5 thriving, sustainable communities

"These modern neighborhoods rely on the age-old principle of cooperation for food, shelter, culture and social change."

By Shea Gunther

Ecovillages are communities of people drawn together by the common goal of living more sustainably. Their commitment and practices vary from ecovillage to ecovillage but all share the bond of not being satisfied with the status quo. Ecovillagers seek to live in harmony with the environment and develop their land with an eye on protecting vital natural systems and on fostering good relations with neighbors, both of the human and animal variety. They farm and garden, pool their buying power to save money, and may share other community resources like cars and tools. Does every house on the block really need to have its own lawn mower?

The modern-day ecovillage has its roots in the communes that first popped up in the '60s and '70s. As the environmental movement was born and matured, more eco-centered communities started forming. In 1991, sustainability experts Robert and Diane Gilman wrote "Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities," a study on ecovillages undertaken on behalf of Gaia Trust that helped lead to the formation, four years later, of the first ecovillage conference that took place in Findhorn, Scotland. That event led to the founding of the Global Ecovillage Network and to countless ecovillages all around the world.

We scoured the web in search of five American ecovillages that have taken root and thrived. Whether you're reading because you're just curious about ecovillages or are looking for a new place to call your eco-home, these five make for a good read. Read More

Farmin in the Hood

The Sustainable World Sourcebook

The Sustainable World Sourcebook is the only book that will get you up to speed fast with the big global issues and the best solutions—the "go-to guide" for getting engaged and creating the just, healthy world we envision....

Our Kitchen Table: Diverse, Stable Food Systems

Our Kitchen Table, now in their fourth year, works to help families form sustainable food systems -- starting in their own backyard. This year, OKT has received a $360,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation "to strengthen the capacity of southeast urban neighborhood residents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to address food and environmental health disparities impacting vulnerable children, families, and individuals by creating resident owned gardens and managed Healthy Food Demonstration Sites."

Outside of a press release, what does this mean, exactly? In a conversation with Executive Director Lisa Oliver-King, she explains the mission of OKT and what they hope to accomplish with these new funds. A quick explanation is that OKT connects food-growers, that is, residents in various neighborhoods who can grow food in their own gardens, and then share with other growers producing different foods. Read More

Sustainable Food Starts with Organic Seeds

Roots of Change: A network for a sustainable food system.

The Rise (and Demise) of Earth’s Eco-Cities

by William Pentland
In 2008, the Ecocity World Summit convened in San Francisco to prescribe the “eco-city” concept as the anti-dote to the escalating threats of resource scarcity, climate change and the massive urbanization predicted to occur over the next Century. The Summit organizers made the following declaration: ”Into the deep future, the cities in which we live must enable people to thrive in harmony with nature and achieve sustainable development . . . Cities, towns and villages should be designed to enhance the health and quality of life of their inhabitants and maintain the ecosystems on which they depend.”

The “eco-city” was supposed to combine the principles of green building and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to reduce – and potentially eliminate – the adverse impact cities have historically had on the natural environment. In “Sustainable Cities: Oxymoron or The Shape of the Future?,” Annissa Alusi, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, reviews the origins and outcomes (thus far) of the first generation of “eco-city” projects being pursued around the world. The findings are mixed and include the following snapshots. Read More

Home builders see green prefab potential

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY

Sandra Beer watched her neighbors in East Chatham, N.Y., devote copious time and sweat equity in building all or part of their homes.
"As a single working mom, I realized I couldn't go that route," says Beer, 51, a fundraiser for a PBS-TV station in Albany. So she explored factory-built options that would be energy efficient.
"I kept looking for something that was middle-class green," she recalls. She signed a contract for a two-bedroom, one-bath $160,000 prefab from Blu Homes, a Massahusetts-based company, in April that was completed in September. The price included delivery but not land.
"It was a lot easier than what others around me experienced," she says, noting the on-budget, quick delivery.
Like Beer, more U.S. consumers and developers are turning to factory-built housing for speed, quality and energy efficiency. The prefab market, once derided as the lowly world of double-wides trailers, is positioning itself for major growth when the housing industry rebounds.
New Hampshire-based Bensonwood Homes builds high-end homes in sections, whether walls or entire bathooms, off-site in its factory and assembles them onsite with with a crane and a small crew. "We're light years away from where we were five years ago," says TeddBenson of New Hampshire-based Bensonwood Homes. His company is refining computer software that can do a 3-D home model, then cut, shape and detail each part in the factory. Read More

Ecotech Institute opens its doors
AURORA, CO A new trade school focused entirely on renewable energy, sustainable design and “green” technology welcomed about 200 students to its new, 62,000-square-foot campus in Aurora this week.

Michelle Obama To Plant White House Edible Garden

by Bridgette Steffen: Eleanor Roosevelt’s World War II-era Victory Garden was a shining example to Americans that they could grow their own food. And now Michelle Obama is following in her footsteps, taking up the cause by planting an 1,100 square foot edible garden on the South Lawn of the White House. Her hope is to educate children about locally grown food, inspiring them to eat healthier and encourage their families and community to follow suit.
Petitions for an organic garden at the White House have been circulating for some time now. The new edible garden will have over 55 varieties of fruits and vegetables, as chosen by the White House Kitchen Staff. According to assistant head chef, Sam Kass, the cost of the organic seeds and mulch was only $200. They will plant tomatoes, tomatillos, cilantro, various lettuces, spinach, swiss chard, collards, kale, arugula, berries, herbs, including anise hyssop and Thai basil (there will not be any beets though as President Obama does not like them). Also present will be two hives for honey and a compost pile.
First lady Obama, along with 23 fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School, will begin the garden by digging up the soil, then planting and eventually harvesting the vegetables. The White House Kitchen Staff is looking forward to planning their meals around the vegetables that are in season. Food grown in the garden will be used as ingredients for family meals as well as state dinners and other official events.

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Top 10 EcoPrinciples for Communities

With the economy in turmoil, a real estate prices dropping, green communities and green building will become more important. It’s easy to see how broken our current community model is in terms of the urban sprawl; the average American commute continues to grow longer. Between 1969 and 2001, the number of vehicle miles traveled for commuting jumped from 4,180 to 5,720.
The Sierra Club notes that today’s average American driver spends what amounts to 55 eight hour workdays behind the wheel every year. Gas won’t stay at the current level so we need to look at developing more sustainable communities.

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New Book Focuses On Self-Sustainability

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Made from Scratch” by Jenna Woginrich, 2008, Storey Publishing, $20.95/$28.95 Canada, 192 pages: Eggs have gone up in price. So have fruit, milk and cheese. Vegetables, too. In fact, everything you put on your table costs more these days than it ever did before. You try to bargain shop and get the best deals, but budgeting is a sure challenge. And clothes? Don’t even mention clothes. Every lost mitten or cap, every outgrown pair of jeans means a needed replacement, and replacements aren’t exactly free. Another trip to the store gets you thinking. Maybe you could start a garden somewhere. You could learn to sew. Or, if the timing is good, you could shuck the city and move to a homestead where you’d live like a pioneer. It might be cheaper, right?Cheaper, maybe not. But definitely more satisfying, as you’ll read in the new book “Made from Scratch” by Jenna Woginrich.After moving from Tennessee to Idaho for the sake of a job, Woginrich began to think about self-sustainability.

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In a Planet of Our Own: a Vision of Sustainability From Across Six Continents

The "In a Planet of Our Own" event is scheduled to be held at Mumbai, India from 16th to 22nd of March 2009 and is being hosted by the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai.This international event is aimed at creating design awareness on sustainability and simultaneously offers a platform for interaction for the design community.The events are centered around the interests of students, educationists and practicing professional designers. In a Planet of Our Own has been designed to be lively, interactive and thought provoking and will provide great opportunity to converse with grandmasters of design, interact with thought leaders and listen to visions by outstanding speakers.The event is expected to throw light on the role of design in an interconnected global world within the context of sustainability.

GrandMasters and Speakers

What if our enlightenment has to do with light?

Over the past year I have heard numerous contemporary spiritual teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Marianne Williamson, predict a profound shift in consciousness accompanied with an evolution to the next stage of humanity.
Where? When? How? I wanted to know. Could it be the fervor of an election year and promise of change? Could it be related to the intriguing prophecies of 2012 which predict a major transformation?
But then, like Goldilocks, something felt “just right” when I read Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation (August issue of Ode) What if our enlightenment has to do with light?

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Go to: Democratic Energy, Every car, home or landowner will become an electricity producer at the same time. Away with dependence on oil and electricity companies!

Eco communities: Living the green life

By Mark Tutton for CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The term "eco community" might conjure up an image of bearded hippies tending an allotment before sharing a mung bean stew. But as today's urbanites become more concerned about reducing their carbon footprints, some are finding that modern eco communities offer them a way to live sustainably without foregoing their home comforts.
Communities that put an emphasis on green values range from isolated eco villages to sophisticated co-housing projects.
Co-housing was dreamed up in Denmark in the idealistic 60s. It allows residents to live in communities where they own their own homes but are actively involved in running their own neighborhoods, which often include a common house where shared dining and other activities are an option.
Sarah Berger, from the UK Co-housing Network, told CNN, "More and more people keep contacting us about getting involved in co-housing communities -- there's an unquenchable thirst for this sort of thing."
As well as co-housing being widespread in Europe, the U.S. Co-housing Association claims there are more than 150 co-housing communities in the U.S.

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Geos, a Sustainable GeoSolar Community

Geos is a community located in Arvada, Colorado. With homes starting in the low $200,000, it is an affordable green community seeking status as the first fossil fuel free community in the United States. The homes combine the benefits of both geothermal and solar energy. Homes range from 850 to 3500+ square feet and include a variety of living options from live/work townhomes to single level flats.

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Geos Website

Ecovillages: Our way into the future

Eco-villages are people-based initiatives to model sustainable, low-impact, human settlements and lifestyles.
They are applicable to both rural and urban settings and accessible to all. Eco-villagers utilize green energy technology, ecological building techniques, and human-scale design to reduce exploitation of natural resources, facilitate community self-reliance, and improve quality of life.
It is about creating new settlements as well as retrofitting existing rural villages and urban areas. An eco-village is designed in harmony with its environment instead of the landscape being unduly engineered to fit construction plans. By thinking in terms of bioregions/ecosystem environments, sustainable settlements are planned considering water availability, the ability to grow food, and accessibility.
Ecovillages defined
In 1991, Robert Gilman one of the pioneers in the world ecovillage movement, set out a definition of an ecovillage that was to become a standard. Gilman defined an ecovillage as: Human scale, (somewhere where you can feel you know the neighbors in your community); fully-featured settlements, (comprising housing, businesses/livelihood, agriculture, culture, spiritual & educational development, as appropriate to the local setting); human activity is integrated harmlessly into the natural world; supports human development; can be continued into the indefinite future; and must have multiple centers of initiative.

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go to: Global Ecovillage Network

Garden Is a Seedbed for Green Cosmetics

"But WALA is based on a school of early 20th-century European philosophy known as anthroposophy. Developed by the Austrian theorist Rudolf Steiner, the philosophy is predicated on the existence of a spiritual world that can be accessed by the human intellect.
Mr. Steiner’s thinking was also influential in more down-to-earth matters. He championed biodynamic agriculture, a rigorous form of organic farming that shuns pesticides and uses no fertilizers that were not already present in the garden."

New York Times, by Mark Landler

ECKWÄLDEN, Germany — You know you are not in an ordinary garden when a man in dirt-covered trousers, tending witch-hazel plants, describes his work in words that could come from Nietzsche.
“It demands a higher level of consciousness and a force of will to garden at this level,” said Joscha Huter, 40, who cultivates the plants and flowers used to make the popular, expensive line of German natural cosmetics, Dr. Hauschka. “There’s a point where gardening becomes an art.”
There’s also a point where it becomes a crackerjack business: this rarefied garden in a southern German valley is the seedbed for an environmental marketing phenomenon that has captivated Hollywood.

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Sustaining Arizona

Shaun McKinnon, The Arizona Republic

It's changing the way people live. And it's happening now, all across Arizona. Sustainability is a way of using earth's resources today in a way that protects them for the next genera-tion.The movement is a movement of people, not governments, not authorities, though officials are starting to catch on, too. The people are doing things that use resources — building homes and businesses — while thinking about preserving those resources for the future.This week, The Arizona Republic tells the stories of sustainability. This is how Arizonans are helping keep the air clean, keep the water flowing, keep the electricity on, keep the environment healthy for tomorrow. This is a tour of the state — from a power plant in Snowflake to a tour company in Sedona, from a rooftop garden in Scottsdale to a ranch in Apache Junction. This is also the story of a movement. This is how people everywhere are sustaining Arizona.

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go to: Global Institute of Sustainability

Measuring sustainability in a Sicilian eco-village

Note: Emergy analysis (spelled with an “m”) is an environmental accounting method.

There is growing interest amongst both local communities and policy makers in improving the sustainability of local communities. However, developing accurate measures of sustainability has been problematic because a wide range of parameters need to be considered, from energy use through to monetary flows. New research shows that 'emergy' analysis can be applied to evaluate the sustainability of a small rural community.
Emergy analysis can be used to measure all inputs of energy and resources used to develop a given product or process. This includes both current and historical inputs as well as direct and indirect inputs into the product or process. To allow comparison between different types of energy inputs, all energy flows are converted into a single form of energy, such as solar energy.

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