even before standing for election as a Cavan/Monaghan Green Party candidate last May on a number of issues - including the fact that none of the mobile phone masts in this State is insured and the incineration of waste creates deadly dioxins - McCabe's fears for the environment, both nationally and globally, were well documented.
In our continuing mismanagement of waste lies our ultimate destruction, he believes. McCabe, whose training is in agricultural science, has long been aware that farmers hold many of the answers. Agricultural waste has enormous energy potential.
"Farmers shouldn't burn off the wet straw and the horse manure, it should be converted into compost or organic fertiliser. We simply consume, we don't think in cycles."
Permaculture, he explains, is a process of perennial and sustainable agriculture - essentially a permanent agriculture. Its success lies in adopting a multidisciplinary approach embracing agriculture, architecture, horticulture and forestry. "It is a design process."
Everything he says makes sense. For example, the real trouble with the disposal of human solid waste begins once water hits it, thus creating sewage. Dry solid waste toilets with a separate container for urine are completely logical for anyone who has ever camped or had to wait days for a plumber to arrive to rescue a conventional toilet.
Marcus, like his father, the writer Eugene McCabe, is an emphatic, convincing speaker. "Traditional agriculture as now practised is not so much dying as dead." But, he says, there are other ways to ensure both agriculture and the planet survives.
At last someone asks why we accept the importance of worming horses, dogs and cats, but never think of worming ourselves to rid us of the parasites and flukes residing within our own bodies. When faced with the obligatory reporter's question, "Are you a weirdo or a crank?" he replies, "I'm not afraid to experiment with unusual methods." OK. So he is a natural campaigner? "I do tend to become politically involved," he says, recalling his involvement during the 1980s in campaigning against the use of asbestos as well as bituminous coal. "The coal was banned by Mary Harney the night before a massive demonstration we had planned was due to take place, I often wonder how that happened . . . Anyhow it meant smokeless fuel became compulsory."
McCabe's main business is the design and installation of reedbed and constructed wetlands (comprising reeds and irises as filters) which are passive biological systems for treating human, animal and plant waste.
It is a practical and ecologically friendly alternative to conventional sewage treatment and is a way in which we can become proactively involved in waste management. More and more clients are emerging: Galway airport, Monaghan County Council, a dairy in Co Donegal, two schools in Wexford, the Ballyogan recycling plant in Co Dublin and a water waste treatment plant in Co Fermanagh.
There is no denying that the language of science quickly enters McCabe's conversation, as does a near habitual tone of exasperation at man's dependence on, and acceptance of an oil-based economy. "It is perfectly feasible to have a bio-based economy." What are his views on the Rio Earth summit? "Too little, too late." As for the construction of incinerators throughout the country, he says, it has been seven years since one was built in the US. Why hasn't the Irish government learnt from this?
Now 42 and a veteran of the Earthwatch movement, he is a naturally intense character and has long been worried about the damage we are doing to the natural world. As a student he grew raspberries and strawberries to help fund his way through college. "Then I began noticing that the standard insecticides, the technically precise chemicals, I was using to kill off the insects were doing more than that, the bees were dying." It made him think, and he hasn't stopped since.
Initially he raised animals for slaughter and then thought, "What gave me the right to kill these animals? It was traumatising the children as well as the animals themselves. Why eat the flesh of terrified animals?"
Without making a huge point of it, McCabe says he was always different: "Being Eugene McCabe's son made me different". He says he was so involved with Dram Soc while at UCD he could easily have become an actor. But he didn't; even as auditor of the Horticulture Society in 1986 he organised a debate on the future of the environment.
He doesn't have a mobile phone, nor would he allow a microwave into his home, and he refers to the "microwave" effect of using mobile phones. His views on the toxic dangers of many modern man-made building materials are well argued. An increasing number of people will have first-hand experience of the health hazards of paints, varnished surfaces and wood preservatives. There is also the dampness, why use cement blocks when timber is not only more attractive, it is healthier and warmer?
Which returns the conversation, inevitably, to the house. Larger than expected inside and comfortable, imaginative it literally is "in the round". Even proven statistics as horrific as the one billion euro spent each year on packaging (much of which is oil-based by-products), can not distract a visitor from the wonders of the house. As if on cue, the children are now watching The Lord of the Rings on DVD, on an Apple Mac computer. There is no television. Gandalf could stride right in and feel pretty much at home.
At first glance, timber dominates. Pole wood - or timber as it comes from the tree in its natural state with only the branches and bark removed - is visible throughout. One such pine pole, a large one, flanks the stairway rising up through the centre of the house. It has been contracting or drying out within the house. "The wood has been seasoned inside the house, the cottage has been 95 per cent grown," he says.
Sitka spruce, that much-maligned conifer, used in the roof supports, beams, rafters and joists, was grown on his father's land in a plantation "planted way ahead of its time in the 1960s". The stairs and upper floors are beech and other woods including hazel also feature - all from Eugene McCabe's land, at the family home, about 300 metres up the road.
The ceiling above our heads resembles a giant wheel, with spruce beams serving as its "spokes". Minimum electricity is used - mainly for downstairs lighting - while the two upper floors are served by candles. It is on those upper levels that the house, through a platform effect, becomes less Brothers Grimm and more Swiss Family Robinson.
The three McCabe children are educated by their mother, Katie Mullaney, a Sligo woman, who was already committed to eco-living before she met and married McCabe. Together they set up the Ark Nursery in 1994.
Before the cottage was completed, the family lived in a wooden cabin "the barn", adjacent to it. The barn now serves as the office and also as accommodation for residents during some of the eco courses run at The Ark Nursery.
For all the wood, however, and the slate and tile ground floor, the chief building material is wheaten straw, among the most beautiful, versatile and deceptively strong natural materials available to man.
The McCabe house, with its rye thatched roof, is built of straw. "I am the third little pig," he says. Well, this little pig's house is strong, warm and practical. Straw is a biomass material and the stacked bales, strengthened by wood and a lime-mortar render create durable walls.
The house was completed in November 1998. It is heated by the masonry stove that is 90 per cent combustion efficient. "Just feel the wall of it there."
The practice of building straw bale houses is not European, the technique was devised about a 100 years ago in the US, in Nebraska.
Of course, designs may be as individual as one pleases, but the basic technology is the same. Aside from their economy, straw bale dwellings are energy efficient and, as is even more obvious, respectful of the environment. McCabe's dream may look romantic, and it does, but it is also practical, effective and possible.
Website: www.arknursery.ie