Society

Ecovillage Future: And How Access to Land is a Barrier

Ecological Civilisation - Part Six (Free Course)

What is an Ecovillage and how do practices and values different from ordinary life within consumer capitalist societies? And what would the world look like if there were millions of Ecovillages emerging to replace industrial civilisation?

In this presentation Dr Samuel Alexander examines these questions and draws on research which attempts to measure the energy and resource reductions of Ecovillage living.

After reviewing an inspiring example of the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, Alexander examines how access to land can be a barrier to embracing such low-impact living.

This is Part VI of the Ecological Civilisation series.

00:00 – Introduction

02:18 – Review

07:25 – Ecovillage analysis

17:59 –Land as a barrier

33:03 – Conclusion

Other video’s in this series include:

Introduction

Home Biogas – Part 1

A Real Green New Deal – Policies for a Post-Growth Economy – Part 3

Life in ‘Degrowth’ Economy: Envisioning a Prosperous Descent – Part 4

Post-Capitalism by Design not Disaster:  A Grassroots Theory of Change – Part 5

The series is grappling with the problems of consumerism and the growth economy; envisioning alternative, post-carbon ways of life; and considering what action can be taken, both personally and politically, to help build an ecological civilisation.

 

Links Referenced in the Presentation 

Joshua Lockyer’s research on Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage

Ted Trainer’s quantitative research on low-impact living

Short analysis of land as a barrier to sustainable living by Samuel Alexander and Alex Baumann

Long analysis of land as a barrier to sustainable living by Alex Baumann, Samuel Alexander, and Peter Burdon: https://www.ppesydney.net/content/upl…

The work above draws inspiration from the Neighbourhoods that Works model developed by Chris Baulman: 

Other Ecovillage Links

Dancing Rabbit

Findhorn Ecovillage

Global Eco Village Network

 

You can support this work by purchasing an e-book from the Simplicity Institute, available on a ‘pay what you can’ basis (edit the price as you choose for a donation)  Paperbacks are also available

Find out more about Samuel Alexander’s work  and the Simplicity Institute.

Samuel Alexander

Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ as part of the Master of Environment.

2 Comments

  1. Interesting. Decades ago, I paid for a permaculture magazine lifetime subscription. After some years the magazine was discontinued. This exposes some factual realities which idealists who are looking for handouts from anyone would rather not face. For a start, when investing our hard scrabble aftertax savings, in the real world we risk losing it. This is not to advice against seeking or giving funds for a venture, but it means that ventures need to be economical to survive without handouts. Handouts are not manna from heaven. Someone stumps up the money. To have ideals is to feel virtuous as a matter of course. These days, since the Sixties actually, in the West, especially in Western Europe and Australasia, to feel virtuous is to almost automatically feel a sense of entitlement. This sense of entitlement manifests in various ways, but in personal relationships it is generally not very profitable, for obvious reasons, therefore the virtuous feeling idealist prospective recipients of other people’s largesse joins a charitable organisation, usually one government-funded. This is a competitive business, if one would make it pay, the more since one making such effort to be rewarded for one’s virtue makes one feel more virtuous and, hence, be labouring under a yet greater sense of entitlement. This sets up a vicious virtuous circle of a feeling of entitlement failure. Time to become a political operative.

    To cut a long story short. I know people who wanted a house of their own, or some land, or both. These people worked and saved, and did without the things that most people take for granted, until they had a deposit or enough to buy something outright. For young people that is in most western countries a hard and long road to hoe. This they reject almost all. To meaningfully participate in democratic society in order to change the system, people who are not financially successful by their own efforts also find too hard a road without instant gratification, so is rejected. To get ahead anyway, people lobby politicians or get a sinecure paid by taxpayers, or both. As a result, the system gradually, at first, the increasingly rapidly, transforms society and the sociopolitical economy. Thus, by their own efforts, or lack of, do people en masse make, or break, society.

    Under the circumstances, I don’t know if this plan to get cheap housing and land for free from the government will succeed. It might in part. It is better to have a good plan which can be, with justification, made to look good, virtuous even, than have no plan and simply say to the government that you cannot afford to buy a house of your own, or even simply cannot afford to pay the rent, even as you are working 50 hours a week in a boring and soul-destroying job doing work that is absolutely essential to keep society functioning..

    In a democratic nation-state, it’s anybody’s game and everybody can do or try to do the best they can for themselves, but make no mistake, if there is no balance between cooperation and competition in society as a whole, society falls apart-as it is doing now in the entire West bar Japan, Denmark and Iceland.
    What has government been about since the 1960s? Better think about it with a permaculture frame of mind,…
    and weep.

  2. If access to land is a barrier, then we need to explore innovative methods to circumvent this. Paul Wheaton has such a method, which is called SKIP, for SKills to Inherit Property. SKIP is a ‘learn by doing’ approach to educate people in the skills necessary to own land. By developing these skills and documenting them on the Permies.com website where this is coordinated, people are then connected with homesteaders (or smallholders as they are called in Commonwealth countries) who do not have anyone to bequeath their property to. These folk do not want their precious legacy to be sold off in an estate sale to people who will bulldoze it into commercial or residential developments.
    More information here: https://permies.com/wiki/skip-pep-bb and https://permies.com/wiki/160690/physical-copy-SKIP-book.

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