Sustainable, sharing communities explored in Karen Litfin’s book ‘Ecovillages’

The fields of Konohana Ecovillage all lie under the watchful eye of Mt. Fuji (Image courtesy of Karen Litfin).

After twenty years of teaching global environmental politics at a major research university, watching the state of the world go from bad to worse, I became increasingly curious: “Who is devising ways of living that could work for the long haul?” My research led me to ecovillages: communities the world over that are seeding micro-societies within the husk of the old. I traveled to 5 continents, living in 14 ecovillages and doing in-depth interviews with their members over the course of a year, and publishing the results in Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community. My sampling reflects their diversity: rural and urban; rich, poor and middle class; secular and spiritual. I was also curious to know what, if anything, unifies the astonishingly diverse Global Ecovillage Network.

I learned that “sustainability” varies with context. Ecovillagers in the Global North focus on reducing social alienation, consumption and waste, whereas those in the Global South focus on village-based employment, gender equality and food sovereignty. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, is an island of frugality in the heart of Southern California’s consumer culture, whereas Colufifa, a Senegal-based village network, is primarily concerned with hunger prevention. Yet both are drawn to bicycles and permaculture, suggesting that ‘sustainability’ has some common ground in east Hollywood and west Africa.

Most important, I found evidence of an emerging common worldview in the global ecovillage movement, including these basic tenets:

• The web of life is sacred, and humanity is an integral part of that web.
• Global trends are approaching a crisis point.
• Positive change will come primarily from the bottom up.
• Community is an adventure in relational living—ecologically, socially, and psychologically.

As a consequence of these beliefs, ecovillagers are unusually sensitive to the consequences of their actions, both near and far, and unusually open to sharing. If I had to choose one word to express the essence of ecovillage culture, it would be sharing. Because ecovillages in the Global North share material resources, both their consumption and incomes are quite low compared to their home country averages. At Earthaven in North Carolina and Sieben Linden in Germany, for instance, members had annual incomes of less than $12,000. Despite being far below the poverty line, they described their lives as “rich” and “abundant.”

Material factors like self-built homes and home-grown food tell only part of the story. A more encompassing explanation is the prevalence of sharing—not only of property and vehicles, but of the intangibles that define community: ideas, skills, dreams, stories, and deep introspection. Ecovillagers consistently reported that human relationships are both the most challenging and most rewarding aspects of ecovillage life. “Being here is like being in a fire,” said one. “Your lack of trust, your anger, your family neuroses—everything that separates you from the world comes out here!” Ecovillages are, as much as anything, laboratories for personal and interpersonal transformation.
In many ways, my global journey was a paradoxical one. As an international relations scholar acutely aware of the global nature of our problems, why was I touring micro-communities in search of a viable future? Even including the 15,000 Sri Lankan member villages in Sarvodaya—by far the largest member of the Global Ecovillage Network—less than 0.05% of the world’s population lives in an ecovillage. Time is far too short to construct ecovillages for 7 billion people but not—as the book’s final chapter, “Scaling It Up,” suggests—too short to apply their lessons in our neighborhoods, cities and towns, countries, and even at the level of international policy. Given that some of Earth’s life-support systems may have passed the tipping point, success is far from guaranteed. What is guaranteed, however, is a sense of shared adventure and worthy purpose—qualities I found in abundance in ecovillages.
—-
This post was written by Karen Litfin, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. You can read the first chapter of her book Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community here.

 

Peter Kelley

News and Information

The forest provides firewood for the 40,000 Tamil villagers who live around Auroville, founded in 1968 in South India. Auroville is now home to 2,000 people from 43 different countries and is one of the few places on Earth where biodiversity is actually increasing.

Karen Litfin is a University of Washington associate professor of political science and author of the book “Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community.” She answered a few questions about the book, and her work, for UW Today.
Q: What is the main message of “Ecovillages”?
A: After teaching global environmental politics for two decades and watching planetary conditions deteriorate, I grew disenchanted with top-down solutions. I also grew tired of making my students anxious, depressed and guilt-ridden. If our ways of living are unraveling planetary life-support systems, then we must answer the question: How, then, shall we live?
My search for models led me on a one-year journey around the world to ecovillages, intentional communities aspiring to live sustainably. Living in 14 ecovillages on five continents taught me that not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over.

“Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community” was published by Polity.

The point, however, is not that we all should live in ecovillages; rather, we need to learn from them and scale up their lessons to existing social structures, from the household to our neighborhoods to our cities, nations and even to the level of global governance.
Q: How did you choose which ecovillages to visit?
A: I took a year to map my journey and arrange the logistics. I selected for “success,” which I conceived as an amalgam of factors including longevity, size and reputation. Most communities I visited, for instance, had a 10-year history with at least 100 members.
Because I wanted to understand the movement’s global character, I also selected for diversity: rural, urban and suburban; global north/global south; rich, poor, and middle class; secular, religious and spiritual: high-tech and low-tech. Across this enormous diversity, I then looked for the common strands.
Q: You write amusingly that the term “ecovillage” may conjure images of “shabby rural outposts populated by long-haired iconoclasts,” but that you found them less easy to pigeonhole. How instead would you describe them, and what do they have in common?
A: I saw a few scruffy shacks but for the most part, I found tidy, smallish homes that reflected a kind of organic beauty. I also found unusually capable and articulate people committed to integrating the four dimensions of sustainability: ecology, economics, community and consciousness.
I learned that “sustainability” varies with context. Ecovillagers in the global north focus on reducing social alienation, consumption and waste, whereas the global south focuses on “sustainabilizing” traditional rural villages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, is an island of frugality in the heart of consumer culture, whereas Colufifa, a Senegal-based village network, works to prevent hunger.
Yet both are drawn to bicycles and permaculture, suggesting common ground between east Hollywood to west Africa.
Most important, I found ecovillages embrace these basic tenets:

• The web of life is sacred and humanity is an integral part of that web.
• Global trends are approaching a crisis point.
• Positive change will come primarily from the bottom up.

If I had to encapsulate ecovillage culture in one word, it would be sharing. Because ecovillages share material resources, both their consumption and incomes can be far below their home country averages.
Material factors like self-built homes and home-grown food tell only part of the story. More important is the prevalence of sharing — not only of property and vehicles, but of the intangibles that define community: ideas, skills, challenges, and celebrations.

One year, 14 ecovillages:
Auroville — India
Colufifa — Senegal, the Gambia
Crystal Waters — Australia
Damanhur — Italy
Earthhaven — North Carolina, USA
EcoVillage at Ithaca — upstate New York
Findhorn — United Kingdom
Komohana — Japan
Los Angeles Ecovillage
Sarvodaya — Sri Lanka
Sieben Linden — Germany
Svanholm — Denmark
UfaFabrik — Germany
ZEGG, Center for Experimental Cultural Design – Germany

Q: How does the ecovillage movement, if we can call it that, differ from “back to nature” trends of previous decades?
A: Ecovillages are far more integrated into society and many of them are in cities. Rather than separating themselves, ecovillages tend to be educational centers; their members tend to be socially and politically engaged. The Global Ecovillage Network, for instance, works with the United Nations and the European Union.
Q: You note people saying, “That’s all fine for those lucky ecovillagers, but what about the rest of us?” How do you reply?
A: We should understand that being an ecovillager is more a consequence of inspiration and hard work than luck. And, because sustainability is the nonnegotiable precondition for inhabiting Earth over the long haul, “the rest of us” would be wise to learn from ecovillages.
Q: This has been a very personal journey for you. How has this work changed you?
A: First, the journey gave me a strong sense of grounded hope: I have seen and touched some seedlings for a viable future. Second, while ecovillages are not for everyone, some people yearn for the intimacy, focus and integrated solutions of ecovillage life. I learned that I am such a person.
Third, I wanted to write a book that would be both emotionally and intellectually engaging, which required learning a whole new way of writing — and therefore thinking.
Q: Based on what you’ve learned, what suggestions would you offer to people looking for sustainability in everyday life?
A: Beyond the green practices that most of us are familiar with —conservation, recycling, minimizing fossil fuel consumption, etc.— I would emphasize the social dimension of sustainability.
The stronger the sense of community, the more we are willing to share. Beyond our households and neighborhoods, we need to scale up the lessons to every level of governance.

Photos by Karen Litfin.

Karen Litfin was “thoroughly impressed” by her first stop, Earthhaven, a 320-acre off-the-grid community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. In its 15 years, she said, the community has created “a rapidly evolving expertise in forestry, a range of natural building styles, 100 percent energy and water self-sufficiency and several thriving farms — all in what was once raw forest.” This the Council Hall, a 13-side structure built by the community.

The forest provides firewood for the 40,000 Tamil villagers who live around Auroville. “Founded in 1968 upon a severely eroded plateau in south India, the first order of business for the pioneers was to revitalize the land. Three million trees later, Auroville is home to over 2,000 people from 43 different countries and is one of the few places on Earth where biodiversity is actually increasing,” Litfin writes.

Larger homes are built with compressed earth bricks, made from a simple machine pioneered by Auroville’s Earth Institute, and run on solar electricity.

Litfin attends a meeting of village leaders in Colufifa, in Senegal and the Gambia. Colufifa is not an ecovillage exactly, Litfin notes — more a Senegal-based network of 350 West African villages seeing to become self-sufficient. Meeting topics ranged from plastic bags clogging local waterways to poultry vaccination programs.

Sekou Bodian teaches high school biology in Colufifa by day and, with the help of a light bulb and a small generator, plants trees at night. By his estimate, he has planted 300,000 trees in his lifetime.

Findhorn, in Moray, on the northeast coast of Scotland, was formed in 1962, Litfin writes, “when three spiritual seekers with no previous gardening experience transformed a barren, windy bluff on the North Seat into a cornucopia.” Litfin herself spent some time working in the garden.

Konohana Family, Litfin writes, is an ecovillage “that sits under the towering presence of Japan’s Mt. Fuji (and) takes its name from the goddess once thought to inhabit this venerable mountain.” The village is almost completely food self-sufficient, and here residents prepare organic vegetarian meals for hundreds of people in the region. As of 2012, the village comprised about 58 adults and 25 children.

L.A. Eco-village was founded in 1992 in a multiethnic neighborhood in East Hollywood. “As a consequence,” Litfin writes, the village “is the most ethnically diverse community I visited.”

Litfin writes that she at first glance, the village’s two renovated tenement buildings were unremarkable. But around back, she found the village’s “lush permaculture garden is alive with free-range chickens, a compost pile, and dozens of varieties of fruit trees and vegetables.”

“In a country where agrochemicals are used intensively, Sarvodaya trains farmers to cultivate rice (shown here) and other crops organically,” writes Litfin. “When people ask how many ecovillages there are in the world, I tell them it depends upon whether you count the 15,000 Sri Lankan villages working with Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest nongovernmental organization.”

Litfin writes of this off-the-grid German ecovillage, “Its commitment to one-planet living and a spacious rural environment make Sieben Linden an ideal hands-on learning community for classes and workshops. Founded in 1997 and named for Linden trees on the land, the village is one of several that Litfin says “sprouted in the fertile soil of the East after German reunification.

Svanholm, a rural Danish community, is “a prosperous and highly functional commune,” Litfin writes, with most of its 85 adults and 56 children “living in small ‘home groups’ in this enormous 1749 manor house.” She adds that the commune’s 988 acres devoted to organic farming “dwarf those of most ecovillages and its farmers have played a pivotal role in setting Danish — and therefore European Union — organic standards.”

UfaFabrik, in the heart of West Berlin, was founded in 1979 when about 100 peace activists took over an abandoned Universal Film Studio site, Litfin writes. “Eventually, they gained title to the land and transformed the old film studio into a 160,000-square-foot state-of-the-art ecological demonstration site” visited by up to 200,000 people a year.

All members participate in communal work in this community west of Berlin founded in 1991 called ZEGG, or the Center for Experimental Cultural Design (or Zentrum für esperimentelle Gesellschaftsgestaltung). Here, members raise a big tent for the community’s annual summer camp. Litfin writes that for 15 years, the community has offered courses on a group process to explore feelings developed there called The Forum, “as a tool for fostering greater self-awareness and social bonding.”

Litfin writes, “Not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over.”

Source: http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/07/15/sustainable-sharing-communities-explored-in-karen-litfins-book-ecovillages/

When reading Karen Litfin’s inspiring book, I was reminded of my recent visit to the Lancaster Cohousing community on the edge of the village of Halton in northwest England. For more than 10 years, young professionals have been battling with planners, bankers, architects and local residents to build some 40 eco-homes in a rural location, centred around a common house, which features shared facilities such as kitchen, laundry and pantry. Community members also co-run car-sharing and food-buying cooperatives.

The UK’s planning laws are not exactly conducive to setting up such sustainable ventures, as the Lammas community in Pembrokeshire also found out. Setting up shop there was even more complicated, as the community hoped to take over agricultural land and live on it as smallholders, which is impossible within the current legal framework.

Thanks to devolution, however, Wales now has an innovative sustainable development scheme called One Wales: One Planet, which enables rural, land-based livelihoods to be created. To meet its planning permission, Lammas must follow strict rules to minimise its impact on the ecosystem. The community achieves this by following permacultural, off-grid design standards, mimicking nature to sustainably manage the land, in stark contrast to the monocultures of contemporary industrial agriculture.

Lammas and Lancaster Cohousing are the sort of eco-villages that Litfin, a political scientist at the University of Washington, would love. They are part of a growing movement of intentional communities experimenting with new ways of sustainable living. In her quest to learn more about such communities, Litfin travelled the world, visiting 14 ecovillages on five continents. This book is her way of making sense of this research experience, as well as part of a very personal growth story. In lively, honest and reflective prose, she offers deep insight into how this research project has been part of her own mission of living more sustainably.
While Litfin provides us with a range of practical information about the principles of ecovillage organising – including countless nuggets of inspiration that will be useful to anyone, not just those intending to live in communities – she also puts forward a theoretical framework for analysing these emerging ways of sustainable living.

What she calls her “four windows into sustainability” – ecology, economics, community and consciousness – are not particularly new. The triple bottom line and three-legged stool approaches have defined sustainability as the balancing of ecology, economy and society for a long time. Litfin, however, adds the “inner dimension of sustainability, the deeper questions of meaning and cosmological belonging that have informed human existence for ages”.
Their thoughts dominated by economics – jobs, healthcare and education costs – many people in so-called developed countries have lost this dimension of consciousness, as well as their deep connection to nature. The natural world is more likely to enter people’s lives through consumption – eg, organic supermarket food – than via a real connection to the land.
Although the ecovillages Litfin visited are mostly based in developed countries – housing well-educated professionals, like me, who want to exit the rat race by reconnecting to people and the land – it is important to bear in mind that many developing countries are still dominated by rural, land-based communities. Their livelihoods are often threatened by large-scale so-called “development” projects: mining, dams, agri-businesses and forest plantations.

Any attempt to reconnect to the land in the rich world should be celebrated, but we must not overlook the struggles faced by poor rural communities trying to carve out a land-based living at the edges of industrialised capitalism. For the rich to go back to the land is important. Equally important is to enable the poor to stay on the land and make a decent living.

Source: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/ecovillages-lessons-for-sustainable-community-by-karen-t-litfin/2010456.article