The four ecovillages sketched here have received acclaim in independent environmental sustainability analyses and evaluations. The Lammas ecovillage made the 2014 ‘Top 10’ Guardian list of eco-homes – selected with specialist advice from authorities such as the UK Green Building Council and the BREEAM building development standard agency.
Furthermore, Lammas attracted a £346,935 award from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (late 2009) to build their Community Hub. Besides fame throughout Ireland – winning the National Green Award for Ireland’s greenest community every year from 2012 to 2014 – Cloughjordan Ecovillage was a gold medal winner at the 2013 Interna-tional Awards for Liveable Communities (the ‘Green Oscars’) supported by the UN Environmental Program. Ecovillage researcher Litfin has referred to LAEV as ‘Eden’, behind the ‘unremarkable’ façades of its urban apartment blocks, and lauds its ‘huge ripple effect’. Furthermore, DRE featured in a 2005 episode of a US reality TV show, ‘30 Days’, which aired internationally and followed ordinary people learning how to live at DRE.51
Nevertheless, all of these ecovillages faltered at some time or another.
The decisive move interstate saw several participants withdraw from DRE and, soon after their land purchase, conflicts and departures shrank the group to just four members in 1998. Yet, by 1999, its population started a long upward swing to 75 in 2014.52 Perhaps the Sandhill connection was crucial to its survival. It is hard not to remark, too, that DRE remains far from having the great number of members anticipated by its founders. Lammas endured a lengthy and tortuous planning
process, and had to overcome an uncomfortable anti-Lammas campaign by certain locals.53 LAEV is not the type of urban environment that many people feel comfortable about raising children in, but the ecovillage has lived with and accepted this detraction while continuing to work with numbers of families in the local area.54 In 2007, Cloughjordan found it critically necessary to substantially revise its governance system.55 In reality, challenges are endemic even to successful, complex and novel collaborative communities.
Size
There are many well-known ecovillages that are larger or smaller than those presented here. Populations rise and fall as different residents enter and exit. In the more substantial range, Crystal Waters (Australia) had a population of more than 200 residents in 2016; Sieben Linden (Germany) had 140 in 2017 (aiming for around 300); Ecovillage at Ithaca (New York) had more than 175 in 2016; Svanholm (Denmark) had 150 in 2015; and Findhorn (Scotland) had more than 210 members, 120 coworkers (many living onsite) with 200 local residents regularly involved in mid-June 2017. Most ecovillages’ informative websites include legal and historical detail on their formal association, planning, finances and governance.
This detail is often sufficient, for those interested, to shortlist ones with attractive features for the purposes of a tour.56
Diversity
Ecovillages in general have been criticised for not being sufficiently diverse and, contradictorily, for not representing their immediate locality enough, in terms of age, culture, and educational and income levels.57 That certain ecovillages are primarily made up of migrants, a greater proportion of professionals, or speakers of one particular language is hardly surprising. Do such characteristics make these experimental socio-material laboratories failures? How far do any such characteristics invalidate what their participants set out to do which, most commonly, is to show that other, more environmentally sustainable and socially satisfying, ways of living are possible?
All the ecovillages considered here were started by tiny groups of people, many who met as activists. Three of the four ecovillages were established in ‘new lands’ by non-locals and even LAEV members already
living in Los Angeles started by spending time and effort engaging directly with their immediate neighbours so both felt informed and comfortable as they established their collaborative living experiment. All these communities are not just locally, but also globally, active, especially in educational work. Equally they have striven to root themselves in their built and natural environments by applying ecologically sound principles.
Sustainability
The ecovillages discussed here were selected for examination partly on the basis of their post-occupancy results, what environmental savings householders are really making, not merely the potential pre-occupancy building standard potential of dwellings that regular ratings systems measure, or prospective targets made when communities form. In a review of studies of the carbon footprints per capita of residents in 16 intentional communities, Daley found that, on average, their impact was one-third of local, regional or national comparison averages, with Sieben Linden around one-quarter of the German average.58
Using a life-cycle assessment of energy used in three US ecovillages – Ecovillage at Ithaca (New York), Earthaven (Black Mountain, North Carolina) and Sirius (Shutesbury, Massachusetts) – Jesse Sherry has calculated that, if all US households reduced their energy consumption to the average level of those ecovillages, it would save the US more than one billion tons of CO2 emissions per annum. Based on results from all three ecovillages, the average resident wasted much less than the average US resident, as the following proportions show: paper (16 per cent);
glass (13 per cent); metals (15 per cent); plastics (11 per cent); rubber, leather and textiles (57 per cent); wood (4 per cent); yard trimmings (5 per cent); food scraps (3 per cent); other (25 per cent). Sherry attributes the ecovillages’ achievements to both ‘fostering community and restoring nature’.59
Real-world living laboratories
Ecovillages are not micro-societies, nor is a sustainable planet likely to evolve simply from scaling up ecovillages. Many ecovillages have put into practice ideas for doing all kinds of things differently and are accurately described as experimental socio-material ‘living laboratories’
for sustainable futures.60 They are, in effect, laboratories of participatory
action research and, as such, have even been referred to as ‘communities of practice’.61 They have led innovations in techniques, technologies and relationships for sustainable living. Most importantly, they provide experiential opportunities for a range of short and long-term visitors to observe and engage and live with their residents – to learn what it really feels like to live in alternative ways. The significance of offering such opportunities cannot be underestimated: unless vast numbers of people reduce their ecological footprints, we will experience rising global climate temperatures and natural re-balancing dynamics that might well pose conditions that make human life on Earth impossible.
To nest themselves in their environments, ecovillages have challenged planning and legal options, policy directions and regulations, and many have successfully co-developed models that are readily transferrable for adoption elsewhere. DRE highlights the planning barriers negatively, its founders simply moving interstate to specifically avoid planning limits.
LAEV took on the urban planning authority status quo by deterring and tempering the behaviour of car drivers in their area, campaigning for bicycles to be taken seriously as a transport mode in Los Angeles more generally as well as successfully protesting against an inappropriate school development that was proposed opposite their buildings by con-structively finding a better alternative local site. Lammas and other such communities have proactively acted as constructive test cases bringing planners, advocates and proposers of such eco-communities together either to change or create additional legislation and provide profession-als with models to more easily incorporate, zone and create standards for such communities. These kinds of topics are discussed further in the next chapter.
Many ecovillagers are bent on creating a seemingly impossible synergy between market and ecological dynamics. This is a trapeze act that guidelines such as the Welsh ‘One Planet Development’ policy might seem to avoid – through an orientation around self-provisioning and material ecological footprint metrics – but the calculations on which the land per capita use are based incorporate simply indicative monetary (price-oriented) units.62 Still, the Lammas approach is clearly based on
‘use values’ (qualities and measures that are quality-specific), rather than ‘exchange values’, where the price is the only or predominant value considered – so many decisions by ecovillage practitioners are relatively free of a market framework.
Cloughjordan is the most market-oriented of the four ecovillages discussed and the least affordable. The implications of integration with mainstream markets is the main theme in Chapter 8 whereas Chapter 9 centres on groups, such as squatters, who have continued to challenge the deep structures of ownership and private property rights as cultural, political, and economic barriers to achieving collective sustainability and stewardship of nature. In the following three chapters, coursing our way through this maelstrom of powerful and energetic community-based, state and market actors, we weave three distinct future directions for col-laborative and sustainable housing, such as ecovillages.