Ecovillages E-Book

Karen T. Litfin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In a world of dwindling natural resources and mounting environmental crisis, who is devising ways of living that will work for the long haul? And how can we, as individuals, make a difference? To answer these fundamental questions, Professor Karen Litfin embarked upon a journey to many of the world’s ecovillagesÑintentional communities at the cutting-edge of sustainable living. From rural to urban, high tech to low tech, spiritual to secular, she discovered an under-the-radar global movement making positive and radical changes from the ground up.

In this inspiring and insightful book, Karen Litfin shares her unique experience of these experiments in sustainable living through four broad windows - ecology, economics, community, and consciousness - or E2C2. Whether we live in an ecovillage or a city, she contends, we must incorporate these four key elements if we wish to harmonize our lives with our home planet.

Not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over. These micro-societies, however, are small and time is short. Fortunately - as Litfin persuasively argues - their successes can be applied to existing social structures, from the local to the global scale, providing sustainable ways of living for generations to come.

You can learn more about Karen's experiences on the Ecovillages website: http://ecovillagebook.org/

Leseprobe

An inspiring and instructive journey to the wide range of communities pioneering a sustainable global future.

Jakob von Uexküll, founder of the Right Livelihood Award and former member of the European Parliament

One of the most powerful questions asked of us by our world crisis is: “How can we live together in ways that allow us to ‘be the change’ together?” Karen Litfin’s book gives us answers. These ecovillage experiments – idealistic, imperfect, courageous, creative, and honestly described – will help us transform our consciousness and find our way forward.

Terry Patten, co-author (with Ken Wilber, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli) of Integral Life Practice

In these times of political gridlock and myopia, Karen Litfin’s tremendously engaging and informative exploration of ecovillages around the world points the way to a viable and attractive future very different from the bleak place to which we are now headed. You will enjoy this book!

James Gustave Speth, author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, former Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University

Nature teaches us that nothing disappears when it dies; it merely becomes something new. Karen Litfin’s lucid and heartfelt book reveals the new life emerging in the cracks of failing systems. Through her eyes, we meet people everywhere who are building high-joy, low-impact communities. Litfin is the perfect guide: intellectually rigorous, spiritually awake, and deeply caring. If you want to create a richer, gentler life for yourself and your community, read this book!

Vicki Robin, bestselling author of Your Money or Your Life and Blessing the Hands That Feed Us

Karen Litfin is a perceptive, thoughtful, and gifted observer of the human predicament. In writing Ecovillages, Litfin combines her intellectual prowess with her sensitivity and compassion to tell a hugely important and inspiring story.

Chris Uhl, author of Developing Ecological Consciousness, Professor of Biology at Pennsylvania State University

The world is in for a major transition, a huge downshift, ready or not. For those inclined to roll up their sleeves and get ready, ecovillages can offer insight and hope. As Litfin shows in this compelling book, they exemplify an “affirmative politics,” a politics at once ecological, economic, community-oriented, and spiritual. Ecovillages aren’t for everyone but, in these uncertain times, their lessons may be.

Thomas Princen, author of The Logic of Sufficiency, Professor, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan

Karen Litfin has not only written a book of great importance to all of us at this pivotal moment in history, she has also done it in a way that is lively, moving, informative, and compelling. This first-rate book deserves to reach the widest possible audience; we must pay attention to the issues Litfin addresses if we are going to thrive as a species on this fragile planet.

Nina Wise, performance artist and author of A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life

Karen Litfin understands that today we need inspiration as much as information to forge the vibrant communities that will carry us into an enduring future. The success stories she brings to life are just what we need to revivify our existing communities on a planet perched at the precipice.

Kurt Hoelting, author of The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life

ECOVILLAGES

For my teachers

ECOVILLAGES

LESSONS FOR SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY

KAREN T. LITFIN

polity

Copyright © Kar en T. Litfin 2014

The right of Karen Litfin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8123-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

1  Living a New Story

2  Around the World in Fourteen Ecovillages

3  Ecology: Living in the Circle of Life

4  Economy: Prospering in the Circle of Life

5  Community: Relating in the Circle of Life

6  Consciousness: Being in the Circle of Life

7  Scaling It Up

Epilogue

Resources

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1  Humor helps to lighten the mood in my classes

3.1  An Aurovilian web designer works with clients from his home, a thatch-hut in the forest

3.2  A Damanhurian software engineer lives in a tree house

3.3  Sieben Linden’s Strohpolis incorporates straw-bale construction, passive solar design, and rainwater catchment

3.4  EVI’s SONG neighborhood demonstrates passive solar and shared-wall design

3.5  Findhorn’s Living Machine recycles the community’s water supply –10,000 gallons – on a daily basis

3.6  At Konohana, farming supports the community economically while fostering social bonds and spiritual growth

4.1  Jiby, my translator, in front of his hand-built mud home in Faoune, the village where Colufifa is headquartered

4.2  Lamin Camara stands with me on a hand-carved wooden fishing boat, with the boatbuilder on the left

4.3  Damanhur’s complementary currency, the credito, fosters prosperity and community solidarity

5.1  Local village children enjoy hands-on environmental learning at Auroville’s Aikyam Bilingual School

5.2  Music, dance, and ritual are vital to ecovillage culture. Here, Findhorn residents form a human spiral

6.1  Damanhur’s Hall of Mirrors in the underground Temples of Humankind

6.2  This painting at Konohana depicts humanity as a baby holding Earth’s fate in its hands while also being held by the Divine

6.3  The enormous banyan tree adjacent to Auroville’s Matrimandir also serves as a sacred space for the community

8.1  This tapered-wall wooden yurt, where I wrote this book, was the first new home built at SkyRoot

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has literally taken a planetary village to write this book. First and foremost are the fourteen communities who invited a curious academic to live in their midst and the 140 ecovillagers who gave lengthy interviews. My research was greatly facilitated by the following people who served as community liaisons: Aly Mansare and Mariama Guldagger (Colufifa); Alan Corbett and Max Lindegger (Crystal Waters); Macaco Tamerice (Damanhur); Diana Leafe-Christian (Earthaven): Liz Walker (EcoVillage at Ithaca); Michiyo Furuhashi (Konohana); Lois Arkin (Los Angeles Ecovillage); Bandula Senadeera (Sarvodaya); Kosha Anja Joubert (Sieben Linden); Sigrid Niemer (UfaFabrik); Ina Meyer-Stoll (ZEGG). I also thank Bagnaia, the charming Italian ecovillage where I convalesced while too sick to travel. For consulting with me about the journey, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jonathan Dawson, Ross and Hildur Jackson, Kosha Anja Joubert, and Diana Leafe-Christian.

Each of the fourteen micro-societies I visited is like a world unto itself, with its own ethos and ambiance. As much as I endeavored to dive deeply into each one, what I could glean in a matter of weeks was necessarily shallow – particularly because most interviews required English translation – and only a small portion of that has found its way into the book. Moreover, my field is global environmental politics, not community development. Consequently, I have inevitably made mistakes and glossed over important aspects of each community. While a cast of thousands stands behind this book, I alone am responsible for the shortcomings. For these, I apologize with the hope that the overriding transformative message nonetheless shines through.

There were those who facilitated the journey and those who supported the writing. To the extent that you are now holding a lively and accessible book rather than an academic tome, Margaret Bendet is largely responsible. Not only is Margaret, with her keen sense of nuance and authenticity, my favorite writing teacher, but she also became a treasured friend. For our serendipitous Easter meeting at the Whidbey Institute, I thank my friend and colleague Johnny Palka.

To all those who read the manuscript, entirely or in parts, I owe a debt of gratitude: Sarah Ellison, Wendy Visconty, Anya Woestwin, Chris Uhl, Lauran Zmira, Leanne Do, Vicki Robin, Tim Richards, and David Marshak. For research assistance, I thank Mark Visconty, Julie Johnson, and David Wilkerson. For help with the index, I thank Catherine Quinn and Angela Gaffney. My thanks also to Stephen Dunne for computer assistance. I am especially grateful to my dear friend Donna Gregory for enlivening the early chapters and offering wise counsel throughout. For bringing this book to fruition, I thank my editorial team at Polity, especially Louise Knight, Pascal Porcheron, Clare Ansell, and Gail Ferguson. They have shepherded the project with good humor and the greatest of care.

To have the freedom to write this book – a highly personal seven-year project – is a great privilege. I acknowledge the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington for enabling this unconventional international relations scholar to fully engage her academic freedom. In particular, my sincere thanks go out to my chair Peter May and my colleagues Jamie Mayerfeld and Christine DiStefano for their encouragement, and to Aseem Prakash for challenging me to scale it up.

For helping me to begin thinking of myself as a writer, I thank the Mesa Refuge for a residency in a lovely cottage overlooking Tomales Bay. I will never forget the day the agricultural levees came down and the Pacific Ocean trickled up the tributaries, bringing new life to an old wetland. It was the perfect metaphor for this book. My thanks, as well, to Carroll Smith and Janice Giteck for their Whidbey Island guest cottage, where I organized more than two thousand pages of research notes.

This book would not have been possible without the loving support of my friends and family. I am especially grateful to Rand Hicks for grasping and emboldening my larger vision; to my dearest friend, Anya Woestwin, who sees my higher self and always finds a larger framework for the rest; to my daughter, Maya Jacobs, who inspires me every day and loves me no matter what; and to my mother, Kathleen Wilkinson, who believed in me even when she couldn’t understand me. And there’s no question that my journey was inspired by Laura, who lived the possibility and sent me on my way.

It is an odd thing to buy a farm and start a community in the midst of writing a book and teaching full time, but that is what I did. Thanks to Dan Neumeyer and Bill Copperthwaite for coordinating the building workshop for the tapered-wall wooden yurt where this book was written. The beauty of the wood inspires me every day. Thanks, too, to my former students and Maya’s friends who, in pulling thistle and whacking blackberry, helped me keep the faith. Of all those who have endured the innumerable hours I’ve spent incommunicado these past four years, the members of SkyRoot Community top the list. For their patience and generosity of spirit, I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Sarah Gillette, Beth Wheat, Anne Wheat, TraceyJoy Miller, Joanne Pontrello, and Byron and Raven Odion. I promise to be more present.

This book is not only about the pioneers who are writing the story of planetary interdependence with their lives; it is a consequence of an invisible web of personal and global community. I am the beneficiary of that web in more ways than I can possibly acknowledge.

Ecovillages at a Glance

LIVING A NEW STORY

For years, I’ve had the perfect job: a tenured professorship in a field I love at a major research university. The perks include a stable income with good benefits, a downhill bicycle ride to my office each morning, and a podium from which to encourage thousands of bright young people to ponder the most momentous issues of our time. Soon after the beginning of the new century, my once-obscure field of global environmental politics began climbing to the top of the public agenda. Suddenly students were hungry to learn what I was teaching – maybe not all of them but enough to make my work exciting. At last I could lecture about climate change, the mass extinction of species, and resource depletion without sounding like Chicken Little. I’ve been giving these lectures for two decades now, and the big picture hasn’t changed much in that time. What has changed is that a lot more people are beginning to see that perhaps the sky (along with the rest of the biosphere) might well be falling, or at least changing in some palpable ways. Ways we can see, hear, and feel – warmer winters, fiercer storms, holes in the ozone layer. Nature has been giving us a wake-up call for quite some time now, and people are finally beginning to wake up. For one who thinks about this stuff nonstop, this is very good news.

As a professor, my job is to acquire and communicate a lot of knowledge. On these issues, though, I’m fascinated by what I don’t know – indeed, what it seems nobody today can know. We don’t know, for instance, how many species there are or which of them are critical to our survival; we only know that because of human behavior other species are disappearing a thousand times faster than before the industrial era. We don’t know what it will be like to live on Planet Earth when it’s 3–10°F warmer; we only know that the scientific consensus is that’s where we’re headed. We don’t know when oil production will peak or whether it already has; we only know that we’re utterly dependent on the stuff and we’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit. I find this combination of knowledge and ignorance utterly compelling. We can’t be completely certain, but the evidence points to a profoundly disturbing conclusion: our way of life is driving us into the perfect storm. For the young adults in my classes, this comes as a rude awakening.

Figure 1.1. Humor helps to lighten the mood in my classes

Source: TOLES © 1996 The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

Over the years, I’ve learned to temper all this gloom and doom with a healthy dose of humor. I start each lecture with a political cartoon. Soon after I’ve pointed out what nobody knows about what’s coming toward us as a species, I usually show one of my favorites: “Goldilocks Goes Global.”

A dark sense of humor may help in the moment, but relief is temporary. One upshot of my perfect job is that I was making thousands of students fearful, angry, depressed, and guilt-ridden. Having steeped myself in the available information, I also inflicted these states upon myself. Until, finally, I said “stop!”

If in the face of the end of civilization as we know it, the best I can do is cite statistics and a few woefully ineffective treaties, what kind of teacher am I? I want to empower my students, not paralyze them, which means that I have to be empowered. Passion grounded in fact is what ignites personal power and transforms responsibility from a moral burden to a genuine ability to respond.

The response, as with the issue, is inevitably multifaceted and must come from a variety of sources. All told, the bottom line is that we need to find viable ways of living with one another and our home planet, changing some systems from within and restructuring others entirely. Some responses – corporate social responsibility, government subsidies for renewable energy, municipal recycling programs – offer tangible ways to work within the system. Personally, I’m inspired by responses that reinvent life from the ground up, and of these I’m most intrigued by the ecovillage. This is a gathering of individuals into a cohesive unit large enough to be self-contained – that’s why it’s a village – and dedicated to living by ecologically sound precepts. I find ecovillages compelling because they weave together the various strands of sustainability into integrated wholes at the level of everyday life and because they’ve sprung up spontaneously all over the world.

This is, of course, a book on ecovillages, but, before focusing on the subject at hand, I want to present a bit more of the big picture, the framework within which ecovillages have emerged, so that it’s clear what “reinventing life” truly means.

A new story

For some time now, I’ve been looking for a way to make sense of this unfolding environmental mega-crisis. It’s one thing to see and feel that we’re in a pickle. It’s another to put our recognition into an intellectual framework. How did we, who view ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, become the most destructive force on the planet? If every culture lives out its core story, what cultural stories have engendered humanity’s current morass? And since our survival as a species requires harmonizing ourselves with our home planet, what new stories might foster our capacity for doing that? For decades, I hunted for answers to these questions in disciplines ranging from economics to philosophy, from geology to theology.

In a nutshell, I concluded that homo sapiens is a splendid oddity in the natural world: the species with the capacity of separating itself from the whole – at least in our own minds. The very term “environment” assumes that separation. One of our culture’s most compelling stories has been our conquest of nature through technology. We’ve told ourselves that our comforts and conveniences would protect us from the vagaries of nature – and to a great extent they have. But now the tattered ozone layer and collapsing ice shelves are evoking a new story: we are not separate. If we take this story to heart and follow its radical implications, it offers some very good news – for the biosphere and for ourselves.

Humanity has become a force of nature, a geophysical force operating on a planetary scale. We didn’t get here overnight. The story of separation, which crops up in one way or another across many cultures, has deep roots; only recently did it produce epic consequences. With the scientific and industrial revolutions, knowledge engendered power in new ways. Starting with seventeenth-century Europe, Earth was carved up into a patchwork of sovereign states. The economic and psychological counterpart of the sovereign state was the rational self-interested individual who, alongside nations and firms, found himself (sic) in fierce competition for resources, power, and wealth. The collisions and conglomerations of these “particles” were like Newtonian particles in a mechanical universe. Nature was reduced to territory and property, a vast storehouse of resources for human consumption, and an unlimited repository for our waste.

Three centuries ago, when most Europeans never reached their thirtieth birthday, that story made sense. With only a billion people on Earth and a vast frontier in the New World, nature seemed unshakably robust and inexhaustibly abundant. Today, with 6.8 billion people inhabiting an increasingly vulnerable planet, that same story is, to put it mildly, evolutionarily maladaptive. The impulse toward self-protection has mutated into a fearsome capacity for self-destruction, particularly in the wealthy countries. Yet, as the story of separation and conquest reaches the end of its tether, the unfolding crisis carries within itself the seeds of a new story.

If “independence” was the by-word of the old story, “interdependence” is the by-word of the new. If the old metaphors were drawn from Newtonian physics, the new metaphors are rooted in ecology, where symbiosis is the rule. Whatever its political utility in the past, independence was always a biological fiction; current trends are driving that point home. The so-called individual is inextricably reliant on a vast web of external ecosystems and internal microbial networks.

At the level of international politics, sovereignty is being eroded by global networks of communications, finance, crime, terrorism, disease transmission, ecology, and transnational activism. Europe, the birthplace of the sovereign state and the epicenter of two world wars, is now home to a particularly intriguing post-sovereign entity, the European Union. The 2008 economic meltdown highlights the same lesson that the even thornier issues of climate change and peak oil challenge us to learn: we now live in an era of planetary interdependence (for an explanation of peak oil, see Box 3.5).

No longer relegated to a collection of objects to be consumed, nature (albeit a profoundly altered nature) emerges as teacher and we her students. When we grasp the meaning of “nonrenewable,” we learn to favor bicycles over cars. When we learn that living systems, being cyclical, generate no waste, we see that there is no “away” in which to throw our garbage and pollution. And we discover the value of compost. As our knowledge grows, so too does our sense of homecoming to our place on Earth.

When we come home, we do so in a specifically human way. Like other animals, we are eating, drinking, breathing creatures. And we are equipped, perhaps uniquely so, to come into conscious harmony with the rest of creation. In doing so, we find our individuality not in our ability to acquire, but in our capacity to inquire – and then to express ourselves as unique parts of the whole. Like cells in the larger body of the living Earth, we become that aspect of Gaia that is growing into awareness of herself. From this large perspective, “sustainability” is just a dry word for our new story’s central plotline: coming home to our place within the larger community of life that sustains us. The upshot of this story is that there are no environmental problems. There is only the age-old human problem, now writ large: how, then, shall we live? Benjamin Franklin’s purported words to his compatriots at the signing of the US Declaration of Independence now have a global ring: “We must hang together, gentlemen … else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”

The challenge of “hanging together”

So how do we “hang together?” How do we forge enduring symbiotic relationships that acknowledge our interconnectedness? How do we live with one another? It’s not easy, as many of us have found, to live in groups. We face challenges even in pairs, as I saw in my brief attempt at cohabitation with my daughter’s father. To forge a stable matrix of relationships among individualistic modern people, within tribal- or village-size groups … Group living of any kind requires a commitment to something higher than the fixtures and plumbing of life.

I had my first experience of conscious group living in my early twenties in California when a friend and I started the Orange County Peace Conversion Project – right in the belly of the beast, as we liked to put it. Those were the years when political leaders talked seriously about winning an all-out nuclear war. So we set out to inspire people, especially workers in the local military industries, to consider how the money and expertise being poured into war preparations might be used to enhance life. Within three years, we had five thousand supporters. We were against nuclear weapons, but our focus was mostly on what we were for: a life in harmony with one another and with the Earth. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were muddling our way toward a politics of “yes,” despite being surrounded by so much that seemed negative. Living by example was an essential ingredient in our homespun recipe. When a generous woman donated her house to our project, several of us, all in our twenties, moved in and lived hand to mouth. We grew our vegetables, ate low on the food chain, bicycled whenever possible, converted our driveway into a neighborhood recycling center, and made our decisions by consensus. That was 1979, long before the term ecovillage was coined.

Like many adventures in community living, our idealistic experiment dissolved for mundane reasons: couples broke up, people left, and eventually our generous donor wanted her house back.

Over time, life’s disappointments and a certain dry pragmatism buried my ideals under a heap of obligations and responsibilities. After those quixotic years in Orange County, I entered a fourteen-year period of intellectual intensity on my way to academic freedom, first as a PhD student and then as a single mother and a professor on the tenure track. During those years, I learned to hone my mind, weave complex webs of thought, dress them up in suitable jargon, and get them published. I wrote about what mattered most to me, the human face of global ecology, but always in the stilted academic language that remains impenetrable to ordinary people. I was in a protracted rite of passage. Some day, I imagined, I would make a difference. Some day.

When I first came to the University of Washington in 1991, I considered group living once again. Alone in a new city, I didn’t want to raise Maya, my daughter, in isolation. Besides, I knew we could live more sustainably in community than in a single-family home. The most promising possibility was Songaia, a new group that owned 11 acres in a semirural area north of Seattle. I attended meetings for several months as we developed a site plan and got to know each other. Every meeting ended with boisterous songs and a shared meal.

In the end, as much as I cherished the prospect of raising Maya in such a wholesome environment, I was deterred by yet another of the classic issues associated with group living: location. I was daunted by the commute. For me, the ecological and social benefits of community life were not worth long hours on the freeway. So I bought a house near the university and, bowing before the academic dictum “publish or perish,” I put my nose to the grindstone.

As I’ve said, it was the perfect job, but something was missing, something big. I cared about my subject, thought about it constantly, saw it as vital – and yet I was not living as if it were true. My lectures, painstakingly researched, all pointed to one extremely inconvenient truth: our everyday actions are unraveling our home planet’s life-support systems. And our actions included my actions. For me, this was even more inconvenient. No matter how inspiring my lectures might be for others, what did it matter if I didn’t change my own life! Sure, I bicycled to work, ate organic, recycled, and shopped at thrift stores. Without any huge effort and even including my international flights, I was able to reduce my ecological footprint to just over half the American average. Still, if everybody on the planet lived as I did, we would need two and a half Earths. Who was I to talk about coming into conscious harmony with the living Earth? There was a yawning gap between my lofty notions of planetary sustainability and my own economic consumption. At the end of the day, as I bicycled homeward up the long hill, I felt like a fraud. But what more could I do?

Enter Wonder Woman

Then one evening, a ruddy-faced woman came knocking on my front door. With her close-cropped hair, at first glance I took her for a man. “Is this where the meditation group meets?” she asked. It was. As she took her seat in our weekly meditation circle, I was curious about this new arrival: she seemed different.

At the next meeting of the meditation group, Laura confirmed that she was, indeed, different. My toilet stopped flushing, and, while the rest of us sat in the living room bemoaning the high price of plumbers, Laura asked for my toolbox and did the repair. In time, I found out that she could fix just about anything. She could build, plumb, and wire a house. She could grow anything rooted in the earth. Whereas I, and virtually everybody I knew, used money to navigate through the material aspects of life, Laura relied upon her skills, her personal relationships, and her ability to barter.

Inspired in her youth by St Francis, Laura had decided to live simply. Her inner life and a handful of deep friendships came first for her. She lived on her earnings, less than US$6,000 a year. By the time she knocked on my door, she had been living with outer simplicity and inner wealth for twenty-five years. I could see that, with all my degrees, I had a lot to learn from this high-school dropout – who is, by the way, at least as well read as my overeducated friends and I.

Laura was master of the spontaneous project. In the time she lived in my vicinity, my home and garden got a substantial upgrade. When I complained about the ugly shrub blocking my living room window, she was back in a flash with her chainsaw and shovels. After one look at my chaotic garage, so many years of detritus from a middle-class life, Laura masterminded the dreaded clean up. A conversation about the evils of concrete led to half my driveway being transformed into a terraced strawberry bed. With every project, I navigated new equipment (a hammer, a chisel, a drill, a handsaw, an electric saw) and learned new skills (how to dig without hurting my back, how to make yogurt, how to build soil, how to compost my own shit). Laura’s guiding question seemed to be: How can we maximize our effectiveness and minimize our harm to the Earth? And how can we do it having the most fun?

One huge consequence of Laura’s material simplicity is her spacious approach to time. People say time is money, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say time is wealth. Although Laura had virtually no money, she seemed to have all the time in the world, while I had money but so little time. If a conversation was important to her, Laura would give an entire day to it. If she felt like making art with rocks, she would give an entire day to that. If I needed help around the house, Laura was right there. I, on the other hand, was constantly rushing from one appointment to the next. I could buy time from other people – the plumber, the massage therapist, my daughter’s music teachers – but I had no time myself, while Laura couldn’t buy other people’s time but her time was her own. When I told her how I often felt squeezed by the lack of time, she teased me. “Litfin,” she said, “you’re the victim of your own choices!”

I started to make different choices. I bought a pedal-activated electric bicycle, made it my primary mode of transportation, and within three years put more than four thousand miles on it. Growing food takes more time than buying it, but it’s a lot more fun. So I took a comprehensive organic gardening course, built several large vegetable beds, and, along with my daughter, began growing vegetables. Maya pitched in with enthusiasm, taking pride in her strawberries. We found a recycled wooden box and enlisted worms to compost our food waste. We shrank our weekly garbage to half a grocery bag. Little by little, I was learning to walk my talk. And I found it fun.

I had many more dreams – fantasies of building an earthen home, harvesting rainwater, installing solar panels …. These didn’t feel ungrounded as long as I had a friend who could actually do all these things. Perhaps I couldn’t do them, but in Laura’s company I knew they were doable. The doors of my life were opening up to a whole new world of possibilities.

Those doors closed abruptly when my personal Wonder Woman moved on to a warmer, sunnier place. Long-distance conversations were small consolation for the loss of my mentor for a life of integrity. On every level, it was a long, soggy Northwest winter.

Come spring, I was at a crossroads. With my comfortable salary and “perfect job,” it would have been easy to continue giving my ideas free rein to gallop beyond my material existence. Maybe I would never live in conscious harmony with the rest of creation, but at least I could inspire my students in that direction. After all, they were young, and there were hundreds of them. I was just one middle-aged egghead.

As the clouds lifted, my sense of what was possible once again expanded. The sustainability crisis is global, and I knew beyond certainty that people all over the world are addressing it collectively at the level of their everyday lives. Surely there must be Wonder People all over the place, and surely some of them would have joined together to share their knowledge. I began asking myself how I could find those who were not just theorizing about planetary interdependence but were living those lessons and forging a viable future. They had to be out there, and I wanted to find them, to see them “hanging together” in a real and viable way.

Seedlings for a viable future

My quest led me to visit communities all over the world, to study ecovillages where people were hanging together so closely they looked like the facets of a single gem. The word “ecovillage” may conjure up images of shabby rural outposts populated by long-haired iconoclasts, but I found that these communities and their residents cannot be so easily pigeonholed.

Ecovillages are diverse in every way you can imagine – cultural, architectural, economic, climatic. The smallest I visited was like a big family – 40 people – and the largest, Auroville, has a population of 2,000, bigger than some small towns. These sustainable communities are appearing in tropical, temperate, and desert regions; among the rich and the very poor; in cities and in all parts of the countryside. People living in ecovillages espouse beliefs rooted in all the major world religions, paganism, and atheism, as well as by a spectrum of moral codes.

Though you won’t find the term “ecovillage” in most dictionaries, the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) with its regional divisions was established in 1995, and with that, the movement went from local to global. The GEN website (http://gen.ecovillage.org/) lists about 400 ecovillages worldwide, and this doesn’t include the traditional rural villages in the Third World that belong to participatory development networks within GEN. Put these ecovillages into the mix and the number leaps to 15,000. Yet if “sustainable” means “continuable into the indefinite future,” then most ecovillages are really aspiring ecovillages. For that reason, GEN has published a Community Sustainability Assessment, available on its website in four languages, which enables ecovillages to gauge their sustainability.

That spring I read everything I could find about ecovillages, online and in print. I found that they describe themselves in glowing prose, packed with organic imagery. Consider this passage from GEN’s online ecovillage design curriculum, Gaia Education:

In preparation for the emergence of a new worldview, “seed” people will begin to appear, inoculating the collective consciousness with new ideas and concepts – evolved interpretations about the nature of reality. Initially, these seed people will be perceived as a cultural “fringe,” an idiosyncratic minority whose new interpretations can be easily discounted and disregarded because of their incongruity with established, officially sanctioned, interpretations of reality. Eventually, however, as the precepts of the old paradigm are revealed to be increasingly inept at managing and providing a meaningful context for the evolving, emerging situation, the seed people will gain credibility…. Ecovillages are the “seed” communities of the not-too-distant future.

Seed people from the cultural fringe inoculating the larger culture? This verbal feast left me with an immense hunger for the meat of experience. I had lots of questions.

•  Is it true that ordinary people on every continent are coming to similar conclusions about the global predicament and how to address it? If so, I wanted to know about them.

•  Are ecovillagers consciously supplanting the old story of separation with a new story of wholeness? Is it just so much verbiage, or is it a narrative grounded in everyday life?

•  Do these seeds of sustainability live up to their glowing accounts? How do they deal with conflict? Child rearing? Questions of ownership? Income disparities? Power imbalances? Aging and death? I wanted to know.

•  Are they populated from the mainstream or by hippies and fractious malcontents?

•  And if some, or even all, of the ecovillages are failing to live up to their image, I wanted to know that as well. There is much to learn from ambitious experiments.

My daughter had just graduated from high school and had saved money for her own dream trip, working on organic farms around the world – WWOOFing, as it’s called. That left me free to explore ecovillages. Wanting to write a personal book, I tapped my savings and financed the journey myself. I got the time by taking a sabbatical from my teaching job and shepherded my research proposal through my university’s human subjects review. In this regard, I signed an agreement not to interview minors and not to quote anyone without their express permission.

Box 1.1 Ecovillages: Intellectual and Social Roots

For centuries, people have come together in small groups to find ways of living in harmony with each other and with life itself. Now, in the face of social alienation and a creeping global ecological crisis, this communitarian impulse has coalesced globally in the form of ecovillages. Individually, these ecovillages trace their roots to diverse lineages:1

•  the ideals of self-sufficiency and spiritual inquiry that have historically characterized monasteries and ashrams and, more recently, Gandhian movements;

•  the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the environmental, peace, feminist, and alternative education movements;

•  in affluent countries, the “back-to-the-land” movement and, beginning in the 1990s, the co-housing movement;

•  in developing countries, the participatory development and appropriate technology movements.

Unlike many alternative communities, ecovillages are not isolated enclaves; rather, they have a strong educational mission. Since 1995 with the formation of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), they have joined forces in order to share and disseminate sustainable living practices among themselves and with the larger world.

GEN has its roots in a 1991 conference organized by two couples, Ross and Hildur Jackson from Denmark, and Robert and Diane Gilman from the United States. As a pioneering software designer and successful international currency trader, Ross Jackson had become convinced that the global economy was unsustainable. In 1987, he and Hildur founded Gaia Trust, a philanthropic organization dedicated to fostering a transition to a sustainable society. 2 Meanwhile, the Gilmans were publishing In Context: A Quarterly Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture. Robert had left his earlier career as an astrophysicist because “the stars could wait, but the planet couldn’t.”3 At the 1991 conference in Denmark, the Gilmans presented a survey of the world’s ecovillages, which they defined as “human-scale, full-featured settlements in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that supports healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefnite future.”4 In 1995, the first international ecovillage conference was held at Findhorn. The 400 participants established GEN and its three regional centers: GEN-Europe and Africa, the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, and GEN-Oceania and Asia.

Yaacov Oved, a scholar and member of Israel’s kibbutz movement, traces GEN to a larger process of “globalization from below,” which includes a growing interest in international relations among intentional communities since the 1970s.5 Since the 1990s, this process has been greatly facilitated by the internet revolution. The original vision of GEN – that new ecovillages would sprout like mushrooms – has not taken place. Instead, the primary impact of ecovillages has been to make existing communities look more like ecovillages through educational programs offered all over the world. My own sense is that this is exactly as it should be.

Mapping the journey

Beginning in September 2007, I visited fourteen ecovillages on five continents. Starting in North Carolina, I worked my way eastward from Europe to Africa to Australia to Asia until I ended up in Los Angeles. The sampling of communities I chose reflects their diversity worldwide: rural and urban, rich and poor, spiritual and secular. I also chose some ecovillages that seemed like places where middle-class Americans like me could imagine living.

So, why fourteen ecovillages? Why not ten? Or forty? Writing has been described as the art of winnowing, and a topic as vast as this global movement requires a great deal of winnowing. That said, there are some important gaps in this material. I did not visit Brazil’s vibrant ecovillage culture nor any other Latin American communities at all. Nor did I visit any of the 200-plus Anastasia communities in Russia nor any of Israel’s 200-plus kibbutzim. Had I visited them all, I might still be on my journey now, and the final book might be too heavy to lift.

Because I wanted inspiration and practical guidance, I chose these fourteen ecovillages with an eye to their success. Given that these living laboratories are works in progress, how would I know success when I saw it? Several objective criteria came to mind.

•  Longevity: Communities with staying power have been able at least to sustain themselves across time. Findhorn, founded in 1962, is the oldest ecovillage I visited, and Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan village network, was established in 1957.

•  Size: All things being equal (which of course they never are), 100 people pioneering a viable way of living is a greater accomplishment than 10 people doing the same thing – especially if we want to apply their lessons to the larger society.

•  Resource consumption and waste: This is a book about green living, so the ability to grow food, build homes, move about, and process waste without harming the Earth are obvious signs of accomplishment.

•  Economic prosperity: If the price of a green lifestyle is a sense of impoverishment, then this would be a one-sided success. Yet, as I had learned, there are many avenues to wealth besides having more money.

•  Ripple effect: Some ecovillages have a strong emphasis on public education and have become internationally recognized models of sustainability. All fourteen of the ecovillages on my itinerary have attained that status.

Of the hundreds of ecovillages I might have visited, the ones in this book were especially strong on some combination of these criteria. Before setting out on my journey, I ran my list of fourteen ecovillages by Jonathan Dawson, then president of the Global Ecovillage Network. He agreed: these were the ones to visit.

Yet, there were other, more subjective criteria that I could only gauge through firsthand experience and getting to know the ecovillagers themselves. Being a social scientist and also the person I am, these were the human factors I found most compelling:

•  Cohesiveness: A felt sense of belonging, of trust, honesty, and reciprocity – these are intangible yet crucial elements of community.

•  Embodied vision: While many ecovillages have posted impressive mission statements on the web, I was looking for a sense of shared purpose among the community members and whether they were able to live their vision.

•  Happiness and satisfaction: Even if an ecovillage were wildly successful with respect to every objective criterion, it would only be truly successful if its members enjoyed living there. They need not be perpetually happy; to enjoy the challenges of collective problem solving can also be a source of great satisfaction.

I set out on my journey hoping to find success stories, but my quest was tempered by an awareness that we can also learn from apparent failures. My goal was not to be a cheerleader for ecovillages but to truly study them, to transform my own life in light of what I might learn, and to share my gleanings with ordinary people who want the information about how to transform their lives and the inspiration to actually do so.

1  Jonathan Dawson, Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability, Devon, UK: Green Books, 2006.

2  Ross tells the story of GEN’s inception, including how a spiritual experience he had with Swami Muktananda inspired him to create Gaia Trust, in J. T. Ross Jackson, We ARE Doing It: Building and Ecovillage Future, San Francisco: Robert D. Reed Publishers, 2000.

3  www.context.org/about/who-we-are/robert-gilman.

4  www.context.org/iclib/ic29/gilman1.

5  Yaacov Oved, Globalization of Communes, 1950–2010, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012.

AROUND THE WORLD IN FOURTEEN ECOVILLAGES

Ultimately, sustainability will not be a choice. It is the nonnegotiable precondition for our earthly existence. Only because of the superabundance of nonrenewable resources and Earth’s seemingly infinite capacity to absorb our waste were we able to persuade ourselves otherwise. Like teenagers with our parents’ credit cards, many of us have been operating under the illusion that living within our means was optional. We’ve acted as if we had the resources of five Earths at our disposal. And it wasn’t just that we could behave like this; our culture told us (in so many ways, ranging from advertising to perverse government subsidies) that this is how we should behave.

As the tectonic pressures on our global socio-ecological system mount, we are fast approaching the day of reckoning. For some, that day has arrived, and they have transformed their lives accordingly. Having reached the day of reckoning in my own life, I set out to learn from those who have gone before me. As demonstration sites for every aspect of sustainable living, ecovillages were the natural place to go. Having taken the road less traveled by opting out of consumer society, ecovillagers have left tracks in the sand. I was determined to follow those tracks, to apply the lessons to my own life, and to share them with people who might never set foot inside an ecovillage.

Starting on the East Coast of the United States in the fall of 2007, I worked my way around the world via Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, concluding my journey in Los Angeles nine months later. I lived in each community for at least two weeks. This was long enough to see more than solar panels and composting toilets, long enough to get to know a few people. I interviewed ten members of each community, listening to their personal stories about their choice to leave the beaten path, along with the trials and triumphs entailed in that choice. I wanted to learn how contemporary people worldwide were answering that age-old question: how, then, shall we live?

The answers I found were diverse. Urban ecovillages focus on having fewer cars and higher-density dwellings, while rural communities focus on growing more food. Low-tech communities emphasize manual labor and locally available materials, while high-tech communities use expensive state-of-the-art environmental technologies. Ecovillages in affluent countries seek to overcome social alienation and reduce material consumption, while those in the less affluent countries aim to make existing villages economically and ecologically sustainable. Many ecovillagers are politically active on issues ranging from district school boards to climate change and genetically modified food, while others express their political views only through their lifestyles.

With these differences, I found some striking commonalities among ecovillagers in their basic perceptions about the world and themselves:

•  The web of life is sacred, and humanity is an integral part of that web.

•  Global environmental trends are approaching a crisis point.

•  Positive change will come primarily from the bottom up.

•  Saying yes is a greater source of power than saying no.

As a consequence of these beliefs, ecovillagers are unusually sensitive to their actions’ consequences, both near and far, and unusually open to sharing. Indeed, if I had to choose one word to express the taproot of ecovillage life, it would be “sharing.”

Because ecovillages share resources like land, food, living space, cars, and tools, the per capita consumption for every community is substantially lower than the average for its home country. I’ll speak about this in some detail in chapter 3. Many ecovillages have found creative ways of limiting their participation in the global economy, and so their average income is generally quite low. Yet the experience of community members seems to be one not of deprivation but of abundance. In the words of Capra, a member of the Italian ecovillage of Damanhur, “Even though I have less money, I feel richer here. There’s so much support.”

The sense of wealth seems to rest upon the intangible kinds of sharing that are the essence of community – the sharing of knowledge and skills, joys and sorrows, births and deaths. These are the signs of community I looked for in my nine months of ecovillage living. I experienced a principle I’d been theorizing about for years: the foundation for ecological sustainability is social sustainability, person to person. In many of the ecovillages I visited, I saw concrete demonstrations that a self-replenishing social order is based on relationships of trust and reciprocity. This isn’t easy to quantify, but I heard it expressed in many interviews and felt it, palpably, in the tenor of conversations during meals and community meetings.

For example, I attended a Sunday afternoon meeting at EcoVillage at Ithaca, where the future of their community farm was in question. Its profits were in negative figures. I braced myself for a tedious exercise in interminable decision-making, but I actually had fun. Like so many meetings at ecovillages, this one began with a ten-minute check-in, with each person saying a few words about how they were doing. A woman, whose husband had been ill, thanked people for bringing them meals. Several parents spoke about how their children were doing in the new school term. And there was a lot of excitement about a three-way birthday party that would be happening in the common house that evening. Those ten minutes seemed to clear the air and set the stage for tackling a tough agenda with a team spirit. People were succinct in their comments and friendly, even in their disagreements; they obviously took pleasure in being together.

Later, I asked a member of the ecovillage’s governing board, a university scientist, whether he would want to live in the community. He ducked the question but implied that, no, he would not want to spend alternate Sunday afternoons in meetings like this one. “Who would want to live with a bunch of idealists who discuss every issue!” he said with a laugh. But he added, “I’ve been pleasantly surprised, however, by the high quality of discussion. Frankly, it’s better than the university. The quality of the ideas is just as good, but it feels better because there’s not the arrogance.” From what I saw, he was right. For some at least, ecovillages offer fertile soil for the shift from individualism to synergistic interdependence.

This is not to say that ecovillagers are without ire or self-interest or tunnel-vision idealism. Those who decide to join a community can themselves endanger the success of that noble experiment because of personality quirks, destructive habits, and the glaring inconsistencies between their words and their actions. Arguments in ecovillages have become feuds, and feuds have led to pitched battles of will, as ecovillagers search for the right balance between forestland and fields, animal husbandry and animal protection, green values and creature comforts. At Earthaven, a rural ecovillage in North Carolina, debates over felling trees and drilling wells erupted into what one member called “a civil war.” I speak about this in greater detail in chapters 3 and 5; for now, it’s enough to say that disagreements over land use sparked a crisis of solidified stances all around. Ultimately, a few members left and the rest of the community entered into a two-year review of its mission and governance process.

In other words, ecovillages are not utopias; they are living laboratories. Some experiments may be successful and others not, but they are all opportunities for learning, and the people I met in these living laboratories seemed infinitely more interested in learning than in comfort, convenience, and security. It’s not that ecovillagers sacrifice all comfort and convenience; it’s that these are not their highest priority. Their commitment to learning – from one another from other communities, from the larger world – is a big part of what sharing means to them. Ecovillages share information about conflict resolution, consensus training, straw-bale construction, wastewater treatment, and so much more. In this sense, ecovillagers are like applied scientists, running collective experiments in every realm of life: building, farming, waste management, decision-making, communication, child rearing, finance, ownership, aging and death.

Hearing the stories of ecovillagers from all over the world, I came to appreciate that choosing to live in a hotbed of learning is not necessarily an easy path. It is a path of adventure.

Step by step

As I traveled from ecovillage to ecovillage, people were inevitably curious to learn about other communities and to hear my take on what I was seeing. While most ecovillagers had heard of the other communities I was visiting, few of them had ever seen a community other than their own. About midway through my journey, at Damanhur in Italy, a group asked me to do a slide presentation. A few dozen people came to see that embryonic version of the slideshow, which continued to evolve and grow in my travels. Each time I shared my photographs and experiences, I was grateful to have something from this project to offer the people who were giving so generously of their time to support it. Since returning from my journey, I’ve presented the ecovillage slideshow in churches, lecture halls, retirement homes, and family living rooms, enabling people in search of sustainability to circumambulate the globe with me from the comfort of their chairs.

The slideshow remains the simplest way of encapsulating my journey, and now, thanks to the wonders of technology, I can share it with a wider audience. To view these photographs, see the companion website for this book at www.ecovillagebook.com. The title, “Fourteen Seed Communities Take Root,” expresses both the diminutive scale of these ecovillages and also their extraordinary resilience and growth.

I like to think of ecovillages as a pioneer species. In botany, it’s known that whenever land has been devastated, whether through natural causes like fires and floods or through human activities like plowing and clear-cutting, there are certain tenacious plants that are the first species to grow. The pioneer species have deep roots that are strong enough to fracture rocks and release their minerals into the soil. These plants also serve as nitrogen fixers, fertilizing the soil by pulling nitrogen out of the air. And when the pioneer species die, their decomposition produces soil for later species. Typically, the pioneer species are not the most glamorous of plants – think thistle – but their restorative work is absolutely essential.

This is why, when criticism is leveled at ecovillages, I tend to defend them. Like pioneer species, ecovillages are preparing the ground for a viable future, and we can all learn from their experiments. These communities are attempting so much that I feel they must be forgiven if at times their greatest strength turns out to be, as well, their greatest challenge.