Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Perhaps finding ways to cultivate and nourish those future community members and leaders is the role that is most important to play for those who love their communities and want them to grow and flourish.
The Green Road has seen the global and the local Ukrainian ecovillage and permaculture communities involved in ongoing emergency support for people fleeing the war.
If we see the whole world as an EcoVillage, we have a new lens through which to perceive our challenges, and new possibilities to consider.
The book Ecobarrios en América Latina: Alternativas comunitarias para la transición hacia la sustentabilidad urbana (Ecobarrios in Latin America: Community Alternatives for the Transition to Urban Sustainability) is an exploration of the committed and valuable work of a movement of people throughout the continent.
Building community is one of the most crucial tasks that every group, intentional or local community should undertake to enable the collective being that animates it to express itself with all its power in a rich and transforming vision. But is there an end to the community building process?
If you want to leave it all and start a community, you should focus on inner work first. If you focus only on action, you risk building yourself another prison. You might just change one form of unhealthy lifestyle and toxic relations for another as a result.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
The first Palestinian eco-village is coming to life in Farkha.
Carbon-neutral is so 20th century. We really need to get beyond zero. That is what ecovillages can offer.
