To launch the competition, bloggers were brought to Denmark and toured the 25 year old ecovillage, a pioneering example of sustainable community in Europe.

VIew two short videos below:

Dyssekilde Ecovillage in Denmark - Impressions

Dyssekilde Ecovillage: Interview with Birgitta Steen

Hundredfold Farm is a co-housing community in Adams County. It is a neighborhood created at first as a way to preserve farmland.

The neighborhood sits in the middle of an operating 80 acre Christmas tree farm, which each homeowner, owns an equal part of. With seven homes complete, eventually 14 homes will sit on just six acres of the farm, preserving the rest of the land.

...

The layout of the community is designed after a small village, where neighbors are a close by and close with each other. The idea for the farm was created 10 years ago. This is the first neighborhood of its kind in Pennsylvania.

Read the article (with video).

Hundredfold Farm was mentioned previously on Buzz Blog as a possible campaign stop of Barack Obama during the Democratic primary.  It's unclear whether that stop actually took place.

It has also been featured on FOX 43 News of York, PA in a 2- part viedo series (1) (2)

Deep in the heart of Siberia's birch forests lies one of the largest and most remote religious communes of the planet. More than 5,000 people have left their families and their homes to move here and join the Church of the Last Testament, which has more than 10,000 followers worldwide. The church centers on one man. He is known simply as Vissarion, meaning "he who gives new life," or simply as the teacher, and he claims that he is Jesus Christ.

Life here is very basic. Vissarion's followers are strict vegetarians and they don't smoke or drink. The houses and churches are built from wood by hand and most of the energy comes from windmills and solar panels. At the followers' school, little boys are taught how to build model ships and young girls learn crochet and singing.

The villagers in the Abode of Dawn follow an almost entirely vegan diet, largely based on what they can grow themselves. When they move here, they give the church their pensions and whatever possessions they may have. In return they receive basics such as sugar, buckwheat and flour. No money is used within the community but they are given an allowance of 300 rubles, about $12, a month.

The piece has a fairly skeptical tone but the images of the community members show them as happy. Whether you agree with their spirituality or not, the images of a remote 5000 person community are striking and I'm sure it would be fascinating to seehow things work day to day.

See the video and read the article on the Russian Commune of Tiberkul

Davis is where cohousing was founded, where the first young hippies wanted to live in a circle around a community center and love each other and that tone has permeated that whole city and housing market.

Ok so its not the most accurate description of the birth of cohousing in the US but at least its positive.

Read the article

See the video (Davis starts around 2:45 in)

Ithaca has a new community in the works, Farm Pond Circle, and they are already getting press in the Ithaca Journal for planting trees on their new community land. Obviously folks in Ithaca know about community and must be interested in whats new in their area.

The AP Wire put out a story on how many people are choosing to have only one child and they have quotes from folks at Tryon Life Farm community in Portland.

The local paper in Worcester, MA has an article highlighting the new cohousing communities in the Worchester area. They highlight Mosaic Commons and Camelot Cohousing but also have a nice map of cohousing throughout Massachusettes.

Champlain Valley Cohousing was in the Burlington Free Press in an article about the farm they have on site. The 22 unit cohousing community has a 25 acre farm on its land that works as a CSA and sells to wholesalers.

The Portland Oregonian had an article about Columbia Ecovillage, a community developing in Portland that started as a farm and sustainability education center and just bought the adjacent apartment complex with plans to convert them to green living cohousing. See photos on the Oregonian blog.

Then there's all the reviews of the movie Mister Lonely that is about impersonators (look-a-likes of Michael Jackson , Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, etc.) who come together in a commune in Scotland. The kicker is that according to some reviews filmmaker Harmony Korine spent some time as a child "on a commune near Nashville, TN". Most likely The Farm but there are many communes in the Nashville area.

We couldn't possibly keep up on all the coverage of the story here but it seemed incongruous to never mention this major media event in this blog about communities in the news.

Below is a small sampling of news and blog coverage on the story. We invite comments if people are interested in sharing.

New York Times Coverage of the story

NPR Coverage

CNN story on how the call precipitating the raid was a hoax

Civil Rights questions raised and ACLU questions threat to constitutional rights

An interesting Blog post comparing the historic Oneida Community to the current events

Blog post from Laird Schaub on the Texas Raid

"The two groups growing dramatically now in America are ecovillages, which are usually rural or semi-rural, and cohousing, which tends to be in or near cities," says Bill Metcalf, a sociologist at Griffith University in Australia who studies communalism and has lived in two intentional communities.

Part of the motivation is that we have a very strongly increased sense of alienation in the country than we did a generation ago," said Laird Schaub, founder and resident of Sandhill Farm in Missouri.

Shared common spaces and clever architectural features--like thick walls and south-facing windows--contribute to energy usage per person that is 40% less than for the average American. A typical couple living in Ecovillage at Ithaca pays about $500 in energy bills a year, compared to a couple in a downtown Ithaca apartment who can pay hundreds of dollars a month during the winter.

There is also a short video on The Fellowship Community, a community which focuses on care for the ill and elderly. The video interview with the founders of the community describes their amazing experience in creating a community that could give long term care to their members and residents. Their unique experience offers an alternative to the wider culture's experiences with elder care. (Note video may not be viewable on Firefox)

But the utopia feature is not all positive on the concept of utopia. Forbes also has an article on the failures of utopian experiments. Mostly the article highlights all the "failed" communities of America's past and comes from an economic/business perspective (it is Forbes.com after all).

The competition for succession invariably favors not the wise, but the ruthless. This is especially dangerous in communistic societies. Where selfishness is a sin or a crime, everyone is guilty; you don't want your antagonists gaining the authority to sit in judgment.

A second lesson is that ideals are constraints, and the more constraints one tries to impose, the less viable the community will be. It's hard enough for a private company--an organization focused exclusively on economic success--to survive intact for multiple generations. Add to that special utopian claims on the firm by the employees and you can see how tough the odds are. The best bet is to run utopia as a business, which is exactly what many communities concluded.

A second lesson is that ideals are constraints, and the more constraints one tries to impose, the less viable the community will be. It's hard enough for a private company--an organization focused exclusively on economic success--to survive intact for multiple generations. Add to that special utopian claims on the firm by the employees and you can see how tough the odds are. The best bet is to run utopia as a business, which is exactly what many communities concluded.

This last argument seems to contradict the research presented recently in the Economist that claimed that religious communities were more successful if they had more strictures on their membership, not less.

Not to stop with things balanced, Forbes produces another article on the failures of American Utopianism including a photo slideshow including pictures of the Jonestown mass suicide.

But wait there is more! An article about someone's not-so-happy experience living in a shared household for a year in college. After a brief smack at Earthaven and Damanhur the author describes her brief experience in a dysfunctional version of community, drawing general conclusions from that experience.

Read the whole special report on Utopia.

Lammas Ecovillage

Lammas has been getting a lot of press and exposure on blogs but not all of it has been accurate. EcoWorldly and TreeHugger recently posted a notice saying Lammas had been granted approval but a Lammas member commented to say that they had resubmitted their plans but is still awaiting approval. For more accurate info keep an eye on the Welsh news or on the Lammas site itself.

You can also see videos about Lammas at undercurrents.org:

Living in the Future and

Ecovillage Pioneers

I for one am certainly envious of their amazing scale model of their proposed village. If every ecovillage could bring together such a clear and compelling plan with models and video and detailed proposals it might shock planning departments into doing something!

"I don't have to turn on the heat once the sun's shining in 'till late in the afternoon even on a bitter day like today," said Gail Carson, the owner. Thick walls and south-facing windows help make heating homes at EcoVillage more efficient than most houses.

Her business has doubled in the last year, while energy consumption at the inn continues to be minimal. Carson said one of the reasons she thinks her business has increased over the years is because people are simply curious about eco-villages.

See the Ecovillage Video.

The commune is a flash from the past where people lived together and shared almost everything. "We don't share incomes. We don't share partners. It's just like any other subdivision but with a slight twist," said Oliveau.

The twist is much like a golf community, but without the golf. The concept is known as co-housing.

The concept of co-housing did evolve from the communes of the 70's, but people at Catoctin Creek say they are less like flower children and more like farm family.

Read the Transcript or see the Catoctin Cohousing Video or watch it embedded below (not functional on all browsers).

Videos include interviews with folks from Frog Song Cohousing in Cotati, CA and Glacier Circle Cohousing a senior cohousing community in Davis, CA. The first video is an overview of cohousing including a look at senior cohousing. The second is a moving piece looking at the experiences of a woman diagnosed with cancer and how her cohousing community supported her during treatment.

Watch the Cohousing Videos.

More Videos on Intentional Community on Community Buzz

Abundance Ecovillage

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?"

See the Video on Channel 13's site: click the link in the upper left for the video.

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.

Enjoy.

See the Ecovillage Training Center Video on Current TV.

See the Ecovillage Training Center Video on YoutTube.

See other Videos on Community Buzz.

Read the article and watch the video.

O.U.R. stands for "One United Resource," expressing how interdependence and inclusion undergird this 25 acre demonstration sustainable community on Vancouver Island. This model ecovillage comprises natural buildings, a school, long- and short-term residences, extensive gardens, greenhouses, and even a bed & breakfast. Brandy Gallagher MacPherson describes how they created an entirely new zoning category by building relationships with regulatory agencies that go beyond "us versus them". www.ourecovillage.org

Watch the video.

Communities Magazine editor Diana Leafe Christian concisely spells out what the successful 10% of intentional communities do: common vision and purpose, fair participatory decision-making, clear agreements in writing, good balance of right and left-brain knowledge, methods of staying accountable to agreements, criteria for new members, good communication and processing skills. She also discusses peak oil effects on the wider community. www.creating-a-life-together.org

See the Video

I thought it was a very positive portrayal and for the most part accurate (of course I am biased since I live at DR).