Ecovillage At Ithaca

Most of the current ecovillages should be viewed as demonstration projects. They model “best practices.” But they are too thin to truly and fully prefigure home places for significant numbers of people. So it’s not surprising to hear that people don’t stay. In particular, it’s not surprising to hear that there is a dearth of young families. Even the Ecovillage at Ithaca, having three neighborhoods, a hundred units, and 230 residents, suffers from the latter conundrum and wonders what to do about it.

It’s dawning that our society is riven by psychopathologies and sociopathologies (not to mention economic problems, culture wars, an ecological crisis … even a gnawing spiritual malaise). Some think it’s an inevitable reflection of human nature and “just the way things are.” But I feel sure it doesn’t have to be this way and, in fact, there are initiatives showing the direction toward a better way of living … a greener, simpler way that, if emulated, could offer us a higher quality of life. This weekend my grandson and I will be visiting such a place, the EcoVillage at Ithaca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-uH36w9xg8

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarazeffgeber/2022/03/10/can-a-cohousing-model-save-the-senior-living-industry-from-obsolescence/ Can a Cohousing Model Save the Senior Living Industry From Obsolescence? By Sara Zeff Geber, PhD … 3/10/2022 EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI), New York is a cohousing community that has thrived since its founding in 1992. Cohousing communities attract all ages and in the last decade a large handful…

The “tragedy of the commons” points out that beer cans litter highways but not living room floors. Well, they also don’t litter the grounds of the EcoVillage at Ithaca. That’s because the scale of the commons at EVI is appropriate and functional. Surely we can foster responsibility at a scale larger than the family. Surely we can’t foster responsibility at the scale of modern mass society. (that’s the kind of thought process that motivated E. F. Schumacher to talk about “the intermediate scale” in regard to things like technology and social structures)

I’m wrapping up the content for the Spring issue of Green Horizon Magazine. A section will be about the idea that we can start building the new society within the shell of the old by establishing networks of ecovillage communities. …

https://www.thriveithaca.org/ecovillage-tour