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18-12-2023

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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 -  President of Context Institute
Founding Editor of
IN CONTEXT, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture

http://www.context.org/iclib/ic29/gilman1/

 

Français

Partout dans le monde, un outil de vivre durablement émerge : les éco-villages. Plus qu’une communauté d’habitants voulant un plus fort lien avec l’environnement, les éco-villages sont définis comme : « un établissement avec toutes les fonctionnalités sociales à l’échelle humaine dans lequel les activités humaines sont intégrées sans nuire au monde naturel dans une manière qui soutient le développement sain des êtres humains et qui pourrait être continué  l’avenir indéfini » (Traduction de Gilman, 1991). Chaque partie de cette définition contient des idées importantes, et une compréhension de ce qu’est un éco-village nécessite une explication de chaque partie.« Un établissement avec toutes les fonctionnalités sociales » décrit une communauté qui a des habitations, l’approvisionnement de la nourriture, le commerce, le travail, l’emploi, les en droits pour les loisirs, et un fort esprit de communauté. Cela ne veut pas dire qu’un éco-village doit être auto-suffisant – souvent, les éco-villages sont liés aux villes voisines. Un éco-village à l’échelle humaine implique une taille qui permet à chaque personne de connaître tous les autres habitants et d’être connue par tous autres habitants, et qui donne a chaque individu l’opportunité d’influencer la direction de la communauté. La partie éco du mot éco-village vient de l’idée que les activités humaines sont intégrées sans nuire au monde naturel. Le recyclage, l’utilisation durable des ressources locales, et l’efficacité énergétique servent comme des exemples de comment un éco-village maintient un équilibre avec la nature. Le développement sain des êtres humains est composé des pluri facteurs, mais en bref, un éco-village donne à ses habitants une vie qui aide au développement de soi-même ainsi que le développement social et économique. La dernière partie de cette définition n’est pas souvent obtenue – elle exige qu’un éco-village puisse survivre pérenne (Gilman, 1991).Robert Gilman a créé cette définition d’un éco-village – qui est une des définitions la plus souvent citée – en 1991 pour classifier une tendance qui était à cette époque relativement nouvelle. En ce temps-là, il y avait déjà plusieurs éco-villages autour du monde (Gaia Trust). Au cours des années suivantes, les éco-villages sont devenus de plus en plus reconnus, et de plus en plus nombreux. Aujourd’hui, il y en a 535 selon une base de données des éco-villages créée par le Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) éparpillés partout dans le monde. La Figure 1 montre une carte du monde mise à jour tous les jours avec l’emplacement des éco-villages.
http://www.academia.edu/3515956/Les_%C3%A9co-villages_un_levier_pour_le_developpement_durable

 

ENGLISH

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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Dr. Robert C. Gilman, Ph.D.
President of Context Institute
Founding Editor of IN CONTEXT, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture

Astrophysicist
The first phase of Robert's life was devoted to the sciences. He received his bachelor's in astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University in 1969. He taught and did research at the University of Minnesota, the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and served as a Research Associate at NASA's Institute for Space Studies.

 

Sustainability visionary
The second phase of Robert's life began in the mid 1970s when he decided that "the stars could wait, but the planet couldn't." He turned his attention to the study of global sustainability, futures research, and strategies for positive cultural change. With his late wife Diane, he designed and hand-built their own solar home in 1975 and then in 1979 they founded the Context Institute, one of the earliest NGOs to focus directly on sustainability.

In 1983 Context Institute began publishing IN CONTEXT, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, with Robert as the editor. IN CONTEXT became internationally acclaimed and in 1991 and 1994 won the Utne Readers Alternative Press Award for "Best Coverage of Emerging Issues." During this phase Robert developed a wide background in all aspects of sustainable development including cultural history, innovation theory, sustainable economics, and greening of the built environment.

He and his family were also actively involved in Citizen Diplomacy with the former USSR. They were instrumental in the founding of the Global Ecovillage Network, and lived for three years in Winslow CoHousing, one of the first cohousing projects in the US based on this Danish model for community living.

During this time Robert and Diane also raised their two children, Ian (b. 1971) and Celeste (b. 1981). Robert was a key resource for their home education.

 

And now ...
The third and current phase of Robert's life began in the second half of the 1990s when Diane developed a brain tumor. The intense personal journey of serving as Diane's primary care-giver during her last 6 months deepened his appreciation of and connection to the underlying mystery of life.

In addition to his on-going direction of Context Institute, he has recently helped the Findhorn Community in Scotland developed a community constitution and established its own self-governance and served as faculty in Antioch University's Environment and Community Master's program.

 

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