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Columnists
Sustainability
and Sustainable Development
Nicholas
R. Hild, PhD Professor ASU
Polytechnic
Nicholas
R. Hild, PhD., Professor, Environmental Technology Management, Arizona
State University College of Technology and Innovation, has extensive
experience in Environmental Management in the southwestern U.S. Dr. Hild
can be reached at 480-727-1309 and by email at DrNick@asu.edu.
"...It
takes a village..."Eco-village," that is..." Part I
of II
Oct/Nov
2008
If
you were in college in the late ‘60’s, you’re familiar with the
concept of ‘communal’ living.
Recently, we’ve seen a resurrection of the idea of what might be
called, the ‘modified communal’ village—only now it is
fashionable to call them “eco-villages” which imbues
them with traits that certainly conjure up a different image than the
‘60’s hippie digs in a time where Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and Wadena
(Iowa) became the holy grail of the flower children generation.
What
brings the subject of ‘communal living’ to mind, is the relatively new
green building concept known today as ‘eco-villages.’
How, you may rightfully ask, did I make the leap from hippie communes to
eco-villages? Consider that
all those years since Woodstock, communal living as practiced by the
flower children of that day, rapidly declined to the point where it would
be difficult to locate any remaining within the U.S.
That is not to say, however, that a few have not survived; they
have, but they’ve had to become something different than how they were
founded—“different” to sustain themselves, at the very least.
In
1970, at the beginning of the end of the hippie lifestyle for all but a
few hardcore communes, a visionary named Palo Soleri proposed to build a
laboratory for an ecologically sensitive, compact, high-density community
where people could live and work car-free, off-the-grid,
growing their own food while focusing on construction alternatives to
urban sprawl and hyper-consumption. He named this vision Arcosanti and set
out to recruit ‘students’ to embrace his “arcology” theories,
combining ecology and architecture to move to the then-remote Arizona
desert and build a 25 acre site into a residence for 5000 like-minded ‘arcologists.’
Wow! 5000 people living on 25 acres—think ‘density’ at the
extreme level.
Arcosanti,
for all practical purposes, became the first of what we now call, “eco-villages”
which are now a part of the current day’s green-speak that
underlies the various ‘sustainable development’ protocols that we’ve
all come to know and love.
What
wasn’t envisioned in 1970, however, was that it would take so long to
‘build-out’ Arcosanti—indeed, now almost 40
years later, it is less than 3 percent complete because…and this
is the catch…because of not being able to attract sufficient capital to
finance the prototype eco-village community.
And,
therein lies the lesson for future sustainable
‘village’ builders— being a capitalist and embracing capitalism was
just too establishment for the truly ecology-minded
prophets of environmentalism back then—it was just not
cool…but, it turns out to be absolutely necessary for survival in this
new (and greening) millennium.
Usher
in the new millennium communal life-style: an eco-village right in
your own back yard! (i.e. no NIMBY syndrome for these folks!)
You
might be surprised, as I was, to learn that in keeping with the notion
that capitalism does have its strong point to emulate, there is now an
Eco-Village Training Center in Tennessee where people go who are
interested in learning how to build, live, and work in more sustainable
‘neighborhoods’— (Note: these are not at all the same model as
Arcosanti)— which are designed as eco-villages.
And, while there aren’t a lot of left over hippie communes, there
seems to be no lack of eco-villages that are better characterized as little
villages within larger neighborhoods, where people have signed
a contract to live just a little more sustainably than the rest of the
neighborhood at large. That’s quite different than the Arcosanti model
but it’s still all about living sustainable lifestyles.
Worldwatch
Institute released a study recently that catalogued 379 “eco-villages”
which are registered with the Global Eco-Village Network—110 of those
are in North America— but while the sheer numbers of ‘villages’ are
impressive, the report also doesn’t give any advice for how such
‘villages’ can sustain themselves.
“That,” says Al Bates, the director of the Eco-Village
Training Center in Tennessee, “is
one of the biggest challenges—the lack of community ‘glue’ is hard
to over-emphasize.” Even
Bates acknowledges that most ‘eco-villages’ fail in the first five
years because… “(the people living there) …don’t have the
people skills to live together in harmony.”
Seems
there was a lot of that going around back in the hippie communes of the
‘60’s, too.
So,
in the second part of this article coming in the next issue of the
Journal, we will examine how eco-villages are designed to overcome those
growing pains that ultimately spelled the demise of the communes of the
‘60’s—those were the people that, back then, were sure they had the
answer for a brighter future for their children’s, children’s,
children.
2008/1234
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