An Eco-vision for the Future: How ecovillages offer an alternative model for sustainable living
By Noah Beckage
January 4, 2021
Not far from the flagship factory where world-famous Cabot cheese is made is a narrow dirt road that winds up a steep, shady hill. There, small gardens, half-built homes, a chicken coop, and a handful of yurt-like roundhouses dwell. This small, clustered settlement is called Headwaters Garden and Learning Center (no affiliation to this magazine). I had come to meet Gwendolyn Hallsmith, the community’s founder, who graciously volunteered to speak with me and give me a tour of the property that day. When I asked about her intention for this place when she envisioned it just over ten years ago, her response was direct: “to build an ecovillage.”
As I was soon to find out, fulfilling that simple declaration of community and environmental stewardship can be a complicated undertaking.
According to the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), an ecovillage is a “community that is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes…to regenerate their social and natural environments.” In other words, it is a group of people who decide they want to live with each other in a sustainable manner. It is a definition that has to cast a wide net out of necessity; no two ecovillages are exactly alike.
Ecovillages have seen a steep rise in popularity in the last 25 years. When the GEN was founded in 1995, it consisted of representatives from 25 self-identified ecovillages worldwide. Today, the GEN databases lists over 950 Eco Communities, and it has been estimated that there are probably tens of thousands more that are not registered with the GEN. This rapid, yet relatively quiet, growth in popularity of ecovillages makes perfect sense if interpreted as a response to the continued failings of our current Capitalist society. Especially in the United States, where political institutions have failed to adequately address the climate crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, social justice issues, gaping economic disparities, and the mental health epidemic–just to list a few of our societal wounds—it is no wonder many are looking for alternative ways of living in the world.
For Headwaters, that alternative includes growing food, conserving land, and raising chickens and ducks, all together as a community. I happened to visit on their once-a-month community meeting and work day, when all the resident families gather around a small fire to share a midday meal and discuss the dealings of the community, ranging from communal garden planning to new-member homebuilding. Afterwards, residents work together on communal projects like gardening and maintaining infrastructure.
I arrived just in time to offer my help in aerating the new terraced garlic beds the community had built. While breaking up compacted soil with Gwen and a handful of her neighbors, I asked her how they make group decisions. As it turns out, when you and your neighbors get along amicably and share values, not a whole lot of bureaucracy or governing needs to happen, other than monthly meetings like the one that had taken place just before my arrival. At some meetings, bigger decisions that concern the entire community—whether or not to invest in building a new greenhouse, for example—have to be made as a group. Cynthia, another Headwaters resident told me that at these meetings, residents always reach an agreement as long as it is “good enough for now, safe enough to try.”
According to sociologist Dr. Debbie Van Schyndel Kasper, author of the 2008 article “Redefining Community in the Ecovillage,” that sentiment is rooted to a feeling of community membership, carrying with it “a certain obligation to be committed, to some degree, to the community’s overall mission and goals.” It is this felt obligation that facilitates ‘consensus style decision-making,’ where decision-makers openly discuss issues with the hope not necessarily of reaching a majority vote, but of coming to a group consensus. Group consensus is distinct from majority decision making in that it doesn’t require participants to like or even agree with the choice being made, but rather that they accept and move on with it; in effect, consensus deemphasizes the role of the individual ego in decision-making processes and instead appeals to the wisdom of the group. Phil Rice, a Senior Scientist at the non-profit think tank Climate Interactive, and a founding member of the eco-village Cobb Hill Cohousing, pithily sums up the process as, “not the art of compromise, but the art of finding what’s best for the whole.”
For an ecovillage, that ‘whole’ includes more than the human residents that make up the community. The environmentally-conscious sensibility that serves as a north star for ecovillages is a manifestation of what environmentalist Aldo Leopold called the ‘land ethic.’ Leopold wrote in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac that the land ethic “simply enlarges the boundaries of community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”
It would not be a stretch to call this expanded notion of community—one that encompasses the non-human—as the defining paradigm of ecovillages. “What primarily distinguished the ecovillage model of sustainable community from the mainstream…,” according to Dr. Kasper, “is an expanded notion of community and an accompanying ethic.” As Dr. Kasper was apt to point out, ecovillages aren’t concerned with this ideal alone, but in “the ways in which they organize practical life around these intentions.” As I was soon to learn during my visit to Cobb Hill Cohousing in Hartland, Vermont, sometimes attempts to reach those ideals work beautifully, but other times they bring less-than-practical results.
Cobb Hill, one of the older ecovillages in Vermont, sits on 280 acres of forest, pasture, and farmland purchased from two adjacent dairy farms in 1997. Donella Meadows, a coauthor of the famous 1972 Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, pioneered modern systems-thinking and expanded on pre-existing ideas around holistic, sustainable communities. It was her 1972 report that popularized the concept that there are “limits to growth in a finite world,” and made the ominous conclusion that unless sustainability on a global scale could be attained, modern society would likely succumb to a collapse in the 21st century. The findings and implications of the landmark report are still contentiously debated to this day, but undoubtedly, have had a large influence on modern environmentalist thinking.
Meadows, nearing the end of her career, had evidently decided enough thinking had been done, and was compelled to act. According to Phil, in 1996, Meadows reached out to a group of friends and cohorts, including Phil and his wife, about her desire to form an ecovillage. Unfortunately, Meadows died in 2001 before she could witness her vision materialize, but the community she had gathered eventually carried it out.The ecovillage that exists today has successfully integrated sustainability into the fabric of the community. All of the homes, for example, are designed such that “even if you're a total energy hog, you're still using half to two-thirds of the energy of somebody else living in a standard-built home,” Phil tells me. From the looks of it, I would not guess anybody here is trying to test that claim. Photovoltaic solar panels line the roofs of the dairy barns, (which still house a herd of Jersey cows), gardens fill the spaces between homes, and homemade cheese rounds line the shelves of the common room basement.
Cobb Hill’s strides towards sustainability are impressive, but they are not just for show; they have been shown to create a measurable reduction in environmental impact. A recent study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2019 found that the average resident of an ecovillage has 67 percent less global warming potential than that of an average conventional American citizen. The study, authored by Planning and Public Policy doctorate Jesse Sherry, concludes that “if all the residents of the U.S. could achieve similar reductions, it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. by at least 1 billion metric tons per year.” To put these values in perspective, that’s about 15 percent of the total greenhouse emissions produced by the country, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Yet for all the benefits that ecovillages seem to offer, I couldn’t help but wonder what, if any, were the hidden costs? When I posed this question to Phil, he didn’t hesitate to openly, if not disappointedly, admit that “you have to be able to afford a certain amount to be able to live here,” though he makes it clear that was never the intention. It is the cost of homes at Cobb Hill that necessitates any potential buyers to be fairly well-off—a lack of developmental foresight during the initial construction phase of Cobb Hill drove up the price of homes. Phil tells me that the community recognizes the unaffordability of their homes as an issue, and that they’ve brought down prices of a few homes with the proceeds earned from selling their development rights to a land trust. “If we’d been able to manifest more money,” Phil says, “we would’ve done that even more widely.”
Back at the garden at Headwaters, Gwen tells me she believes that oversights like these can be forgiven. After all, the founders at Cobb Hill were academics, not carpenters. Still, by no means are these cost barriers inevitable. She should know, considering that she was also a part of that initial circle of friends Donella Meadows reached out to, back when Cobb Hill was still just an idea. In addition to being an author and vocal advocate for ecological economics, Gwen has spent her career immersed in sustainable development. She is well aware that it takes more to create an ecovillage than to simply, as she puts it, “buy a piece of land out in the middle of nowhere and plunk a village on it.” When I asked her what exactly the shortcomings of Cobb Hill’s initial members were, she didn’t hesitate to share. There was no water supply or wastewater system on the land, and the cost of permitting and building that infrastructure wasn’t accounted for. “I could tell at the beginning,” she recalls, “that because of the way they were proceeding, it was just going to be too expensive. So I dropped out.” It was almost a decade later when Gwen again found herself immersed in the process of building an ecovillage from the ground up—only this time, she was going to do it the way she saw fit.
As we were wrapping up our work in the garlic beds, Gwen told me how it all got started here at Headwaters. In 2007, while she was working as the sustainable development director for the city of Montpelier, her friends at Rhapsody Foods, a small natural foods facility next door to Headwaters—initially introduced her to the land upon which Headwaters now sits. “They invited me out for tea one Sunday. It was something like this, me just coming out, like you came out here today,” she remembers. “I had this uncanny feeling about having come home.” That feeling turned out to be infectious, not just to those families that would eventually decide to come and raise their kids here, but even to brief unsuspecting visitors like myself. Fortunately, those families that do come to live here don’t have to break the bank to do so either.
Concerned about the ways in which the price tag of an ecovillage can creep up, Gwen found clever means to keep the cost of living at Headwaters affordable without sacrificing sustainability. According to community guidelines, homes must be built only with locally-sourced, renewable materials, and there’s an upper limit on how big a house can be so that nobody can come in and build a huge castle that few else would later be able to afford. The wisest measure Gwen knew to take – perhaps thanks to her background in development – was to ease the land at Headwaters to a Community Land Trust. This kind of trust, one that protects the land and property on it from inflating real estate prices, is designed for low income housing projects, but can be strategically applied to community lands, such as those at Headwaters, as well.
In the ecovillage movement at large, there are signs that communities are taking steps to make their sustainable, alternative lifestyle accessible to all. Leopold’s land ethic may expand beyond the realm of the human, but it should go without saying that it must encompass all humans as well. Recognizing that the popular western conception of environmentalism has historically focused on the predominately white narratives of the movement, the Foundation for Intentional Community—a network similar to the GEN, but encompassing communities beyond ecovillages—has launched a fund to help support BIPOC individuals who want to join intentional communities or start their own. Other initiatives such as Ecovillage Development Programs, reach out to impoverished villages in underdeveloped countries and use “an integrated, community-led approach to transition communities to resilience and restore their environments.” These programs seek to preserve cultural sovereignty, develop economic opportunity, and honor the indigenous origins of sustainable principles all the while adhering to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreements.
As I left Gwen and Headwaters that sunny fall afternoon, I couldn’t help but be inspired by seeing that process in action, a genuine environmental vision turned into reality. In a world in which our current systems – climatic, economic, social, and political alike – are failing in deep and critical ways, it’s more important than ever to re-envision what a better world might look like. Trying to live in social and environmental harmony won’t always be easy, but I remember what Phil told me about how to confront that challenge: “I think it goes back to trying to find sustainability,” and in an ever-changing world where sustainability is always a moving target, “you just sort of have to craft ideas, by ongoing discussion.” In that way, maybe Leopold’s land ethic and expanded notion of community can be thought of more as a direction than a fixed state. Not quite an accomplishment to be achieved, but a process to be practiced, one garden bed at a time.
