Ecovillages

New Frontiers for Sustainability

Jonathan Dawson

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781903998779
• eBook ISBN: 9780857843494
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Ecovillages - local communities which aim to minimise their ecological impact while maximising human wellbeing and happiness?- are found all over the world. They incorporate a wealth of radical ideas and approaches which can be traced back to Schumacher, Gandhi, the 1960s, and the alternative education movement. This Briefing describes the history and potential of the ecovillage movement, including the evolution of the Global Ecovillage Network. The ecovillages movement promotes: learning from the best elements in traditional and indigenous cultures; community banks and currencies; low-impact living; organic, local food production; and reviving small-scale participatory governance. Faced with climate change and diminishing oil supplies, this Briefing examines the lessons that we can learn from ecovillages to live sustainably.

Chapter 1

Tracing the threads in the ecovillage tapestry

Ecovillages are the newest and most potent kind of intentional community, and in the vanguard of the environmental movement that is sweeping the world, I believe they unite two profound truths: that human life is at its best in small, supportive, healthy communities, and that the only sustainable path for humanity is in the recovery and refinement of traditional community life.—Robert J. Rosenthal, Professor of Philosophy, Hanover College, USA

Ecovillages seem to have burst suddenly onto the scene. The term ‘ecovillage’ had not even been coined 30 years ago. Today, it proliferates under a dizzying array of guises. A web search on the word ‘ecovillage’ takes the browser on a journey through the world of intentional communities in the industrialised North, community development projects in the poorer countries of the South, luxury tourist destinations worldwide (the benign nature of whose ‘eco’ features tends to be dwarfed by the impact of simply getting there), large-scale, developer-led housing projects and education centres (often with little or no associated resident community). This truly is a term that has entered the zeitgeist, even if, in the process, it has made sacrifices in terms of clarity of definition.

However, the concept—if not the specific term—has a much longer lineage. The journey towards an understanding of what is meant by the term ‘ecovillage’ in the current context takes us back to the late 1980s. Most alternative measures of human well-being (alternative, that is, to the conventional measure of money flows as reflected in Gross Domestic Product) show that quality of life in the industrialised world peaked in the mid-1970s and has been going downhill ever since, even while GDP has continued to climb. In parallel, global ecological footprint studies suggest that around the same moment we moved into overshoot, eating into the Earth’s natural capital rather than, as previously, living off its naturally and sustainably replenished bounty.

By the late 1980s, the fall in quality of life was tangible. Ozone holes, species extinctions and deforestation pointed up serious problems of resource depletion and environmental degradation. Community integrity was being steamrollered by economic policies favouring mass production and distribution and the free flow of capital across the globe. Meanwhile, increases in the rates of crime, depression, drug abuse and suicide were sure indicators of the growing alienation and anomie experienced by many.

The response of governments to these problems was, on the whole, weak. This was the apogee of the Thatcher/Reagan era, and the frontiers of the state were being rolled back. Corporations were growing in power and it was becoming progressively more difficult to find a candidate for political office who dissented from the neo-liberal, growth-through-trade agenda. The environment was relegated to the fringes of debate and the problems of the socially marginalised were to be addressed through trickle-down growth policies.

The political vacuum that resulted stimulated a growth in what has since come to be called civil society. There was a rich profusion of informal, citizens’ initiatives and of popular debate and activism outside national parliaments. Seeds were sown that would sprout into the mass popular demonstrations in Seattle, Genoa and beyond. One of the emerging themes of the period was the question of how to address the challenge of living sustainably. With mounting evidence of, on the one hand, progressive ecological and social dislocation and, on the other, limited formal political response to these problems, citizens’ groups began to wrestle with the challenge of creating models for sustainable communities.

Two nodes of activism in this field combined to play a catalytic role in the emergence of the modern ecovillage movement. Hildur Jackson is a Danish social activist who had been involved in the emergence of ‘cohousing’, a model for human settlements in which a number of households cluster together around a ‘common house’ where members eat communally and where shared resources—laundry, garden tools, play space, etc., depending on the preferences of each individual group—are stored. While this model enjoys some success in both helping to re-build a sense of community and reducing overall levels of consumption as a consequence of a sharing of resources, Hildur and some of her colleagues remained dissatisfied. Their conviction was that a deeper and more far-ranging transformation was needed in how humans live on the Earth than the cohousing model (which generally permits its members to continue to live fairly conventional lifestyles) could deliver. She and her husband, Canadian entrepreneur Ross Jackson, established Gaia Trust and set about seeking to identify leverage points for facilitating the emergence of more radical experiments in low-impact and convivial human settlements.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Robert and Diane Gilman were using the pages of In Context magazine, of which they were joint owners and editors, to explore the emergence of experiments in sustainable community and to showcase the best and brightest examples. In 1990, Gaia Trust engaged the Gilmans to undertake a study of best practice in the field of sustainable community and their report the following year, ‘Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities’, highlighted international best practice and provided a series of recommendations on how Gaia Trust could have greatest impact in “helping the movement make the transition from the experimentation stage to the take-off stage (and beyond)”.

Some twenty-six initiatives were described in the report as “shoulders to stand on” for the movement. These included traditional villages, cohousing communities, alternative communities in both town and country, the Mondragon network of cooperatives, a Nepali permaculture support project and a Philippines-based network for grassroots sustainable development. The report was a bravura effort of synthesis, bringing together a range of contexts and experiences and attempting to draw from them common themes and attributes for the type of communities that could be pioneers in the transition to a truly sustainable society.

The Gilmans’ report defined an ecovillage as a

human scale full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.

The ecovillage concept as envisioned in the Gilmans’ report did not represent some attempt to return to an idealised past. The aim, rather, was to create a new synthesis that would draw on the best of human expertise in treading lightly on the Earth, community-level governance and the application of modern, energy-efficient technologies.

A contrast was drawn between the growing specialisation, gigantism and alienation of mainstream society with “. . . a human-scale integration of functions, so that the ecovillage becomes a comprehensive microcosm of the whole society”. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that the ecovillage model was seen as mirroring a transformation in how we understand the world—mirrored in the findings of complexity theory and systems thinking—emphasising the connections and relationships between activities, processes and structures. This was seen as permitting the development of a broader understanding of what constitutes sustainable community, with ecovillages as the microcosmic, physical manifestation of a new holistic worldview.

Further, the vision was one of total societal transformation along ecovillage lines: “. . . a key principle in our definition of ecovillages and sustainable communities is that they be designed so that a fully-functioning society could be mostly comprised of such units.”

The report described the nature of the challenges facing ecovillages in six different areas: “integration into the biosystem; built environment; economy; governance; glue (or values); and whole-system challenge.” This listing underscores the most distinctive and generous gift of ecovillages to the wider sustainability movement: namely the attempt in the many and multifaceted environments in which ecovillages are active, to design, build and behave in a holistic manner, with the various physical and social technologies integrated into a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. This is a theme to which we will return repeatedly through this book.

The Gilmans’ report formed the centrepiece of a meeting in Denmark in 1991 attended by twenty leading thinkers in the sustainability movement, including Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, and economist David Korten, as well as the Jacksons and the Gilmans. The meeting concluded that what was most urgently required was good examples of what sustainable and convivial communities might look like. It also noted, on the basis of the Gilmans’ report, that there were solid grounds for believing that a wave of initiatives exploring just this territory was already gathering steam.

Before turning to explore how the Gaia Trust set about facilitating the development of ecovillages, it is of value to locate the types of initiatives that were being seen as the harbingers of the new age of sustainability in their correct historical and philosophical context. The ecovillage pioneers were looking to the intentional communities movement in the industrialised world as a major source of hope and inspiration. These can be characterised as initiatives generally undertaken by small groups of private citizens to create micro- or small-scale settlements (the Gilmans’ report set an upper limit of roughly 500 people on ecovillage settlements), largely independent of governmental support and often seeking to create visionary, alternative modes of community.

Seventeen of the Gilmans’ twenty-six ‘shoulders to stand on’ initiatives can be defined as intentional communities, all but two of which are in the global North; moreover, the two Southern communities—Auroville in India and Aztlan in Mexico—have a significant expatriate, Northern population. At the time of the writing of the report, thirteen of the communities had a population of less than 100 people.

Were such intentional communities a relatively recent phenomenon at the time of the Gilmans’ report? Emphatically not. Communities scholar Bill Metcalf reckons that the first intentional community that we would recognise as such today was Homakoeion, developed by Pythagoras in about 525 BC (though he acknowledges that some Biblical scholars consider the eighth-century BC prophet Amos as the first recorded intentional community designer!).

Since then, the intentional communities movement has waxed and waned. Notable moments of waxing included the second century BC, when around 4,000 Essenes lived and worked together in their commune overlooking the Dead Sea; the centuries following Patrick’s mission in Ireland when Celtic monasteries flourished; the millenarian communes (including those of the Cathars) of the European Middle Ages; the Diggers of seventeenth-century England; the communal initiatives inspired by Robert Owen’s New Lanark; and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in many countries of Europe where, according to Metcalf, community builders and dwellers “sought not to retreat into a bucolic, spiritual, non-material world, but envisioned modern intentional communities, using modern technologies, to liberate people from capitalist oppression”. The most recent upsurge of interest in intentional communities is in the age in which we live today.

Diverse threads are woven into the fabric of the modern-day intentional communities movement. One important lineage, apparently as old as the movement itself, is the ideal of self-reliance and spiritual enquiry kindled in the world’s religious communities This thread is most evident today in communities like the Catholic l’Arche in France and quasi-monastic communities like Plum Village, created in France by the exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. However, the spiritual impulse is also deeply embedded in many non-monastic initiatives, including the Auroville community in India, and among groups that form part of the New Age movement in the North. Among all of these, Gandhian principles of self-reliance, decentralisation and spiritual enquiry remain of paramount importance.

Closely related, and perhaps the most powerful modern manifestation of intentional communalism, is the kibbutz movement in Israel. The kibbutz model offered the creators of the new state the opportunity to marry principles of self-reliance, social justice and nurturing of the cultural and religious values at the heart of Zionism. At the peak of the kibbutz movement, they played home to seven per cent of the population of Israel and provided the heart of the new state’s economy.

Many other contemporary threads are also woven into the ecovillage tapestry. The Back to the Land and hippie movements of the 1960s and 1970s represented a rejection by youth of mainstream, materialist values, a yearning for reconnection and the launch of myriad experiments in the recreation of community in the West. The cohousing movement, launched in Denmark and spreading rapidly internationally, represented a less radical but no less important attempt to create human-scale settlements that tread more lightly on the Earth while offering to their residents a real sense of community.

Many who were active in both the environmental and feminist movements began to see the links between the patriarchal oppression of women and the domination and destruction of the Earth which, like women, was seen as a passive resource to be exploited for profit and which could and would reproduce on demand. The emerging small-scale, egalitarian communities were seen as ideal laboratories for the birthing of a new society, based on ecological principles and in which men and women might coexist as true equals. In common with several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiments, a number of today’s intentional communities also experiment with moving beyond what is seen as the repressive, socially sanctioned norm of heterosexual monogamy.

German peaceniks created settlements based on ecological principles (ökodorf—literally ‘ecovillage’) next to the nuclear plants against which they were protesting, in the process moving beyond rejection of nuclear weapons to being proactively ecological. Meanwhile, treading in the footsteps of Gandhi, E.F. Schumacher proposed the development of intermediate technologies as key to the evolution of more human-scale and community-based societies. His efforts and those of the organisation he created, the Intermediate Technology Development Group (recently renamed Practical Action), were primarily geared to the context of the global South. But his ideas found a growing number of advocates in the North, and decentralised, human-scale technologies emerged as a key element of many of the new community-based experiments.

The alternative education movement provides another important motivation for modern-day communards. Deeply dissatisfied with a state education system primarily designed to train young people as workers and consumers within the industrial growth economy, many created their own models and systems, aiming for a more rounded and holistic approach. Alternative, holistic education continues to be the core activity and largest single source of income for many intentional communities.

The new element that has been the primary driver of the current upsurge in interest in the communities movement has been growing awareness of the seriousness of the ecological problems faced by humanity. The failure of governments to address this crisis in any systematic manner has led people in unprecedented numbers to conclude that the core direction of mainstream society is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be reformed from within but must, rather, be transcended from without.

Many of those communities that include the need for ecological sustainability at the forefront of their raison d’être, along with social justice, peace and the creation of a human-scale society, are now calling themselves ecovillages. This is such a strong trend that, in the words of Bill Metcalf: “Ecovillages are becoming so popular throughout much of the world that many people imagine them to be the only type of intentional community.”

The ecovillage pioneers were not, however, pinning all of their hopes on the resurgent intentional communities movement. For, in a genuinely new and radical departure, the ecovillage concept was also to embrace popular movements in the global South. Several of the ecovillage pioneers had been seeking to build bridges between visionary movements in the North with Southern-based organisations and networks for some time. Hildur Jackson, in her work as co-ordinator of the Nordic Alternative Campaign, had, for example, developed a working relationship with Helena Norberg-Hodge, whose work in Ladakh proved such an inspiration to the pioneers of the modern ecovillage movement.

Other visionaries from the South, or having strong connections with it, were also pulled into the debate on how to shape a global sustainable communities movement. These included Ari Ariyaratne, director of the Sarvodaya organisation, which works with around 15,000 villages nationwide in Sri Lanka; Rashmi Mayur, president of the Glob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword by Dr Caroline Lucas
• 1 Tracing the threads of the ecovillage tapestry
• 2 So, what do ecovillages look like?
• 3 Saying Yes: beyond the politics of protest
• 4 Challenges
• 5 Cutting Edges: ecovillages on the new frontiers of sustainability
• Resources
• Copyright