Eleven Ecovillages, Vegan Liverwurst, and Proof That Greed Is Optional

"a month-long overland cruise through Germany" 

I just got back from touring 11 German ecovillages, which is a bit like touring 11 different flavors of the same miracle — the miracle being that a critical mass of otherwise employable adults woke up one morning, looked at the conventional life plan laid out for them, and said, politely but firmly, “no thank you.”

That’s really the whole essay, if you want to leave now. But stick around, because the details are where the Germans, bless them, always overachieve.

Here’s what I keep noticing, tour after tour, decade after decade. Nobody stumbles into an ecovillage. You have to actively climb out of the trajectory your parents spent eighteen years constructing for you — the one with the tidy handrails and the guaranteed pension — and step off into the weeds on purpose. There be snakes there, and usually your parents watch fearfully, or tearfully, arms raised to their heads, muttering the German equivalent of “we did not raise you for this.”

The residents I met had all done exactly that, generally as young adults, generally against enormous domestic headwind, and generally because they’d stopped believing that getting theirs first, world be damned, was actually a viable life philosophy. They chose aparigraha — simplicity, non-grasping — over acquisition, and in the choosing ennobled themselves in a way no LinkedIn resume ever will.

The Man on the Cruise Ship

Declan Kennedy

My first stop in Germany wasn’t an ecovillage at all — it was a hospital, where my old friend Declan Kennedy was clinging to life at 92 after a rough turn. Neither of us knew if we’d get another visit after this one, which has a way of focusing a conversation.

Declan was teaching architecture at Darmstadt in the late 1960s when the futurist Constantinos Doxiadis invited him aboard a cruise ship touring the Aegean — the kind of invitation that sounds like a pool party until you hear the guest list. Margaret Mead. Marshall McLuhan. Economist Barbara Ward. Biologist René Dubos. Town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Jonas Salk. Buckminster Fuller. Epigeneticist Conrad Waddington. Arnold Toynbee. Architects Fumihiko Maki and Kenzō Tange. Whitney Young and Walt Rostow. They lounged. They feasted. They threw torchlit rituals on Delos. And in between the fancy dress parties, they casually reshuffled how the late twentieth century would come to rethink cities, ecosystems, neurobiology, and the future of civilization.

It was Declan — having studied under Bill Mollison — who first carried permaculture across the world to Europe. I met him and his wife, the economist-architect Margrit Kennedy, in September 1991 at Fjordvang, Denmark, where the Gaia Trust formed by Ross and Hildur Jackson had convened about twenty of us to further advance a newly released Eco-Villages and Sustainable Communities Report compiled by Robert and Diane Gilman at Context Institute. Declan and Margrit were there, along with Max Lindegger, Karl-Henrik Robèrt, David Korten, Marilyn Mehlmann, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Sunderlal Bahuguna, Rashmi Mayur, John Talbott, Stephan Wik, Preben Maegaard, and a dozen more people whose names read like a syllabus for a graduate course no university had the wisdom in the 1990s to offer.

We arrived at three findings, and thirty-five years later I still haven’t seen anyone improve on them:

• The model is fragmented. No single community had cracked the whole code. Findhorn had the spiritual dimension nailed. The Farm in Tennessee had the social economy dialed in. Crystal Waters in Australia had the ecological permaculture sorted. Everybody was good at their one thing, like a potluck where each guest only knows how to make dessert.

• Human scale or bust. For any of this to work long-term, settlements needed to stay human-scale, full-featured, and woven into the surrounding ecology — not bolted onto it.

• Trust the practitioners, not the theorists. We decided the future belonged to the people actually doing the digging, not the people writing about the digging. We also guessed the movement’s next foothold would be the post-Soviet world. We were partly right — the Anastasia movement did take root there — but the real momentum, it turned out, came from the Global South, not the overdeveloped North. Predicting the future is a humbling hobby.

That Fjordvang meeting eventually birthed Gaia Tech, Gaia University, and the Global Ecovillage Network. And thirty-some years on, here I was in Germany, correcting the homework assignments.

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The Village That Refused to Die

Some of what I saw on my 3-week tour were post-unification reinhabitations — towns that had one foot in the grave and decided, collectively, to yank it back out.

The first stop was Lebensgarten in Lower Saxony, which Declan and Margrit were largely responsible for creating and where Declan (thankfully) returned to, following our hospital visit, on the mend and eager for morning dance circle. Lebensgarten was constructed as a P.O.W. camp for Russian and Polish captives who were set to work making mines and munitions in the adjacent chemical plant in 1941. There are mass graves there. After the war, it became residential housing for the occupying Allied Forces. Then it was abandoned for a few decades, only to be squatted and eventually purchased in the 1980s by German hippies and artists with ökodorf on their minds.

 

Morning circle in Lebensgarten, this one celebrating the birthday of Anton Marks (seated)

Flegessen-Hasperde-Klein Süntel is a Dreidorfgemeinschaft—a three-village community—near Lebensgarten. Aging population, shuttered schools, hemorrhaging economy: the usual rural death spiral. So the 1,500 residents did the natural thing and formed a committee — the Ideenwerkstatt Dorfzukunft, an “Ideas Workshop for the Village Future” — open to every age and every political flavor. Out of it came an art-house cinema in the old church, a regional school, a self-mocking film collective, a village newspaper called the Süntelblatt, a real-estate agency specializing in “new life in old walls,” a repair café, a carpool schedule, a housing project taking shape in the former parsonage, and — the crown jewel — the Dorfladen, a volunteer-run shop selling nothing but organic regional groceries, which lets everyone buy good food cheap because nobody’s taking a cut. Somewhere a rural development consultant is quietly furious. Those towns that were circling the drain are now attracting outside business, including an organic cracker company giving jobs to the underemployed. Crackers saved the village. My rural area in Tennessee should learn from that. We have no shortage of Crackers.

A much smaller operation, L’Arche Friedenshof, has resettled an old Crusades-era farmstead near Neustadt am Rübenberge with fewer than a dozen residents and a cluster of new solar buildings. Don’t confuse it with the Jean Vanier L’Arche communities — this branch descends from Lanza del Vasto, a direct disciple of Gandhi, so the household runs on Ahimsa, simple living, and a Thich Nhat Hanh-flavored zen spirituality. They pool their income entirely. If you want a sense of how seriously they take shared purse, imagine explaining a joint checking account to your extended family and having them not flinch. 

The pebble floor at L’Arche Friedenshof 
dates to the Crusades, when the building 
was a Benedictine Monastery

The Kommunes: Shared Purse, Serious Spreadsheets

Speaking of shared purse — that’s the whole operating system at Niederkaufungen and Lebensbogen.

Niederkaufungen, founded in 1986, rebuilt itself inside a traditional half-timbered urban shell and now runs a conference center, day care, a fruit cannery, a CSA, a guesthouse, event catering, carpentry, metalwork, and an insulation company, plus bike parking and repair — a small municipality in the shape of a commune. Sixty-plus adults, twenty-some kids, a million euros a year in revenue, and a heating system that would make a German engineer weep with pride: combined heat and power, wood-fired backup, solar thermal for hot water, rainwater harvesting, and recycling loops closed tighter than a Swiss watch.

 

 

Lebensbogen, founded in 2015 near Zierenberg outside Kassel, sits on the edge of the Habichtswald Nature Reserve in a former youth hostel that — this is not a joke — was originally built after World War II to train young Germans not to become fascists. Twenty residents are still doing that work, now under the shadow of the Helfensteine volcanic outcrops, hosting seminars on climate activism, syntropic agroforestry, and permaculture, officially blessed by UNESCO as an actor for sustainable development. Everyone works for the co-op and draws about 450 euros a month in discretionary spending — but if you want a 2,000-euro e-bike, you can just... take it from the treasury. No committee vote required. I have never once, in forty years of intentional-community reporting, heard a sentence more likely to give an accountant a stroke. “Dare to Trust” was the theme of this year’s GEN Europe Gathering at Nature Community. At Lebensbogen, they have a color code on the wall in the community dining room. Green means go ahead and spend; we are in surplus this month. Yellow means slow down, stick to essential needs. Red means we are underwater this month, so everyone needs to think about ways to elevate community revenues while spending less.

 

Clocks at Niederkaufungen: Timelessness, binary time, CET/CEST, commune time, retro, no time

The Castles: Not Actually Castles

A German Schloss is not a castle, whatever the turrets suggest. It’s closer to a Mexican hacienda — the manor of a wealthy patron, complete with café, shops, and sprawling gardens and animal barns.

Schloss Tonndorf comes with a 40-meter watchtower, stone buildings, orchards, meadows, and a small forest, all being lovingly restored since 2005 by about 65 adults and children running a café, a seminar center, catering, a dairy, beekeeping, an orchard boasting hundreds of apple varieties, naturopathy, and a forest kindergarten. It’s essentially a Renaissance fair that also does your taxes. There is an actual drawbridge and moat on this one.

Schloss Tempelhof, founded 2010 in the sunflower country of Baden-Württemberg, bills itself as a “workshop for the future” and backs it up: 130 residents plus a wider circle of regional collaborators run a CSA, a farm store, a free school, the Schloss Café, a community kitchen, workshops with a full production hall, car-sharing, a library, and an earthship — orbiting the castle like a satellite moon.

Schloss Blumenthal has another Earthship gypsy camp in orbit, where you go for the sauna and cacao circle. Blumenthal has 700 years of history behind it — former monastery, later a wealthy family holding — before eight families bought the place at a distressed price (1 million) in 2006. Today, 7 million euros more down the hole, its 18 buildings house 43 adults and 18 children running a hotel, seminar center, 2 tavern/restaurants, a popular beer garden, a vast CSA, goat husbandry, a cheesery, art galleries, and a farm store. In the USA, this gorgeous spa might have been converted into luxury condos. Here, the ancient monastery has become a goat-cheese and dunklebeer cash cow.

The Collectives: Nightingales and Peace Work

In 2016, the Nature Community took over a former vacation resort in the Black Forest foothills near the Czech border — a border that spent the Cold War being “the end of the world” from either side and is now just a very pleasant place to grow food and swim naked after emerging from the sauna. A generous donor made the purchase possible and the gourmet-vegan hotel and restaurant sustains 40 adults and 15 kids running on solar power, permaculture, syntropic agroforestry, keyline design, and a gift economy that funds global peace work. Transparency and nonviolent communication round out the household rules.

ZEGG, near Bad Belzig outside Berlin, has one of the stranger origin stories on the tour: a spinoff of a free-love encounter group that spent thirteen years developing its social tools before buying, in 1991, a former Stasi spy-training camp. Nothing says “reclaiming the site of state surveillance” quite like building a culture around radical transparency. Instead, ZEGG’s signature contribution is the Forum, a gestalt therapy practice for collective authenticity.

Thanks in part to a visit by ZEGG’s Achim Ekler to The Farm, since 2013 they’ve been composting humanure with biochar and feeding it back to their crops with results good enough to make them food self-sufficient. ZEGG is one of Germany’s first Cool Villages. With a strict no-pet policy, a dozen nightingales have moved back in, providing nightly concerts with frogs and quail. To keep ZEGG from quietly drifting into an assisted-living facility, the community doesn’t accept new members over age 47. 

 And then there’s Sieben Linden, which I first visited not long after its 1997 founding in a former East German village. Today it’s home to just over 100 adults and 40 kids, plus a rotating cast of seasonal volunteers, living in eleven straw-bale houses and roughly forty gypsy bungalow trailers. All new construction is required to be done in straw-infill timberframe with natural plaster, because if you’re going to build a house out of hay you may as well commit. An ecologically restored half-timbered farmhouse anchors the community kitchen, shops, and seminar rooms; the gardens produce 400 apple varieties, 300 pear varieties, and every nut or berry the climate will tolerate, adding up to 90 percent food self-sufficiency. Composting toilets, an on-site sewage plant for the apartments, firewood, and solar panels close the loop.

Meditation Room at Schloss Blumenthal

Structurally, Sieben Linden runs as a cooperative with its own land trust and building trust. A monthly meal plan will run you 240 euros; a caravan bungalow, 200. Pub nights are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; film night is Friday — which, besides straw insulation, tells you everything you need to know about how a functioning intentional community actually survives the German winters or summer heat. Governance runs on consensus-minus-one: if you block a decision, it goes to committee, but you’d better show up with an alternative plan, because “no” by itself doesn’t count as valid.

What 11 Villages Add Up To

Thirty-five years after that meeting in Fjordvang, the fragmentation we diagnosed back then is still true — nobody has built the one perfect village that does everything. But watching these communities up close, fragmentation starts to look less like a flaw and more like a feature. Findhorn does spirit. The Farm does enterprise. Crystal Waters does ecology. Niederkaufungen does infrastructure. ZEGG does radical honesty and, apparently, nightingale rehabilitation. Nobody has to do it all, because between them, they already are.

The through-line, the thing that connects a repurposed Stasi camp to a 700-year-old monastery to a village that reinvented itself around a cracker company, is that same original decision: somebody, at some point, looked at the trajectory they’d been handed and got off. Their parents were not always thrilled. The nightingales came back anyway.

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Seiben Linden Car Park

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to end the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We have a pipeline to aid in the West Bank that may only last a short time, so we appreciate immediate donations—right now.

We support Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road, and we work to heal collective trauma worldwide through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVI.cool). I appreciate your support.

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

We now have our own merchandise store on Redbubble. Swing on in for the latest wearables and chachkas….

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion,