[PDF]JDawson EcovillageDream

The Ecovillage Dream Takes Shape



Along the Petite Cote, just south of the Senegalese capital Dakar, the mangroves are
growing back. Already, just three years into their re-planting programme, the villagers of
Mbam are seeing their lands become more fertile as the mangroves filter out the
saltiness of the sea-water and a return of fish and other sea food as their marine
ecosystem begins to restore itself to health. After years of silence, the air is once again
filled with the sound of bird-song.

In the high hills around Kandy in the very heart of Sri Lanka, the villages associated with
the Buddhist NGO, Sarvodaya, are thriving: in Matale, a village-owned and managed
bank is providing micro-credit for a host of different small-scale, village-based activities -
handicraft production, milk-processing, blacksmithing, organic vegetable production.
Sarvodaya now works with around 17,000 villages nationwide.

In the far north of Scotland, a community of 450 people, the Findhorn Foundation
community, is birthing a new model for vibrant local economy in the European context:
using its own community-owned bank and money system, developing a community-
supported agriculture scheme to reduce food-miles, generating much of its own power,
re-using and recycling most of its own waste.

In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a town of several thousand people, Auroville,
has been growing up over the last 35 years with the aim of becoming "a universal town
where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive
harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities". To date, over two million
trees have been planted to stabilize and refertilize the soil, canyons have been dammed
and hundreds of fields bunded to prevent water run-off. There has also been much
experimentation in developing environmentally-friendly building techniques and in
recycling waste water, while solar power is widely used for pumping and heating water
and providing electricity.

**Something here from North America**

Other than being great good-news stories, what do these five vignettes have in
common? Each of the five communities in question calls itself an 'ecovillage' and all are
members of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).

So, what is an ecovillage - and can any one word that attempts to incorporate such a
great range of social, cultural and ecological conditions retain any value? "Ecovillages",
asserts GEN, "are human-scale settlements, rural or urban, in the North or in the South,
that strive to create models for sustainable living. They emerge according to the
characteristics of their own bio-regions and typically embrace four dimensions: the
social, the ecological, the cultural and the spiritual combined into a systemic, holistic
approach that encourages community and personal development".

Communities that have tread lightly on the Earth have, of course, always been with us.
For much of the life of our species, this has been how we have lived, our impact limited
by the scale and nature of our technologies and our numbers kept in check by the food-
supply in our specific bioregions. The progressive globalisation of our economies over
the last five hundred years, however, has shattered all such controls. Today, in the
North, we are beset by the disease of affluence and all of its associated discontents -



isolation from others and from the very land and food that sustain us, loss of community
and of identity, disempowerment in the face of all-powerful business and government.

Meanwhile, the viability of low-impact communities in the South is under threat both from
the transfer of much of the most productive land from food production for local needs to
export for consumption by the global consumer class; and from a bombardment of media
and advertising images glorifying life in the money-rich North and denigrating that
elsewhere. As life in the villages becomes harder, the young lose cultural self-
confidence and seek to escape to the consumerist Eldorado promised to them nightly on
their television screens. And everywhere, human numbers grow.

Just one system - the neo-liberal, globlised economy - can be seen to be underlying
both the alienation and disempowerment of the spiritually-deprived North and the
erosion of the cultural and economic integrity of low-impact communities in the South.
Similarly, the ecovillage concept offers a single model, albeit with manifold local
manifestations, as a response to this crisis. At the heart of the model lie a celebration of
cultural, spiritual and ecological diversity and the impulse to re-create human-scale
communities in which people can rediscover healthy and sustainable relation to self,
society and the Earth. It is a model in which the skills and worldview of the peasant
farmer and small-scale artisan are not a problem to be solved by the development
planner but an asset to be cherished. It is a model that offers citizens and communities
worldwide the opportunity to ground our visions for more sustainable and joyful ways of
living in our own places.

The global ecovillage movement draws inspiration and traces its roots back through
diverse lineages. One important thread is the ideal of self-reliance and spiritual enquiry
kindled in the world's religious communities and ashrams over the millennia. When
asked recently what was the earliest genuine ecovillage I could think of, my mind drifted
back to the small, democratic, decentralised Celtic monasteries of sixth century Ireland
that kept alive the flame of literacy and learning during the European Dark Ages.

This thread is most evident today in communities like the Catholic I'Arche in France and
among the various Buddhist ecovillages dotted across south and east Asia. However,
the spiritual impulse is also deeply embedded in many non-monastic initiatives including
the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, the Auroville community in India and among
communities that form part of the New Age movement in the West. Among all of these,
Ghandian principles of self-reliance, decentralisation and spiritual enquiry remain of
paramount importance.

The first widespread usage of the term 'ecovillage' in the modern era was among
German peace activists who created settlements based on ecological principles (okodorf
- literally ecovillage) next to the nuclear plants against which they were protesting. The
magazine Okodorf Informationen began publishing in 1985 and later evolved into the
current journal, Eurotopia. Following German re-unification, the movement coalesced
into the wider ecovillage movement.

In parallel, following on from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the publication
of the Limits to Growth report in 1972, rumours grew that all was not well in Paradise
and that technological development might not, after all, hold the key to human
happiness. The Back to the Land and hippie movements represented a rejection by
youth of mainstream, materialist values, a yearning for reconnection and the launch of



myriad experiments in the re-creation of community in the West. The co-housing
movement, launched in Denmark but spreading rapidly internationally, represented a
less radical but no less important attempt to create human settlements that tread more
lightly on the Earth while offering to their residents a real sense of community and
belonging.

Meanwhile, treading firmly in the footsteps of Ghandi, Fritz Schumacher proposed the
development of intermediate technologies as key to the evolution of more human-scale
and community-based societies. While his efforts and those of the organisation he
created, the Intermediate Technology Development Group, were primarily geared to the
context of the Third World, his ideas found a growing number of advocates in the
industrialised West and small-scale, affordable, decentralised technologies emerged as
a key element of many of the new community-based experiments emerging in all corners
of the Earth.

Perhaps the final major thread woven into the ecovillage tapestry is the alternative
education movement. Deeply dissatisfied with a state education system primarily
designed to train young people as workers and consumers within the industrial growth
economy, many created their own models and systems, aiming for a more rounded and
holistic approach.

Each of these diverse threads have lent their own distinctive flavour to the ecovillage
movement. Indeed, a core strength of the movement is that each of the places calling
themselves 'ecovillages' (and many that do not) have borrowed from each of these
movements - monastic, Ghandian, peace activism, environmental activism, hippie, co-
housing, intermediate technology, alternative education - in different measure, creating
a rich mosaic of diverse initiatives sharing broad core values.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Robert and Diane Gilman in Seattle used their
magazine In Context, to publish stories and interviews describing ecovillages as a
strategy for creating a more sustainable culture. In 1990, the newly-formed Gaia Trust,
funded and driven by Ross and Hildur Jackson, invited In Context to produce a report,
Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities, to catalogue the scattered efforts under way
across the world and to describe the emerging philosophy and principles in greater
detail.

From this point, the movement was greatly aided by the emergence of the Internet as an
international networking tool and, ironically for a movement so strongly based on an
ethic of small-scale technology and self-reliance, it was the computer that enabled the
movement to discover its true strength and diversity. A conference at the Findhorn
Foundation in Scotland in 1995 entitled 'Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities -
Models for the 21 st Century' drew 400 participants from around the world with a further
300 turned away. At this conference, the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) was born
with the dual aims of strengthening the network from within and communicating the
ecovillage experience to mainstream policy-makers, planners and the general public.

Today, GEN carries the ecovillage message into all of the main governmental and civil
society forums. It is a leading participant in a United Nations training programme to help
local governments worldwide implement Agenda 21 , has consultative status as an NGO
at the United Nations, is represented at events such as the World Summit on



Sustainable Development and the World and European Social Forums and addresses
countless conferences and seminars world-wide on sustainability-related themes.

To reach a global figure for the number of ecovillages in existence very much depends
on how and what you count. Sarvodaya, for example, a member of GEN, works with
around 17,000 villages throughout Sri Lanka; does that count as one member or
17,000? One member of the network in Senegal in turn, works with 350 villages.
Similarly, 13 of the European members are national ecovillage networks. So, does that
make 13 members, or do we also count in the many initiatives affiliated to these national
networking organisations? What is beyond dispute is that this is a significant, large and
growing movement.

To see how the various elements that go to make up the ecovillage movement can come
together in most beautiful and creative synergy, let us go back to where we began, in the
village of Mbam on Senegal's Petite Cote. Mbam is one of 20 villages in the country that
have been accredited as ecovillages in Senegal (twenty more are currently awaiting
accreditation). At the heart of the network in Senegal is an alliance of six sector-specific
NGOs that have been inspired by the potential offered by the ecovillage movement for a
more holistic, integrated and values-based approach to development. Between them,
they have expertise in mangrove restoration, reafforestation, permaculture, micro-credit,
mother and child heath care, renewable energy and water management.

Already, villagers from Mbam have received training in mangrove restoration,
reafforestation and permaculture and there are plans to introduce more new skills and
technologies. Village trainees are also trained as trainers and there is an active
programme for sharing their newly-acquired skills with neighbouring villages. GEN
Senegal plans to have Mbam as one of its four regional centres for research, training
and demonstration of intermediate technologies and sustainable lifestyles.

Senegal is also one of the hubs of GEN's international education effort. Undergraduates
come to Senegal from Europe and North America - some independently and some
through the Living Routes programme that provides accredited semesters for students
from US universities in ecovillages in India, Scotland and the US as well as Senegal.
Over 200 such students have passed through Senegal over the last five years. Before
these students arrive in the country, they are helped to identify a research project and a
counterpart Senegalese student is assigned to each. The foreign students live in host
families and, where appropriate for their research project, also travel with their
Senegalese counterparts to spend time in the villages.

The potential here for rich, mutual learning and multi-cultural appreciation is great
indeed. In a country where mass tourism brings its usual sad baggage of child sex
abuse and an undermining of indigenous culture, it is truly inspiring to witness such rich
and mutually-beneficial human contacts. The education is radical and empowering,
knowledge and intermediate technology are geared towards meeting the needs of the
people, traditional beliefs and cultures are respected and validated, healthy relations
between communities and their eco-systems and restored and the world is quite simply
a better place.

This is the ecovillage movement at its best: exploring the fertile edges between North
and South, environment and development, education and activism, spirit, culture and
natural ecology. The movement is still young and in need of pioneers. It represents a



vehicle for people and communities to realise their highest dreams. Empower
yourselves. Join us!

For further information, please contact Jonathan Dawson at ionathan@gen-europe.org