Are Ecovillages Impossible?

Pop question: are ecovillages aging out?

The trends don’t show it. More and more people are starting offgrid homesteads, buying cohousing projects with friends, and joining sustainable community real estate projects. There are even network states forming around this concept.

Maybe a more accurate way to phrase it is: what is happening to the ecovillage pioneers that started as free-spirited communities in the 70s?

They are being forced to transform. Some of them are facing struggles around intergenerational leadership, but because they are so well-known, they still welcome new members, skillfully acquire funds, and have established infrastructure and relationships with their local governments that they can coast on.

The real struggle happening now is that our generation of free-spirited thinkers are setting out to build a village where they can live harmoniously with others and the environment, and they’re hitting walls.

I’ve been an ecovillage researcher for 6 years. Let’s talk about where village building is headed.

Differences between ecovillage and regenerative village

My main problem with the word “regenerative” is that it’s multi-syllabic and hard to meme.

My secondary problem with it is that it’s an ambiguous concept that functions more as an ideal, inviting people to swoop in and try to police what is regenerative or not.

Yet it represents a profoundly holistic approach to our role in the ecology of planet and people.

And as I have been quoted saying in Moneyless Society documentary footage, regeneration “is only the most important social movement of our time”.

Regeneration has too many layers to peel right now, so instead I will ask a guiding question: how can communities support the regeneration of our planet?

What characterizes a regenerative village:

• Integrating regenerative practices, the main ones being agriculture and construction, since villages are land (re)development projects.
• Transforming degraded land with the intention to reestablish a mature ecosystem (read about the difference between regeneration and restoration).There are more grey versions of this, like communities buying castles or old historical buildings, and practicing a kind of cultural regeneration to reclaim spaces that were previously degenerative (I think of this community project outside Berlin built in an old prison or Selgars Mill building a regenerative village in a gorgeous old paper mill).
• Regenerative communities are acutely socially aware, combating inequity, building not for but from diversity, and acknowledging that most regenerative ideals originally come from indigenous practices.
• Although tech doesn’t determine whether it’s regenerative or not, regenerative villages are typically tech-positive rather than tech-adverse. They seek to integrate technology with nature.

Regenerative villages are not inherently better than ecovillages, but are definitively more modern in social and technological context. However, ecovillages represent a wealth of traditional knowledge that must be honored.

I tend to use the term ecovillage, because it isn’t syllable soup.

Hot take: “true” regeneration might even require more radical concepts like degrowth and #landback, because we need to go beyond solving existing problems and heal humanity’s deeper historical scars.

Why people struggle to build an intentional community in this day and age

3 Reasons:

• Money
• People
• Lack of knowledge

Money

I find that people with idealistic desires to “change the world” (myself included) characteristically lack the self-organization and relentless ambition to acquire resources we can allocate towards village building projects.

We are still learning how to market regeneration to people with lots of capital. Even through we have a cooperative culture, we need to create new ways to coordinate effectively to pool our own resources to achieve our aims.

People

Good old interpersonal conflict. And it’s not even that the involved humans aren’t suitable, but that they don’t have the suitable skills to thrive in community. We’re emerging from an individualistic society with a lot of wounds. We need tools to be healthier individuals and therefore healthier community members.

Lack of knowledge

Tools, resources, role models, case studies, hard data — you name it. Currently, if you want to know how certain projects “did it” you usually have to visit them, take some of their workshops.

Maybe you are lucky to find a good online course that teaches what you are seeking to learn (I’ll be breaking my list of favorite courses down in future articles). Either way, we are still organizing and packaging our knowledge and trying to increase access to that knowledge.

What would make villages more ‘possible’?

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Read the full article on the Terrenity Substack