[Scpg] The Eco-village Challenge by Robert Gilman

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

The Eco-village Challenge http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC29/Gilman1.htm
The challenge of developing a community living in balanced harmony - with 
itself as well as nature - is tough, but attainable
by Robert Gilman

One of the articles in Living Together (IC#29)
Summer 1991, Page 10
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute | To order this issue ...


For humankind at the end of the 20th century there is hardly anything more 
appealing - yet apparently more elusive - than the prospect of living in 
harmony with nature and with each other. What are the possibilities for 
realizing this dream, and what are the highest-leverage actions that could 
help us all toward such a future? This issue explores this question by 
considering the current status and likely prospects for a particularly 
powerful approach to achieving this dream of harmonious living: the 
eco-village. We will also explore the broader concept of sustainable 
communities, and the idea of community in general.

There is, at this time, no generally agreed-upon definition of an 
eco-village. For the purposes of this issue, we will define an eco-village 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.


"A human-scale..." * Human-scale refers to a size in which people are able 
to know and be known by the others in the community, and where each member 
of the community feels he or she is able to influence the community's 
direction. There is considerable practical evidence, both in modern 
industrial societies and in other cultures, that the upper limit for such a 
group is roughly 500 people. In very stable and isolated situations it can 
be higher, perhaps as high as 1,000, while in situations typical of modern 
industrial societies it is often lower, even less than 100.

"...full-featured settlement..." * A "full-featured settlement" is one in 
which all the major functions of normal living - residence, food provision, 
manufacture, leisure, social life, and commerce - are plainly present and 
in balanced proportions. Most current human settlement in the 
industrialized world - urban, suburban, and rural - is entirely divided by 
function: some areas are residential, some are for shopping, some are 
industrial, etc. These districts are usually too large to be human-scale, 
even within a single function. In contrast, the eco-village is a 
comprehensible microcosm of the whole of society.

This does not mean that eco-villages have to be fully self-sufficient or 
isolated from the surrounding community. As an ideal, an eco-village will 
have as many jobs within it as there are employed people who live in the 
eco-village; but some of the villagers will go outside the village to work, 
and some of the jobs in the village will be held by people who reside 
outside the village.

There are also many specialized services that clearly cannot be located in 
each eco-village - hospitals, airports, etc. Yet with cooperation among 
villages, essentially any large institution could be successfully run by 
clusters and networks, permitting a fully functioning modern society to be 
mostly comprised of eco-village units.

"...in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural 
world..." * This idea brings the "eco" into the eco-village. One of the 
most important aspects of this principle is the ideal of equality between 
humans and other forms of life, so that humans do not attempt to dominate 
over nature but rather find their place within it. Another important 
principle is the cyclic use of material resources, rather than the linear 
approach (dig it up, use it once, throw it away forever) that has 
characterized industrial society. This leads eco-villages to the use of 
renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc.) rather than fossil fuels; to 
the composting of organic wastes which are then returned to the land rather 
than sending these to a landfill, incinerator, or sewage treatment plant; 
to the recycling of as much of the waste stream as possible; and to the 
avoidance of toxic and harmful substances.

"... in a way that is supportive of healthy human development..." * This 
fourth principle recognizes that eco-villages are, after all, human 
communities, and without genuine human health at the core, these 
communities are unlikely to be successful. What is "healthy human 
development"? To attempt a complete definition would take a book, at least! 
Suffice it to say here that I see this as involving a balanced and 
integrated development of all aspects of human life - physical, emotional, 
mental, and spiritual. This healthy development needs to be expressed not 
just in the lives of individuals, but in the life of the community as a whole.

"... and that can be successfully continued into the indefinite future." * 
This last principle - the sustainability principle - forces a kind of 
honesty on eco-villagers. Without it, it would be easy (or at least easier) 
in the short-term to create human-scale communities that seemed to be 
harmoniously integrated into nature and to be full-featured, but in fact 
were in some not-so-visible way living off the capital accumulated in other 
parts of the society; or dependent on unsustainable activities elsewhere; 
or not inclusive of a major aspect of life (such as childhood or old age). 
The sustainability principle brings with it a profound commitment to 
fairness and non-exploitation - toward other parts of today's world, human 
and non-human, and toward all future life.

Sustainable Community * The more general term "sustainable community" 
includes eco-villages, but it also includes clusters and networks of 
eco-villages, and non-geographically based "communities" (such as 
businesses) that are nevertheless human-scale in their components, diverse, 
and harmoniously integrated into the natural world. In this sense, an 
eco-village is a distinct place, either as a rural village or as an 
urban/suburban neighborhood. A city could not be an eco-village, but a city 
made up of eco-villages could be a sustainable community.

FORWARD, NOT BACK

If eco-villages are such a great idea, why don't we already live in them?

One oft-suggested response is that, in fact, most people already do live in 
"eco-villages" - that is, the best model for an eco-village is the 
traditional agricultural village - and to regain harmony with nature and 
with each other, all we need do is return to that traditional way of life. 
I disagree.

While it is true that there is much to be learned from these villages (they 
still contain about half the world's population), few people today - 
including most traditional villagers! - would describe these villages as 
either full-featured or supportive of healthy human development. The work 
is hard, life expectancy is short, opportunities for personal development 
and education are few (almost non-existent for women), and the diversity of 
livelihoods is small.

In addition, the harmony between these villages and the natural environment 
has often depended on low population densities - a luxury we no longer 
have. Traditional villagers around the world use three main types of 
agriculture: slash-and-burn, dry-land rain-fed, and irrigated. Of these, 
slash-and-burn is the most environmentally demanding and requires the 
lowest population density. But even irrigation, which supports the highest 
population density, can be environmentally damaging, as the ecological 
collapse of many past irrigation-based civilizations attests.

And finally, traditional villages are hardly paragons of harmony between 
humans. Village life is often, from a modern point of view, painfully 
patriarchal. Beyond the household there is feuding and mistrust within 
villages, between neighboring villages, and toward the world beyond.

True eco-villages, in contrast, are a distinctly post-industrial (and 
likely even post-agricultural) phenomenon. While they draw on lessons from 
all of human experience, they are not a return to any previous period or 
way of life.

Eco-villages grow out of the needs and opportunities caused by:
new ecological constraints - which grow out of high levels of population 
and technological capability;

new techniques and technologies, from better understanding of ecosystems to 
more diverse channels of communications; from efficient technologies for 
renewable resource use to new forms of human organization; and

new levels of consciousness and awareness, symbolized in part by the 
picture of the Earth from space, with all that means in terms of global 
consciousness and an awareness of the many-billion-year history of life on 
this one small planet in the vastness of the Universe.


In spite of its increasingly-evident lack of sustainability, industrial 
society has the momentum of hundreds of years of institution building and 
capital development. Given the enormous infrastructure and social 
patterning in place, it has so far been much easier for people to keep 
living in the same old unsustainable ways than to pioneer sustainable 
communities.

The answer, then, to why we aren't living in eco-villages yet is fairly 
simple: these needs and opportunities are so new we have not had time as a 
society to adjust to them. We are at the very beginning of a new era, and 
we can expect much of the development of technique and awareness that will 
characterize this era to be still ahead of us.

ECO-VILLAGE CHALLENGES

While it may seem more difficult to pioneer sustainable communities than to 
live within an untenable status quo, numerous groups have been doing so for 
decades (with precursors that go back much further), as some of the 
articles that follow will illustrate. To appreciate the difficulties these 
pioneers have faced, let's look at the various challenges that the 
eco-village vision entails.

The bio-system challenge * To fulfill the ideal that the activities of the 
eco-village be harmlessly integrated into the natural world requires that 
the eco-village find ecologically friendly ways to:
preserve natural habitats on the village land

produce food, wood, and other bio-resources on site

process the organic waste produced on site

render harmless any initially toxic waste from the village

recycle all solid waste from the village

process liquid waste from the village

avoid adverse environmental impacts off site from the production and 
delivery of any products brought in from off site

avoid adverse environmental impacts off site from the use and disposal of 
any products.


The built-environment challenge * To fulfill the ideal that the activities 
of the eco-village be harmlessly integrated into the natural world also 
requires that the eco-village:
build with ecologically friendly materials

use renewable energy sources

handle solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes from buildings in an ecologically 
friendly manner

have a minimal need for motorized transport

build in ways that have a minimal impact on the land and the local ecology.


To fulfill the ideal that the eco-village support healthy human development 
requires that the buildings in the community:
have a good balance of public space and private space

encourage community interaction

support a full diversity of activities.


The economic system challenge * To fulfill the ideal that the eco-village 
support healthy human development and be full-featured requires that there 
be significant economic activity in the eco-village. To fulfill the ideal 
of fairness and non-exploitation that is part of the sustainability 
principle requires that the economic activities of the members of an 
eco-village not depend on exploitation of other people and places, nor on 
exploitation of the future by the present. The implications of these goals 
are not as clear as, for example, the implication for the built-environment 
that energy sources should be renewable. Instead, we can identify some of 
the likely questions that an eco-village will face concerning its economic 
system:
What are sustainable economic activities, both in terms of what will 
sustain the members of the community and what is sustainable in ecological 
terms?

What parts of the community should be held in common and what parts owned 
privately?

More specifically, how should the ownership of land and buildings be handled?

How can we be simultaneously economically and ecologically efficient, so as 
to reduce both expenses and environmental impact?

What are the most appropriate forms of business organization for 
eco-village associated businesses?

Are there useful alternatives and/or supplements to the money economy for 
facilitating economic exchange within and between eco-villages?


The governance challenge * As with economics, the ideals of fairness and 
nonexploitation point eco-villages in a general direction, but do not 
provide clear guidance as to how these ideals are to be put into practice. 
Here again, however, we can identify some of the likely questions that an 
eco-village will face concerning its governance:
How will decisions be made, and which methods will be used for what types 
of decisions?

How will conflicts be resolved?

How will decisions by the community be enforced?

What will be the roles for, and expectations of, leader-ship?

How will the eco-village relate to the government(s) in the surrounding 
community?


The "glue" challenge * To deal with all these challenges the members of the 
eco-village need something that holds them together, some basis of shared 
values and vision that can provide a "glue". Developing and maintaining 
this glue is yet another level of challenge which will raise questions such as:
What is the appropriate interplay of unity and diversity?

What common values, behaviors, or practices will be expected in the group?

What, if anything, is the group's shared vision?

How shall the group discover, develop, and evolve that vision?

How close shall the group be interpersonally?

How is this closeness best developed?

How will the group relate to others outside the group?


The whole-system challenge * There is an even deeper, and often 
unperceived, "whole-system" challenge. Perhaps the biggest challenge faced 
by anyone attempting to create an eco-village is that it requires change in 
so many different areas of life. All too often community founders attempt 
to, or feel forced to, work on all aspects of these changes simultaneously. 
Almost all of these changes take longer than expected and are often more 
costly than expected. In addition, each area of change interacts with the 
other areas in unpredictable ways. In the process, financial resources, 
emotional resources, and interpersonal relationships can be put under great 
stress. When attempts to create communities have failed, one of the reasons 
has almost always been that the group simply tried to do too much too fast 
relative to the resources they had available.

The whole-system challenge is to get an honest sense of the scope of the 
undertaking and then develop an approach that allows the community to 
develop at a sustainable pace. In other words, sustainability is not just a 
characteristic of the "completed" community; it needs to be part of the 
thinking and the habits of the group from the very beginning.

Building a successful eco-village requires a balance of activities among 
three major phases - 1) research and design, 2) creation and 
implementation, and 3) maintenance - for each of the challenge areas.

It's helpful to use a simple diagram to represent the basic relationship 
between these challenges:




This is a "building block" diagram, in which some parts of the system 
"rest" on other parts. The bio-system and the built-environment provide the 
most obvious and visible "requirements" for an eco-village. They are the 
"top" building blocks.

Moving down the diagram, we see that it represents the idea that achieving 
success in the bio-system and the built-environment areas depends - is 
"built on" - successfully dealing with the economic and governance 
challenges. Success in these areas in turn depends on successfully dealing 
with the glue challenges.

Finally, all of the more specific challenge areas depend on successfully 
dealing with the whole-system challenge. It encompasses, rather than 
underlies, all the others. It is not a building block, but a living wholeness.

Given these challenges, it should be no surprise that as far as we have 
been able to discover, there are as yet no communities that fully express 
the eco-village ideal. This is the bad news. The good news is that there 
are many communities and other groups that have made considerable progress 
on every one of these challenges. There are even some communities that 
could, within a few years, be considered full eco-villages.

Those who would now turn their efforts to reaching this goal - either by 
starting a new community or by evolving an existing one - fortunately do 
not need to start from scratch. We invite you to read on.




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