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Last week The New Statesman, a British current affairs magazine, carried a story about the LA Ecovillage in its online edition. The blogger, Johnathon Dawson, usually writes about life at Findhorn, an ecovillage in Scotland.
I want to devote my blog this week to an extraordinary development unfolding in a poor, multi-ethnic, working-class neighbourhood some 6,000 miles from here - in inner-city Los Angeles.
Why on Earth would I do that is a column called Life At Findhorn?! Well, first because we are part of a much larger global family, one of whose members, the Los Angeles Ecovillage, is engaged in quite wonderfully distinctive and inspiring work. Second, because I have just returned after spending ten days there, participating in the annual board meeting of the Global Ecovillage Network."
The Threat
"It is great, if all too rare, to see an ecovillage get stuck in in an urban context, really working in cooperation with their neighbours and helping transform and humanise an entire neighbourhood.
Now, however, the initiative is under threat - and this is where you, dear reader, may just be able to help. The LA school department is planning to locate yet another school in the neighbourhood - there are several there already. This would entail demolishing 35 affordable housing units (all to rare in the city) and even more bussing in of kids from other parts of town.
The ecovillagers are fighting it tooth and nail and have set up an online petition asking the authorities to find another site. If you feel inspired, visit http://www.laecovillage.org/ and sign up."
In co-working, a group of freelancers or other solo entrepreneurs share one big office space with perks that they might not get at home, such as conference rooms, espresso machines and opportunities for socializing.
From the New York Times:
While coworking has evolved since 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.
Coworking comes in many flavors. The Hat Factory in San Francisco is a live-work loft that’s home to three technology workers who open up during the day to other people. Some companies, like Citizen Agency, a San Francisco Internet consulting firm that has done the most to evangelize coworking, have an open-door policy, in which people rent desks but others are free to drop in and use the Wi-Fi or the conference room.
We are excited to see this cooperative endeavor taking root around the country and around the world. Hopefully the spirit of sharing and community will thrive in these environments.
Abundance Ecovillage in Fairfield, IA made the local news with a wonderful piece on their growing ecologically focused community. The piece focused primarily on the ecological aspects: solar and wind power, energy conservation, rain water catchment, waste water treatment, food production, etc.
Co-founder Lonnie Gamble started the project after several people approached him about how to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, "Their beer is cold, their showers are hot, but we do it with one-tenth of the energy a conventional home would use."
The Ecovillage has room for 50 to 70 people to make their home for about the same cost as building a new home in Fairfield. But here there are no electric, water, or even sewage bills to worry about. Gamble asks, "If we can build homes like that for about conventional cost, why do we build anything else?"
The big media splash in cohousing these days is about Senior or Elder Cohousing, and some might say cohousing's core constituency is among the boomer generation. But recent posts on Trendcentral and Treehugger are noting that cohousing also has appeal for Gen X and Gen Y.
A lifestyle trend that first started back in 1960s Denmark, co-housing may be making a comeback among progressive Gen Xers and Ys....While co-housing used to be a fringe movement, it is now resonating with Xers and Ys who are starting families, searching for community and looking to pool resources.
While I don't understand how cohousing's continually fast and steady growth can be described as a "comeback", its not surprising that Gen Xand Gen Y want in on the action. It seems the appeal of cohousing cuts across generations and its only a matter of when people get into the home buying market that they will start taking a look at cohousing.
With grass-roots ecovillages pioneering sustainable living, the mainstream wants in on the action. The Guardian reports that the government in the United Kingdom has plans to build 10 carbon neutral ecotowns by 2020. The towns will have up to 5000-20,0000 homes, 10-100 times the size of most ecovillages, but will share a focus on ecological living.
Most important, the whole town has to be carbon neutral. This means the amount of energy taken from the national grid to run the town is less than or equal to the amount put back through renewable power.
There are also groups working on helping ecotowns be car free but its not clear who will be helping the government develop the social sustainability aspects of the "three-legged stool" they mention on their ecotown website:
It is appropriate to start with an understanding of sustainability as a "three legged stool": in addition to environmental considerations there are the less well understood but no less important aspects of social and economic sustainable development to consider.
Perhaps they will be able to learn from the rich tradition of ecovillages and intentional communities in the UK on how to create opportunities for community and create a spirit of cooperation towards their ecological goals.
If only the US government were investing in sustainability at this level...
You've heard of Christian radio, how about Krishna radio? Well, New Vrindaban, an intentional community in West Vriginia, is seeking a license for a full power radio station so it can broadcast on such topics as yoga, vegetarianism and lessons from The Bhagavad Gita.
New Vrindaban was established 40 years ago by the funder of the Hare Krishnas and is now home to 20 devotees and has 80 or more people connected to the community in the surrounding area.
For many outsiders, the community's biggest draw is its Palace of Gold, an ornate, Indian-style temple that looks entirely unlike anything you'd expect to encounter in West Virginia. The site is visited by upwards of 40,000 pilgrims and tourists a year, many from India.
The community is still gathering signatures for its petition to the FCC and there is serious competition for the available frequencies in their area. We wish them luck.
We've been wanting to have more video pieces on Community Buzz but video on community is just not as easy to find. We hope to start posting at least one video a week but to do so will need to include not just the latest and greatest videos. If you have a favorite online video on community let us know.
This week we're featuring a video from CurrentTV, a TV station started by Al Gore that gets much of its content from videos posted online and voted on by internet viewers. CurrentTV definitely has a lot of video related to sustainability and community and we're sure to bring you more from their site in the future.
This 12 minutes video is a tour of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Tennessee. Ecovillage activist Albert Bates guides you through the center's myriad of ecological learning facilities. Produced by Dharma Dog Pictures.
The 18 minute audio program focuses on the ecological features of the community including energy efficiency and design to minimize driving. The cohousing units received a LEED Platinum rating, the highest rating awarded by LEED.
The Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm is a new 29-unit co-housing development being built in Peterborough, NH. The community features state-of-the-art, energy-efficient homes; a working organic farm; seven wood pellet boilers for electricity and hot water; and "roughed in" plans for photovoltaics and solar hot water systems. Stephen Lacey visited the site and brought back this story.
Greenway Park is one of the first cohousing projects created exclusively for low-income residents (most such projects are for middle- to upper-middle-class residents, and a few are mixed income) and is structurally a rental project (most cohousing raise construction funds by preselling units). Also, the building is the first affordable housing project in Chicago to have no professional manager. Greenway Park is self-managed by its residents, and future tenants are selected by current tenants.
The developers did great work to get grants and state funding to support energy efficient design for heating, cooling, and electricity. They knew that affordability doesn't just mean low purchase price or rent, but also low cost for utilities.
Greenway Park's green efforts focused on an integrated approach that incorporated a package of energy-efficient building practices, the deliberate substitution of a variety of green building materials for their more conventional counterparts, and a 2.4 kW rooftop photovoltaic system.
Despite its impeccable transit-oriented, environmentally friendly green design, plans for Sycamore Village were rejected in January 2007 by the Orangevale Community Planning Advisory Committee following complaints from area residents.
When it comes down to it, the real problem may be an entrenched Not In My Back Yard philosophy that has little to do with rational argument. Rick Mockler, of Cohousing Partners, likens the NIMBY attitude of cohousing detractors to the way many people feel about mass transit—they support the idea of public transportation, so long as they can continue driving their cars.
Sacramento already has one completed cohousing community with others in nearby Davis. Sycamore villages plan have a lot going for them:
Cohousing is usually situated within walking distance to schools and centers of commerce, and sustainability is at the center of its design. Within a quarter mile of Sycamore Village are a school, grocery store, fire station, fitness center, medical facility, dentist, restaurant, gas station and bus stop. The houses will be built with bamboo flooring, cellulose insulation and recycled decking; the grounds will include organic garden patches, permaculture landscaping and compost heaps. In other words, this project is the very definition of smart growth with a limited carbon footprint.
It sounds like they are working closely with neighbors to resolve concerns and we are hopeful they can work it all out to everyone's benefit.
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Abundance Ecovillage
