I must have missed the first of these messages on eco-villages and its one
of my favorite subjects.
The Farm, where Elizabeth lived, is a leader in the ecovillage movement.
Check out the info online if you can. I'm on a list called ecovillage and
anyone interested should consider joining. I don't have these addresses
handy, but they're not hard to find through Yahoo. If someone wants to
join the list, but doesn't have web capability, then e-mail me personally
and i'll figure out how to get you on the list.
I think E's charactarization of The Farm's sexist culture in the 70's is
true. The whole back to the land movement was a movement back to
traditional roles in a lot of ways, but this has long since given way to
other arrangements. I view the whole period as sort of living through our
culture's history in order to understand it.
The ecovillage concept is very important to ecofeminism, or at least it
should be. I've heard of a couple of ecofeminist EV's forming.
Most EV's i know anything about want to be non heirchical, but i would
expect a lot of failure in this dept., from the men and women both.
Heirachy is pretty hard to root out, or maybe outgrow is more like it.
The area i live in, Floyd county VA USA, has a fair number of communities
that don't have or want publicity. I hope its like that in a lot of
places. Most of the communities around here are more like neighborhoods
with shared assets.......now that is said that i'm thinking of one that has
shared income and one with no shared assets and i think one of the
important things about communities is that they vary so variously. I live
in a community where people own their own land and also stock in a company
that owns a house and some farmland and also another company that is a
nature conservancy. My review on this is mixed... but i'm very happy with
the nature conservancy part. We put the most sensitive areas in a trust
called "artesia" and this has been a big success because we don't have to
do anything but enjoy it. The other assets are part of "left bank" ,and
this was formed out of 13 parties who mostly didn't know each other, and so
had no idea how little they had in common besides wanting to buy land here.
I call it social deep diversity but this is no good for coming to group
decisions and i now think that these things need to develop in a more
organic way, which they no doubt will. I think the internet might be a
good tool for helping like to find like. I think that once a few good
patterns for doing this are put out there that they could spread quickly
I feel ( and think) strongly that ecovillages are the future home of much
if not most of humanity. I think that the last feminine age was an age of
peaceful village life, and that the masculine age that we are now coming
out of is an age of cities, and that next feminine epoch will be villages
again, but this time with a global worlview.
anyway that's the view from will'sworld
will bason
