Sustainable Villages and the United Nations

From The Permaculture Activist #11, 1997

"The pattern of settlements polarize us into a few megalopolitan areas with vast congestion and enormous emptiness with hardly anyone. On the one hand in the rural areas there is the total decay of culture because of cultural starvation and in the urban areas the total decay of culture because of corruption. We had the Habitat Conference about Human Settlements. Again one comes to the situation where people took this mostly abnormal developmental situation as normal. And of course no-one can teach our American friends when it comes to coining new words. They were freely talking about the megalopolitization of the world. I had to practice this word. If you follow this, you can see that this polarization inevitably will lead to ecological breakdowns because the impact which comes from this absurd distribution of mankind over the surface of the earth nature cannot take and it leads to unbelievable use of resources."

E.F. Schumacher, Findhorn, Scotland, 1976

You can't really blame the Habitat-II delegates who gathered in Istanbul in 1996 for not accomplishing any grand strategy for the future of cities. They were given an intractable problem to work with.

Somehow they were supposed to alter a trendline begun 6000 years ago, when the entire human population of the planet could fit into one of our cities today, and shape it to meet the needs of a planet waking to 238,356 new people every morning. There are now more people in just two countries than lived on Earth when the United Nations was founded.

The attraction of cities, to begin with, was as secure seats of power for the leaders of militaristic cultures. Centers for trade and commerce followed, and cities rather naturally sprouted like flowers in the fertile junctions of rivers and land routes.

Early cities were much more self-contained than are today's sprawling megalopoli. A view of Delft in the time of Vermeer finds as much space devoted to productive gardens inside the city walls as to buildings, roads, and waterways. This "garden city" approach enjoyed a brief renaissance in the mid-Twentieth Century, but was overwhelmed by the sheer pressure of swelling populations.

Today cities are too big, too complex, too capital costly, and too violent. But what is a city planner to do? Buck the course of history?

Clearly, we need a change of direction. We need housing that encourages social health. To borrow a phrase of Robert Loring's, we need Solar Streets and Wilderness Alleys. A well-planned community incorporates security for both the human population (including reliance on local and renewable resources) and for nature (ensuring that the present generation will not be the last).

Like all good things, such innovations start small and build on limited successes. Grand scale approaches are useful only when what is being accomplished is grandly good and appropriate for a larger scale.

That is why the best new idea to come out of Habitat II was "ecovillages" as an experimental model for sustainable development in the next century.

We shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that we can shunt 8 billion people into rural settings like some gigantic Campuchean revolution. Ecovillages will have to be located inside cities and suburban areas as well as on suitable tracts of unsettled land. Successful experiments will have to expand to 500 people, and 5000, and 50,000.

Nor can we ignore the truth that not even the most benign configurations of manageably simple and socially secure communities can hope to cope with incursions and external turmoil deriving inexorably from desperately unrestrained expansion of the human family.

Still, ecovillage experiments are blossoming in myriad climate regimes around the globe and show every promise of becoming a lasting revolution. In 1990, a group of us who have been living in such communities began asking how we best could share our resources to further the greater movement. In October 1995 we held a conference on "Eco-villages and Sustainable Communities" in Scotland, which was attended by over 400 people from 40 countries. Over 300 had to be turned away. The interest in the concept has been immense ever since.

In 1996 our group, now called the "Global Ecovillage Network," met again in Tennessee, Istanbul and Australia. We had a booth and ran some 40 workshops and seminars at the Habitat conference that attracted the attention of tens of thousands of visiting dignitaries and community developers from around the world. We had another booth and more seminars at IPC-6 in Perth. Our following has been steadily increasing. Our web site now gets more than 100,000 hits per month.

In Istanbul, we made a presentation to the United Nations in which we suggested that if 100 million dollars were allocated to furthering say, 50 to 70 ecovillage experiments now underway around the world, that more progress would be made to chart a course for sustainable development than all the academic, government and institutional studies being commissioned. We said, give it to the people doing that work on the ground. It will pay back a hundred times faster.

It is still early in the process for this sort of funding, and in the meantime our Ecovillage Network subsists on the kind donations of thousands of small contributors who are willing to part with $25 or $50 to further a good cause.

The concepts of living collectively and for a common purpose cross cultural boundaries---from the United States to Russia, India to Argentina, Scotland, Hungary, Egypt, and Australia. In every case, these communities work because people set aside petty differences to make a positive contribution to society as a whole. The effect is contagious and inspiring---as shown by the continual stream of new and exciting experiments that we keep learning about.

Since the Findhorn conference, GEN has established three additional network nodes in new regions that were not previously represented : Asociacion Gaia (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Kibbutz Gezer (Israel), and the International Institute for Sustainable Future (Bombay, India). GEN will host meetings in Russia and in South Africa in 1997 and weÕll be providing village design courses on 5 continents.

The prospective villagers we see at seminars tend to fall into three motivational categories: ecological, spiritual, and social.

The ecologically motivated are reacting to environmentally unsustainable policies, and tend to emphasize living in harmony with nature, adopting Permaculture as a way of life, and becoming more self-reliant.

The spiritually motivated are reacting to the spiritually barren philosophy of materialism and consumerism and what they perceive as dogmatic narrow-mindedness of many cultures. They tend to emphasize taking responsibility for their own lives and personal development.

The socially motivated are reacting to the alienation of the individual, the breakdown of the family, the increase in crime and drugs, and the marginalization of the weaker members of society. They tend to emphasize re-establishing "community" as a solution to social decay.

Irrespective of where people are coming from, the common factor would seem a desire to create a system that can continue indefinitely, balancing family and human values, a respect for nature, and practical ways to earn a living.

At a meeting of the Communal Studies Association in October, 1996, datakeepers for the institutions that follow such trends reported that the graph of newly forming intentional communities has taken a sharp turn upward in the past few years and could soon rival the explosive period of the early 70s. Their explanation? Ecovillages. Moreover, there is a qualitative difference. To quote one scholar:

"...the ecovillage movement has a much better chance of achieving its broader utopian objectives than have previous ventures: they repudiate coercion, but can be widely attractive over time because they are simultaneously countercultural and procultural, being in touch with deep sources in both traditional thought and contemporary understanding. The ecovillage movement is not just riding a sort-term wave of economic and social disorder, but is at the front of an historic global transformation of human ways."

- Robert Rosenthal, Hanover College, "Villages, Ecovillages and Ecotopia," 1996.

Albert Bates is author of Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What you Can Do (Summertown: Book Publishing Company, 1990) and regional coordinator for the Global Ecovillage Network. He can be reached at ecovillage@thefarm.org.