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WPE: Chris, what is an ecovillage and why have you devoted your life to it?
CM: One definition is "A full featured human settlement that is harmoniously integrated into the landscape. It provides a healthy human habitat and can be continued into the indefinite future." Basically, it's a sustainable human settlement. There are models popping up all over the world, where people are taking their living situations into their own hands and are creating their own habitats, their own settlements, off the grid, growing their own food, creating their own social institutions. It's taking charge and creating your own ideal living situation, then working out the best way to organize that.
WPE: What is the Global Ecovillage Network?
CM: The idea of GEN is very fresh, there have been utopian ideals and experiments for hundreds of years, this is the same kind of theme. The word ecovillage first appeared publicly in a 1992 issue of 'In Context' magazine, though it had been brewing for awhile. In that article, Robert Gilman described the full vision of the ecovillage. In 1995 there was a conference at Findhorn that brought together sustainability experts from around the world, and they officially inaugurated the Global Ecovillage Network. It was funded by Ross Jackson from Denmark, through his organization the Gaia Trust. Ross became wealthy by designing his own currency trading system. After that he went to India and had a spiritual experience, deciding that he was going to do something really good with his fortune. He came back to fund the Global Ecovillage Network, and worked to help get it started. I think he's put some 7 million dollars into it.
Currently, GEN is entering a new phase. Gaia Trust is no longer funding its development, now they're funding education, as part of their strategic plan - they gave so much time to get the GEN started and now that it's going well, the funding will go to education. In June of 2004 there was a meeting held at Findhorn (an ecovillage in Scotland) for 23 invited guests, ecovillage educators from all over the world. There we launched the new Ecovillage Designer Education.
WPE: Describe that journey!
CM: It was exciting to be invited, just because I've been working on this for 10 years now academically. I took my first Permaculture design course in 1993 and as I was sitting there in the opening session, I felt an overwhelming conviction that I had just discovered my life's work. If anyone else has had that kind of experience, its really convincing....that this is something I need to pursue. That was in 1993 and by 1994 I started college. The word ecovillage had just been coined, around that same time, and GEN was getting started, but there was no education in the universities for ecovillage design. So I made a career out of creating degrees that were devoted to ecovillage design. I created my first degree, of 3 at this point, called Village Design that was a first attempt at creating an ecovillage design degree academically.
I had to travel to fill in the degree. I would fly to various ecovillages and take their education or design courses, then come back to the university and fill in that information with academics - anthropology, archaeology, geology, different types of biology - they all had relevance to human settlements integrated into nature. Also, I went into Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala, to study traditional villages. I knew that GEN was going to be having one of their big board meetings in a little ecovillage in Mexico, called Huehuecoyotl. I timed it so that I'd be there at the same time GEN was there. They were flying in from Europe and Australia. I created a portfolio of my degree. It was the fifth year of my Bachelor's degree. Ross Jackson was there. We were working on a cob cottage project and I timed it so that when Ross came walking down the trail I would have my portfolio. Sure enough when Ross came by I asked him if he would take a look at what I'd been doing. He did, he took it and brought it back a few days later. He told me he'd be interested in this because they'd started to look at education within GEN, could I send him my course list, the schematic of all the courses I'd taken and how they fit into an Ecovillage Design Education. Ross asked if I would send that to Hildur, his wife, in Denmark. I did and Hildur responded with a letter saying "this is exciting, please keep us informed."
That was how I got introduced. From time to time through a Master's degree and now a PhD, I would send them stuff, and we began developing a relationship in that kind of sense.
When Hildur had the outline for GEN's Ecovillage Designer Education, she sent it to me and asked me to comment on it. So I did, I went through it with a pen and made critical comments wherever I thought they were needed. Based on that she invited me to the meeting at Findhorn in June 2004.
WPE: What happened at the meeting at Findhorn?
CM: It was just a fantastic group of people. Max Lindegger from Australia was there, and Marti Mueller from Auroville in India, May East from Findhorn. These people have been my heroes all these years. Very committed high energy people. Educators from Germany and a few from the US. There was a guy there from Portugal, and Lepre Viola, a woman from the Damanhur Federation of Ecovillages in Italy. It was a great group of people. It was well thought out too. Will Keetin from the Satyana Institute in Washington State, was our facilitator. It was a very thoughtful week of community building. We would meditate together, then go through group process work, and afterward come out with the best ideas possible.
Out of all that came the initial framework for the Ecovillage Designer Education. Right now all the ecovillages around the world, the premier ones, have their own education programs. It's a natural part of it, it's kind of automatic. When you're setting up a sustainable community model it becomes an education site, by its very nature.
This new education is intended to set a standard, a common language for all of them, so that everybody is on the same page more or less. So this will be the education that is endorsed by the Gaia Trust and GEN, and now the UN too! People will still have their own approaches, but there will be a standard to follow. We had just a great, great week, high energy! Towards the end was the need to create a steering committee for follow up work, and I was nominated to be on the steering committee.
Once the steering committee met, I was asked to be the coordinator for this new curriculum. After this meeting people were going to go back to their respective homes, and then begin writing the modules. They needed someone who could receive all the modules, and start putting them all together into some kind of coherent whole. Because I am a PhD student, I got the job.
WPE: When you got home, who contributed to the curriculum and what types of ideas did they contribute?
CM: We came out of Findhorn with four dimensions - Social, Spiritual, Ecological and Economic, which is one step more than the United Nations recognizes. They recognize three: Social, Ecological and Economic. They see three parts to education in sustainability, while we took the step of adding a fourth one called spiritual. It's a big step. It's a sensitive issue, focusing on human growth and development (not related to religious).
Max Lindegger from Australia, sent the Ecological Curriculum. The Social Curriculum was written by 5 separate people, all European, for all of whom English was a second language. The Spiritual just appeared as a kind of brainstorm that various people contributed to.
Over the course of a couple of months I would respond to the modules I received, and there would be an exchange going back and forth. We got closer and closer to having it look like a curriculum, rather than a bunch of separate writings. It was a fun exercise, and it was challenging also.
Somewhere around the middle of October (2004), May East notified us that she had arranged for a meeting with UNITAR in Geneva. (United Nations Institute for Training and Research). She needed a version of the curriculum to give to them at the meeting on November 10th, 2004. Suddenly there was a rush to get all the modules we had as organized as possible. I wrote four separate overviews for each of the dimensions, and the Introduction had to be written. It ended up that a small subgroup of us, 4 or 5 people, got together just as time ran out. We barely got a Draft 1 done in time for the UNITAR meeting.
They liked it enough to set up a second meeting that happened on January 10th, 2005. After a break for the holidays, we reconvened as an international committee, and we powered out a Draft 2. Our goal for this draft was to get down to a manageable form of 60-70 pages, that wouldn't be so laborious to read through. That became the big task for draft 2. The new introduction, for example, is down to 4 pages. All of the Overviews are still in there.
May East went ahead and delivered Draft 2 to UNESCO in Paris and UNITAR in Geneva on January 10th. Based on that, UNITAR sent us an endorsement letter, I have it right here. It says "Let me take the opportunity to congratulate GEN on leading this initiative. The Ecovillage Designer Education Curriculum will prove to be a valuable contribution to the dialogue in action undertaken in the context of the UN's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development."
WPE: The next meeting was in Hungary?
CM: Yes, we met in Hungary in June (2005) for a meeting called the Training of the Trainers. There were 13 of us, who had been contributing to the writing. As a group we are referred to as the GEESE -Global Ecovillage Educators for a Sustainable Earth. Our goal was to try out the EDE, the 20 modules, 5 modules each of the four dimensions and work out the glitches.
The meeting was hosted by an ecovillage in Hungary called the Galgafarm. The Galgafarm is a community of folk who have worked together for decades, all growing up in the area. They have many income producing cottage industries in place. They have huge agricultural fields and canneries that produce a variety of products. They have sheep and produce woolen fabrics. Their booth at the farmers market in Budapest is widely known. Their plans to build an ecovillage are in the works, and an architectural model has been made. While we were there, their principal organizer, Geza, held a press conference that included radio and television.
Each dimension was given two days for us to try out the modules. Each of us taught the modules we had worked on. As I said earlier, the modules are hands on and it was alot of fun.
There were two days for each of the four dimensions with 2 or 3 modules per day, plus all the business needed to evaluate and make changes - it was very full.
WPE: Is there a common vision that GEN, UNESCO, all of this is being driven by?
CM: Besides generic sustainability, I think people are starting to come to recognize that this global economic system may have a lifespan to it, a limited lifespan. In other words, it can't be continued indefinitely, so I think the common vision is people coming together and imagining, "Well, what is the post phase going to look like?" What does a sustainable situation look like, and then designing settlements based on that.
There are two different ways to approach it. One is to imagine the optimum way for humans to live together, the visionary component. What kind of living situations bring out the best in human nature? Their creativity, their compassion, their community? Traditionally people tend to go with smaller groupings, where they can join in creating a life for themselves. That's one vision, the other vision is a response to Peak Oil, and the unsustainable economic situation. I don' t really like to jump on that kind of fear based, things are going to collapse idea. I don't really think its going to be such a disaster. But there is going to need to be a redesign of the way we do things. Ecovillage principles can be expanded to resolve these issues.
WPE: What will the role of the curriculum be? What's the vision for this curriculum?
The vision right now is to complement the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, and also to create a standard for all the ecovillage models that are popping up. You could call it integrated ecovillage design, so that all the various factors are considered. Social, Economic, Ecological and Spiritual. Some ecovillages tend to focus on one of those aspects more than others. Some design courses tend to be more singularly focused, so this is an effort to insure that everybody is looking at the full spectrum of considerations.
WPE: After Hungary, you completed the final rewrite.
CM: The next step was to prepare a final draft for the 10th Anniversary Celebration of GEN, at Findhorn, October 1 -10, 2005.
During this process we changed the term "Spiritual" to "Worldview".
The 10th Annniversary of the Global Ecovillage Network Conference was incredible. The event was designed so that most of the participants also were giving workshops about their projects back home. A woman from the Bay Area had been introducing permaculture to her area, the Brazilians talked about their urban village in Sao Paolo. There were 150 people there and they each had been making it happen in their own places. When they all came together in one place it was very high energy. It was life changing for me!
What an amazing event it was! Findhorn, an ecovillage in Scotland, has consciously stated their purpose to be the focal center of a network of light around the planet. GEN brought together 150 people who are all doing wonderful work where they live. When they came together, it was such a big affirmation for the planet, each a point of light that together mushroomed! All that focused energy expanded, amidst all the gloom and weird stuff going on in the world. It was an affirmation that everything is going to work out OK. No one could be there at the conference and have an attitude of despair.
There were some great speakers. Peter Harper, from the Center of Alternative Technology in Wales, gave a moving presentation. Everyone is trying to raise the image of the ecovillage. When I'm here at home in the states, I still think that people have a prejudice that it's a "back to the land" movement. But the people at the forefront, the innovators, are doing everything they can to make it a mainstream solution. Not just ideas for building utopian communities, but to do the retrofit that's needed to redesign the urban neighborhoods. Peter Harper has a lot of respect around the world, and when he gives a presentation he is fully directed toward a solution that any person can accept. It's not directed toward one kind of culture, or a subculture of one type or another. Up here at Fairhaven College, where I have done my work for 10 years, "ecovillage" is way down at the bottom, seen as a counter culture idea, "we can just forget about them". And it's reinforced in our local community. For example, a couple of people from school got together and decided to start an ecovillage initiative here in town. They did some advertising and rented a room to have the first ecovillage development meeting. But when people walked into the meeting, they found that the two people who organized the meeting had dreadlocks and were wearing the style of jeans that have holes and patches. It just happened that that's the fashion they like, but anybody from the mainstream walking in felt that ecovillage concepts are for a subculture that they don't feel comfortable in. It appears like some kind of fringe. It just reinforces that image. We're never going to get funding that way.
So, being at a conference with someone like Peter Harper, who is very straightforward, saying "These are problems that the world is facing, and these are the solutions that this ecovillage concept offers." That perspective completely eliminated the subculture issue. And Helena Norberg Hodge, also spoke. She wrote the book "Ancient Futures". She is the same kind of person, someone who is beyond that initial stage that says "do we want to have this kind of culture or not". She's way beyond that. She has a detailed critique of globalization, and how relocalization can bring the economy back. Local production, local consumption. It's the only solution. Globalization is an idea that had a short lifespan. These speakers are writers that have international respect. To be there in the midst of that was very inspiring.
The first conference, where GEN was born, was in 1995. I had just started school. I tried to get to the conference, but it was all filled up. So, a couple of friends and I got to Findhorn a few months afterward, and the place was still buzzing from the energy. We stayed for three months and did an internship.
Now, here it is 10 years later, October of 2005, and I not only got to go to the conference, I went as a writer of the Ecovillage Designer Education Curriculum, as the coordinator. All of my expenses were paid. I sat on the panel with all of the other Global Ecovillage Educators for a Sustainable Earth (GEESE), in the Universal Hall - a spectacular place - I got to sit with the rest of the GEESE, and announce to the rest of the world that this body of work is to become the standard.
It was very satisfying, so fulfilling. I had a real sense of appreciation to be there, to have been able to have the space to be doing this work, a deep sense of camaraderie with the other people who live scattered around the world but come together once in awhile to create this curriculum, this education that the UN wants to use to better the world.
The UN is especially interested in the urban aspect, tying this to an urban setting. More and more we're going to streamline it to fit an urban model. We want to describe ecovillage in terms of retrofitting the urban neighborhoods to become more sustainable. This is already happening in Australia, where the word ecovillage is openly talked about in city planning, in city councils. Ecovillage is not a fringe wild hippie commune experiment, it's sound design principles that can be applied to neighborhoods, to transition them to sustainability. For what we are calling the post carbon era, when it's too expensive to ship food thousands of miles, when the entire economic system is being restructured to be localized, the whole village idea becomes more about creating self sustaining communities at the neighborhood scale. City planners have come up with a neighborhood plan that talks about Urban Villages, but I've been reading through the plan and there's not a whole lot of detail. What do they actually mean by an Urban Village? It's kind of a word that's being thrown around to promote infill, as a solution to sprawl, but they're building condos now. They're infilling, but its one dimensional, they're not thinking about the transit and how to feed these people, economic opportunities for them, there's a lot missing. Any traditional village you go to has a marketplace, for example, the center of the social and economic life is the marketplace. There's light industry, opportunities to be economically sustainable at the neighborhood scale. How about the energy situation, what can we do? How can we meet our energy needs by ourselves if we can't rely on the grid anymore? There are creative opportunities to begin taking charge of our own living situations at the neighborhood scale, and calling that an ecovillage. Or urban village, or just village - whatever you want to call it, it comes down to "Village".
In Vancouver, BC, next year (June 2006), there's going to be a big conference on the UN's Sustainable Cities Initiative. This will be the 3rd one, they've had one in Barcelona and one in Nairobi. What they really want from us is to work on just that. This is where the Urban Village comes in. How do we organize the urban landscape to create self sustaining villages? How do we use the same ideas, the 20 modules, and tie these into inner cities, city corridors or districts? The UN wants to do this because the undeveloped countries have such horrible situations in their cities. They are going to try out the EDE in two of their biospheric reserves, one in Cuba and one in Slovenia. There will be an 18 month pilot period in which Ross and Hildur, through their organization the Gaia Trust, will give a set amount of money to fund 8-10 pilot projects. Two that the UN will do in their biospheric reserves, and the rest in ecovillages around the world.
WPE: Let's close with an excerpt from the Preamble of the Ecovillage Designer Education Curriculum:
"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defense of an idea, such as democracy or the fight against poverty. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are small as schools and villages; others as large as continents. What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people. Together, we are stronger." - Kofi Annan- UN Secretary General
We live in a rapidly changing world that is transforming before our very eyes. Humanity is now being challenged as never before to grow in wisdom, maturity, and understanding. A plethora of deep and pressing concerns is calling for our immediate attention, concerns such as: Earth's environmental degradation, including the loss of precious topsoil and forest cover, the encroachment of deserts, the depletion of fisheries and aquifers, the loss of habitat and the extinction of species, etc.; the glaring and increasing disparity between rich and poor leading to exploitation, poverty, and the associated regimen of malnutrition and over-population; the disintegration of families, communities, even entire cultures; unrestrained urbanization resulting in social alienation, displacement, and feelings of disconnection with the natural world; the dimming of a sense of spiritual awareness and purpose; global warming and ozone depletion; etc. And now, looming on the horizon is “peak oil,” with its coming adjustments and retrofits, including the probability of ongoing conflict over access to the remaining energy reserves.
All of these problems are quite real and, by now, well-documented; but gaining awareness of the extent of the problems is only half the project of becoming educated these days.
Amidst these intense challenges, and largely catalyzed by them, lies the prospect for tremendous growth in human potential and consciousness. People and communities all over the globe are coming together to reclaim responsibility for creating their own living situations – at local and regional levels. In the process, they are overcoming prior limitations and developing new talents, skills, knowledge and approaches. Paradoxically, many of the most innovative solutions rely on a timeless, perennial kind of wisdom that seems to have been disregarded recently. The potential for a refreshed, renewed, revitalized humanity goes hand-in-hand with meeting the challenges of our present Age.
The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) believes the most promising and effective way to deal with all these issues is through education – not a typical education but a new kind of global education, specifically designed to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century:
This is an education where a thorough and objective assessment of the state of the planet is followed by regional, community, and place-based solutions; an education that empowers individuals and communities with the knowledge for shaping their worlds and becoming more self-reliant; an education that is universal in scope but local in application, directed toward preserving precious cultural diversity; an education where investigating theory is followed by practical application; an education that imparts useful and instrumental life-skills as part of the curriculum; an education relevant to peoples of both developed and developing countries, rural and urban regions; an education focused on the complexly interwoven, transdisciplinary issues pertaining to the transition to sustainable culture; an education promoting and facilitating healthful planetary evolution; an education exploring and expanding the perceived limits of human potential; an education identifying and reconnecting all these essential considerations to a meaningful, dignified, high-quality life for all the world’s people...
This is the Ecovillage Design Education – an education preparing the way for a sustainable future.
To get a copy of the EDE or to contact Chris Mare: ecmare@villagedesign.org www.villagedesign.org (Village Design Institute)
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