Eco Villages as Solutions for the Next Century
Written by Morgan Rivers, Edited by Nico S, Cofounders @ Agartha
This is the first of a series about solarpunk villages, including economics, governance, available technologies to improve them, how they solve societal problems, and their place in societies of the future.
If you find this article interesting, be sure to head on over to the Agartha discord to join a community passionate about solarpunk villages or browse our notion to browse the research we’ve been putting together.
Eco villages are intentional communities with a commitment to sustainability. At Agartha, we have the ultimate goal of starting our own pilot “solarpunk” village, to test that a stable, vibrant, and thriving community is possible with high quality of life while continuing to share research of existing technical solutions and living examples.
Eco Villages as Solutions to Societal Problems
I will adopt the definition of eco villages as:
- Intentional, off-grid human settlement guided by principles of sustainability, equity, and regeneration
- Communities that use inclusive social governance models to make decisions, resolve conflict, and create innovative solutions.
- Members take an active role in everyday life.
- An eco village doesn’t have to be a “village”, nor does it have to be in a remote place in nature.
Compelling results have already been found about the effectiveness of eco villages in addressing some societal and environmental issues. Of the eco villages in the GEN network:
- 90% have more than 40% women in decision-making bodies
- 90% recycle, reuse and repair more than 50% of consumer goods
- 85% compost all their food waste
- 96% provide training in nonviolent conflict resolution
- 80% have an agreed upon method for resolving conflicts
- 95% regularly engage in campaigns to protect human rights, the rights of communities and the rights of nature
- All of them actively safeguard regenerative local cultural traditions using local sustainable ways of building and provide education in decision-making and mutual empowerment skills.
Studies on happiness generally find that contrary to common sentiment, making more than about $40,000 a year won’t significantly affect your happiness. Much more significant are factors like getting married, being healthy, and having close friends. Given the focus on good food and nature, as well as the close interaction between people in the community, we might expect eco villages to do quite well in this regard. In fact, a study called Quality of Life in Intentional Communities has shown that those living in intentional communities were significantly happier than their non-intentional community peers.
Problems in Default Society — and how Eco Villages address them
Healthcare
The healthcare system focuses on symptom treatment rather than the key drivers of health — exercise, stress management, community, moderation with drugs and alcohol, fresh air, clean water, and healthy food. An eco village provides ways to handle all of these in a much less clinical, but more effective way, than existing typical health systems. A shared health insurance company could be jointly owned by members of an eco village, and share the burdens among many in the community without relying on a primarily profit motivated and extractive multinational insurance company.
Childcare
Intergenerational communities allow grandparents to spend a lot more time with their or their co-member’s grand-kids. This also means families spend a lot less money on healthcare. Elders who spend time with kids tend to live longer as well. Eco villages can make this easy and default, rather than artificially separating families in far-flung regions of the world.
Equality Crisis
Rates of societal inequality are higher than they’ve been in centuries. In the US, federal minimum wage workers can’t afford the average rent in any of the cities. We live in a global system where the market is manipulated, inflation is irreversible, and the wealth gap expands rapidly every year. Policy makers favor corporations that have the ability to lobby their way in, and the average worker can barely get by.
Increasing the circulation of currency in smaller communities can reduce inequality and allow for new modes of governing financial capital to be more just and regenerative, as well as allow for more affordable housing.
Ecological Crisis
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions mean that earth is warming, with increased unpredictability in rainfall and sea level rise, and hurricanes and tropical storms. Pollinators are dying because of pesticides and herbicides leaking into the environment. Billions of animals are suffering in factory farms.
Eco villages can be carbon sinks, they can use organic foods and low environmental impact farming methods, and can efficiently and humanely produce their own animal products. This gives consumers visibility into the entire farming process and conditions of the animals. Intentional communities nowadays often largely forgo the consumption of animals or animal products altogether.
According to a life-cycle estimate from Kalu Yala in Panama and an analysis from Dancing Rabbit in Missouri, while the carbon emissions of transport to and from the eco villages were typically higher overall than an average American’s due to increased plane flights, these were far outweighed by changes in diet, energy consumption, and decreased driving within these communities, meaning overall carbon emissions per eco village resident were a small fraction of the average American’s emissions. It’s also possible to set community standards to alleviate the carbon burden of these flights with carbon offsets.
Lack of Resilience
If that’s not enough, we are bombarded by risks of societal collapse like engineered pandemics, nuclear failure and proxy wars. Just-in-time supply chains for critical supplies like foods and medicines leave us with little room for failure. Highly interconnected systems show high correlated risk.
However, more heterogeneous groups of living communities can increase societal resilience and engender more self-reliance and resilience to catastrophic Shit Hits The Fan scenarios.
Meaning Crisis
As automation increases and people increasingly work at jobs divorced from their values and from community, rates of suicide and opioid addiction skyrocket. Automation in default increasingly makes our traditional structures unable to provide people with meaningful work opportunities.
Eco villages can turn this around by allowing automation to be used for reducing actual work, and allowing people to focus on all the jobs that people need done that are going undone in default due to lack of incentives and failures in the incentivizing of default economic structures.
Existing Eco Villages Can’t Solve It All…
Okay, this all sounds like eco villages solve a lot of problems. But they don’t solve every problem! It’s an open secret that communities like eco villages have a fairly low success rate decades on. Very few eco village communities from the 1800s stick around to this day, while cities, towns, and universities formed around that time largely still exist. Let’s examine why.
Eco Village or ‘Ego’ Village?
The recent Netflix docuseries Wild Wild Country demonstrates that while creating an enormous settlement with a strong community and self-reliability on the scale of thousands of people is possible, a community organized by a single or a few charismatic leaders can quickly turn perverse. It’s important to recognize this and apply the cult checklist to spiritual or religious oriented communities that are also eco villages.
By being inwardly focused, eco villages also lose out on key opportunities to trade with external parties and become strongly embedded in the local communities. Much like an embargoed country, an eco village with little economic activity with the outside cannot typically sustain itself economically or provide economic opportunities to its members.
Anti-Technology Pro-Cult
It’s not a coincidence that moneyless, hippy drug-indulging communities with a strong internal regressive anti-tech focus and extreme leftist politics, with no clear attempt at effective governance beyond consensus large groups will fail. The failure to use efficiencies of technology to enable low cost energy usage, cost-effective farming, and improved governance and voting mechanisms currently blocks eco villages from scaling and creating meaningful economic opportunities.
During the industrial revolution there was a massive communal movement in the US. It was the beginning of a bifurcation of an individualistic mainstream and an egalitarian communitarian alternative. These communities were generally overpowered by centralized industrial powers due to segregation and lack of access to information and slow adoption of technology.
Unhealthy Social & Power Dynamics
Due to the more strongly interconnected social web in an eco village, life in an eco village usually includes more interpersonal drama that can snowball into bigger social issues for lack of communication and equitable governance models. These power dynamics become especially harsh when eco villages are struggling for financial reasons.
Conclusion
In the upcoming articles, we’ll dive into how we think we can do better than existing approaches.
Our long term vision is to help create a melting pot of a global community of different nationalities, belief systems, ages, genders, interests and backgrounds to gather around a shared vision and understanding. We want to live in harmony with nature and each other, but not in fear of intelligently using the tools of advanced technology to make that a viable reality. Creating these articles are the first step towards that vision.
If you found this article interesting, please join us and engage with the conversation, find opportunities and connect with other like minded people!
