Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: cohousing: self-sufficient community

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Jessica Shaten asks:

> But is there anyone else out there interested in this idea of 
> village self-sufficiency and long-term sustainability?  It is not 
> really a co-housing issue per-se (or doesn't need to be), so I don't 

My take is that some people in Cohousing care a lot about these kind of
issues, and others don't care much, or only care in a fairly abstract 
kind of way.  

I think that the kind of thing you are mainly talking about goes under the
rubric "ecovillage" most of the time.  There is an international Ecovillage
Network (this movement has a very international flavour).  You can look
at their web pages at 

http://www.gaia.org/ 

(Access is a little slow because it's in Denmark - the pages are in English
though).

You can also look at the Fellowship for Intentional Communities ecovillage
page which is at

http://www.well.com/user/cmty/ecov.html

I'm aware of four reasonably well-developed groups in the U.S. which consider
themselves to be Ecovillages 

Ecovillage L.A. (http://www.well.com/user/cmty/la.ecovill.html),
who are retrofitting an urban L.A. block to be more sustainable.

Ecovillage Ithaca (several members of whom are on this list) which is
more like a cohousing community with a strong orientation to sustainability
issues (they are in the middle of building new houses from scratch).

The Farm (http://www.gaia.org/farm/index.html)
An older rural intentional community which is more or less in the process
of converting to an Ecovillage and has an "Ecovillage Training Center" which
runs courses.

Manitou (http://www.gaia.org/manitou/index.html) An institute in Colarado
which seems to do both very spiritual and very eco kind of stuff.


I have no doubt there are many others.  It seems to me in general that there
is considerable variety in who is calling themselves an Ecovillage, and I
get the feeling that there is a certain amount of "They're not really an
ecovillage" feeling amongst some people about other groups.  I usually
take the word as a statement of intent, rather than denoting any actual
state of sustainability.

Hope this information is useful,

Stuart.


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Stuart Staniford-Chen                   | Dept of Computer Science
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu                    |   UC Davis, CA 95616
h:(916) 756-8697; w:(916) 754-8742      |          and
http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/cohousing/ | N St Cohousing Community
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