The Eco-village Challenge
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
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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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