Eco Vista: Building a Transition Town in a Student Community in California

By John Foran, Resilience.org

“Eco Vista” was the name chosen in 2017 by a group of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara acting together with long-time community members to describe their vision of turning their rather unusual community of Isla Vista into an ecovillage in the next ten years.  Unusual because 23,000 people live together in an area of just .54 square miles, with eighty percent of them between the ages of 18 and 24.

The Art of Maintaining “Good Vibes:” Lessons on Practices and Skills from Two Egalitarian Communities

By Katarzyna Gajewska, P2P Foundation

Creating an alternative economy and organization of production implies a transformation of the relations and ways of inter-personal functioning that have been inculcated into hierarchy culture and the capitalist system.

Integrated Sustainable Community & Ecovillage Design Education

By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium

Education for social and ecological literacy will be an important catalyst in the process of creating a culture of sustainability. The challenges of climate change, approaching peak oil, and non-renewable resource depletion are creating the need for an education that empowers citizens through knowledge and skills which enable them to actively participate in the design and creation of sustainable communities and bioregions.

Rescuing Los Angeles

By Albert Bates, The Great Change

Ecovillages are like a shadow world government. They are not top-down electoral, C3I or Deep State puppeteers; they are grass roots, spontaneous, semi-autonomous networked infiltrators. Their weapons are not Death Stars or enslaving financial schemes but viral memes spread by new media, art and gardening.

An Eco-Village in Palestine

By Aisha Mansour, Future Perfect

The first Palestinian eco-village is coming to life in Farkha.

The Next Tango in Paris

By Albert Bates, The Great Change

Carbon-neutral is so 20th century. We really need to get beyond zero. That is what ecovillages can offer.

If Everyone Lived in an ‘Ecovillage’, the Earth Would Still Be in Trouble

By Samuel Alexander, The Conversation

Put otherwise, based on my calculations, if the whole world came to look like one of our most successful ecovillages, we would still need one and a half planet’s worth of Earth’s biocapacity. Dwell on that for a moment.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage: Living Abundantly on 10%

By Marissa Mommaerts, Transition US

Almost 20 years later, Dancing Rabbit (DR) is a fully functioning ecovillage with around 60 full-time members who live happily on just 10% of the resources the average American consumes.

Peak Moment 231: Columbia Ecovillage (part 2) — Shaping a Life Together

By Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment Television

What’s it like, living in an urban ecovillage? Barbara Ford finds that this size community enables people to contribute while doing what they love.

Columbia Ecovillage – From Apartments to Community (part 1)

By Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment Television

What if you could turn an apartment complex into a houseful of friends? Joe and Pam Leitch did. They purchased the apartments adjoining their farmhouse in metropolitan Portland, with the vision of creating an intentional community.

Consensus and the Burden of Added Process: Are There Easier Ways to Make Decisions?

By Diana Leafe Christian, Communities Magazine

This tale illustrates what I suspect are at least two different assumptions about the amount of process time people are willing to put into community. And these two assumptions, I suspect, are themselves based on deeper, possibly unconscious, assumptions about why people join community in the first place. Assumption A: We’re willing to put in a lot of emotional process time because the main reason most of us live in community is for a deeper connection with others. Processing emotions in a group is one way to feel connected. Assumption B: We don’t want much process time. Most of us live in community for neighborliness, sustainability/ecological values, and/or changing the wider culture. Some of us may want more emotional closeness with others (and are fine with a lot of process time) but most of us don’t.

Busting the Myth that Consensus-with-Unanimity Is Good for Communities, Part II

By Diana Leafe Christian, Communities Magazine

The conflict in this real community I’ll call “Green Meadow” (first described in Part I of this article, Communities #155, Summer 2012) was between two community members who had frequently blocked proposals and a roomful of people who wanted to pass an Agriculture Committee proposal about a community site plan for future farms, pastures, and orchards. Passing the proposal would mean clearing more of their forest. The two frequently blocking members were committed to protecting the community’s land—to protecting the Earth—from the human impact of clearing more forest and implementing the proposed agricultural site plans.