I found this article in alternet rather thought provoking: http://www.alternet.org/story/145419/can_%27eco-villages%27_be_sustainable_without_being_exclusive
my personal and off the cuff reaction is that the knocks laid against ecovillages suffers from several of the author's crippling assumptions: 1. What we now have for ecovillages is the only model we will ever have. that seems implicit in the complaint but when the present crop of villages weather the decline from peak oil, they will begin to look like they ARE infrastructure rather than propped up on existing grid technologies. 2. Do ecovillages scale? It is put forth as a damning question but really, there are other ways things can turn out...what if they tended toward self contained and self sufficient power and food supply? when you talk of energy distribution, scaling up has costs too and cheap energy has made planners negligent of those costs 3. Violating the principle of public space is a weak claim. if you put two ecovillages next to each other, they would tear down any walls...what could this Johannes Fiedler guy learn from the ecovillage at Ithaca? =George -- freedom is not more important than fairness and much easier to fake. _______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins Questions about the list? ask [email protected] free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
