Posts Tagged ‘ecovillages’
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is profiled in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch!
Residents of Missouri's Dancing Rabbit test the limits of green living
Missouri is home to more than 50 "intentional communities," a broad term that includes communes, co-housing, and student co-ops.
Ecovillages also fall under that umbrella, but what sets them apart is residents' dedication to an intensely green lifestyle. At Dancing Rabbit, for example, residents grow their own food, shun private vehicle ownership and live off the grid in homes powered by solar and wind energy generated on site...
Homes at Dancing Rabbit range from the modest - one resident lives in a renovated school bus named Aubergine - to more ornate straw bale homes complete with full kitchens.
Read the full article here.
And check out the companion video presentation here.
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Related Posts Tags: Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, ecovillages, intentional communities, St. Louis
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Written by:
molly
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
Scott Merzbach of The Amherst Bulletin has written a piece on a San Francisco couple who are touring communities nation-wide, compiling footage and interviews for a new documentary on sustainable living.
A San Francisco couple's 12,000-mile bicycle tour around the country has connected them to a simpler life. It is also teaching them how to live a more sustainable lifestyle, a lesson they hope to spread via a feature-length documentary they are producing.
During their "bikepacking" journey, Mandy Creighton and Ryan Mlynarczyk are visiting more than 100 sustainable communities and co-ops, where they will be living and working alongside the residents, while also filming footage for a documentary titled "Within Reach."
Read the full article here.
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Related Posts Tags: bikes, cohousing, ecovillages, intentional communities, San Francisco
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Written by:
molly
Monday, August 25th, 2008
CNN has had two articles on community in the past few weeks, one on simple living and one on eco-communities in the UK.
The simple living article profiles a woman at the Keystone Ecological Urban Center in Chicago.
Keri Rainsberger isn't rich. She works in the nonprofit world for a relatively low-profit salary. Yet, as many Americans are scrimping for every penny, she hardly feels the pinch.
How is this possible?
For starters, she has no car and commutes by bicycle each workday. She also has no mortgage payment and chooses to live in an "intentional community," a partly shared space where $775 a month covers everything from utilities to meals.
Her private quarters -- larger and a bit more expensive than some -- are about 400 square feet, divided into a sitting room, a craft room and a small bedroom. She shares bathrooms, showers, a kitchen and a large dining room with 28 other residents whose ranks include young professionals, professors and retirees.
"It's like a college dormitory, but with better conversation," she often jokes.
The article claims that the poor economy is pushing more people to explore simple and cooperative living:
"The economy starts to tank. People get tired of it," says Daniel Howard, an expert in consumer research and behavior at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. "It's people saying, 'Let's get together and help one another.' And it works."
But those who advocate a simpler, less consumer-driven life say there are lessons in the strategies she and other intentional communities use.
By buying their food in bulk, for instance, Rainsberger and her neighbors spend $100 to $150 per person each month for meals. (Consider that the U.S. Department of Agriculture "thrifty plan" for a single person is $200 a month.)
The article comes around to point out someof the non-tangible benefits of community:
Rainsberger, whose closest family is in Ohio, savors the camaraderie.
"For me, to be able to walk out my door and have everybody in the hall know me, that's a really great experience," she says. "And if anything happens to me, I know there's somebody next door who'll take care of me."
The article on Eco-Communities stresses the sustainability focus of many intentional communities:
Communities that put an emphasis on green values range from isolated eco villages to sophisticated co-housing projects.
But where co-housing projects were once primarily intended as a return to a more collective, less isolated way of living, new projects often place an emphasis on sustainable living.
They mention Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm in New Hampshire and the UK community Living Villages. They go on to look at how widespread eco-communities might become:
Inherent to eco communities is their small scale. Not only does it provide the social glue that holds them together, it allows communal facilities and equipment, such as lawnmowers, to be shared, reducing the community's carbon footprint. But in a crowded world that size restriction limits how widespread these developments can become.
While these communities will never be for everyone, Berger maintains co-housing is a model for the future. "A lot of the basic concepts behind co-housing are applicable to larger housing developments," she says.
"Some of the principles could be woven in to conventional developments -- things like having the residential area car free, having a common house where you can eat communally from time to time, hold events, and have a children's room and games room for teenagers.
Read the Simple Living Article on CNN
Read the Eco Communities article on CNN
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Related Posts Tags: Chicago, CNN, cohousing, ecovillages, Keystone Ecological Urban Center, Living Villages, Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, Simple Living, UK
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
The Times Educational Supplement, a publication for teachers in the UK, has an article about the educational opportunities at Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland. The article starts with a brief nod to Findhorn's legendary gardens and faerie/angel culture but mostly focuses on the ecovillage's sustainability education programs. Here's an excerpt:
The Findhorn Foundation is a charitable trust earning income from activities as an education and conference centre, focusing on spiritual self-discovery, teaching how to live sustainably and a range of courses on the arts and healing.
The ecovillage, where community members experiment with new techniques for environmentally friendly living, won Best Practice designation from the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements in 1998. For more than 10 years, the foundation has engaged with the work of the UN as a non-government organisation, offering programmes in line with the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-14.
This community recorded the lowest eco-footprint in the industrialised world last year and is attracting the interest of politicians and others who would have given the place a wide berth until comparatively recently, according to Dawson. When he came here a decade ago, he felt it would have been political suicide for a local figure of substance to have been too closely identified with Findhorn as it was still considered a bit "away with the fairies". But he believes as the sustainability agenda has moved centre-stage, the way of life here doesn't seem quite so whacky to outsiders.
Read the article on Findhorn's sustainability education programs.
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Related Posts Tags: ecovillages, education, Findhorn, Scotland
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Friday, May 9th, 2008
EcoVillage at Ithaca is helping set up a car sharing cooperative for the town of Ithaca, NY. Car Sharing co-ops are designed for people who don't own cars but have occasional needs for them. Members are often cyclists, walkers, and frequent users of public transit.
After about three years of planning, Ithaca CarShare is set to launch June 1 with six Nissan Versa hatchbacks and a Ford Ranger pickup. The organization expects to add more vehicles in August.
Jennifer Dotson, executive director of Ithaca CarShare, said the average car sharing member spends $100 a month compared to the $600 a month that AAA says the average car owner spends.
Nancy Jacoby, an Ithaca resident, said, "I'm really excited. It's been rocking my world all week. It's the missing link to getting rid of my car."
One of the locations cars will be available is at the Ecovillage. I'm sure a number of Ecovillage members will take advantage of the program.
Read the article on Ithaca CarShare.
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Related Posts Tags: Car Sharing, Ecovillage at Ithaca, ecovillages, New York
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
 Meredith Medland of Living Green interviews Diana Leafe Christian on the subject of Ecovillages and Intentional Communities in this 24-minute podcast.
Diana was the editor of Communities Magazine for 14 years and is now the editor of the Ecovillages online newsletter. She is the author of two books Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community and Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities.
Diana shares her immense experience of community living and the communities movement in this interview. Here's some highlights:
I feel like I'm in a network of a lot of brothers and sisters and cousins. I feel like I'm living inside of a family of likeminded people going towards the goals of learning how to live more ecologically and economically and socially sustainably, and also we're learning, we're teaching what we learn to others through classes and workshops.
I got interested in intentional communities because I, like thousands and thousands of people across the country, this is in the early 90's, I began to feel like something was missing and I finally could feel my way to identify that what it was, was community.
Diana goes on to describe "13 kinds of Intentional Communities" including ecovillages, cohousing, communes, christian communities, other spiritual communities, retreat centers, student co-ops, and more.
She even explains how to find the community oyu are looking for:
Well, when you're checking communities out on the internet, and the website you need to know about is directory.ic.org, where you can look up any community by its name alphabetically or you can go to any state or province or country and look up the community. It's North America based, so you'll find most communities in the US and Canada, and then you can read the listing about the community and you can read their website if they've got one. Here's some things to look for: does the community have a lot of people? Do they have land and have they been there for a number of years? That tells me that they actually exist as a community. Read their mission and purpose. Is it in alignment with yours? Could you make a living there? Is it in the part of the country that you're interested in? Is there internal community finances, one that you like, income sharing, independent income? How would you make a living? What are the annuals dues and fees? What's the joining fee? How can you, can you afford it?
Diana gives a vision of the future where community is much more common:
Meredith asks: If you look ahead thirty years from today, what kind of transition and awakenings and new emergings do you think are going to be happening in the co-housing and intentional communities based?
Diana Leafe Christian: Well I think that many, many more people will be living in various kinds of intentional communities, including ecologically oriented ones like Eco Villages in cities and towns out in the country, I think that income sharing communities and independent income communities will be everywhere, and food co-ops and worker owned co-ops will be everywhere. People will be getting around I would say by bicycle and donkey cart and not using petroleum and using all kinds of transportation methods from olden times, people will be growing their own foods in urban areas, on their rooftops, on their balconies and in public parks in the median strips just like in Havana today, and people will be growing most of their food in towns and in rural areas because of the industrial shifts without petroleum.
This podcast is a great overview of intentional communities and a great listen. There are also a ton of community resources in Diana's bio on the site.
Listen to the Ecovillage interview with Diana Leafe Christian (also includes a full transcript).
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, communes, Creating a Life Together, Diana Leafe Christian, ecovillages, Living Green
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
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