"I'm kind of anti-utopian myself, although I am in favor of the human project continuing."
- James Howard Kunstler
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at.”
- Oscar Wilde
This past week the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) celebrated its 20th anniversary with a week-long conference in the Findhorn community in northernmost Scotland. Because of scheduling conflicts we were not able to attend but were grateful a small portion of the conference was live-streamed (and archived). Between sessions of our Permaculture Design Course here in Tennessee we were able to wade into that stream and recommend others do as well. As incoming GEN president Daniel Greenberg said, ecovillages are not about living together, they are about “the impulse ... this longing for inter-beingness. How can we be intimate with all life, with each other?”

When a whole new continent was first discovered by an off-course Italian navigator using maps purloined from the Chinese, Europeans did not do as the Chinese did a few centuries earlier and set up a few coastal settlements only to abandon them, but rather, they acquired native peoples' lands through trickery, slavery, pestilence and genocide and then invited religious fanatics of every stripe to come across the ocean and try out the wildest schemes.
See, e.g., Bethehem, PA; New Harmony, IN; Oneida, NY; Amana, IA, or Nauvoo, IL. In permaculture we call it “wild design.” You take a blank page and fill it. No rules, anything goes. From that process you get mostly duds and a few real gems.
Solheimer |
The word "ecovillage," as far as we know, was coined by architect George Ramsey, a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright who became a prototypical "New Urbanist" in the 1960s after observing the waste and ruin wrought by automobile culture. By the 1970s Ramsey was writing prescriptions for a reboot of the built environment to bring humans back into the natural world, hopefully before petrocollapse or climate change cans that whole unsustainable civilizational thingy, in the most painful way imaginable.

“As we rush toward the limits of our natural resources, our system — which is based on the increasing consumption of such resources — faces a serious threat of breakdown. Every aspect of life in the United States must be reevaluated in terms of the energy it consumes.”His prescription:
- Roads and parking should be eliminated wherever possible
- If a building—even a one- or two-story, solar-heated structure—is placed so that its usage requires long-distance travel in privately owned vehicles by the public, it would not receive a construction permit
- Building heights, in general, should be limited to three- and four-story walk-ups, thus eliminating elevators and simultaneously permitting the sun to reach street level.
- Light industries and businesses should be encouraged to move into existing bedroom communities.
- New villages and towns must be prohibited from agricultural land
- Streets should be reserved for bikes only
- Every possible non-polluting source of energy must be tested and—whenever possible—used in preference to fossil fuels, nuclear power, and other polluting sources.
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Declan Kennedy, Ross and Hildur Jackson, and Robert Gilman at the GEN Summit, 2015 |
In 1991, Robert and Diane Gilman, founders of In Context magazine, wrote an overview, Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities, for the Gaia Trust in Denmark. They came up with a definition that still works pretty well. An ecovillage is:
“…a fully-featured human settlement, with independent sources of initiative, in which human activities are integrated into the natural environment in a way that is sustainable into the indefinite future.”
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Kosha Joubert and Robin Alfred |

We will take a few of your minutes to describe that project here with the caveat that it is as yet a work in progress. As we read the material out loud to our permaculture class, we could see some eyes glaze over. Of course, we lack the passionate delivery of Kosha and Robin, but you can judge for yourself.

What are you going to do, start an ecovillage? You and what Rockefeller family member?
Enter the Evoneers. We could instantly see this as a perfect marriage between Robin's business consulting background and Kosha's nurturing of a movement in its infancy, daintily bound up with a Findhornesque gift bow. Evoneers is 9-step therapy for post-traumatic permaculture course adjustment.

The first step, Answering the Call / Igniting the Fire, is about getting past thinking about possibilities and starting to plan actualities. It is recognizing that each of us has an inner diversity of interests and talents but that none of us can succeed as solitary individuals. We need homo gestalt – a like-minded group. Step One is building an authentic, open and supportive team.
We could carry on to describe the whole methodology, but we will leave that to our readers to get from direct sources now online such as this video:
Efforts to turn fictional visions of utopia into real 3D paradise need not fail. We come from a well-watered garden planet and it is long past time we remembered our roots. As Thoreau said,
"In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
1 comment:
This hones in on what many of you out there have experienced (I have in my life)and what seems to short circuit ANY attempt to live that life of community and responsibility. The truth is, as I see it, is that many of us aren't leaders in the sense that we can start, with an accomplished vision, at going into the birth pangs of starting something that resembles an community, or Eco-village, in our economically, blackmailed life that most of us inhabit. All that many of us can hope for is to continue the fight to live a life of full awareness of where we are on this planet and in relation to one another. I can say for me, in my circumstance, that an eco-village in the truest sense is currently not a reality until we get shocked as a people into seeing that the current trajectory is aiming for a stone wall.
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