Ecovillages

What is an Ecovillage?

In the summer of 1991, In Context magazine defined an ecovillage as a human-scale, full-featured settlement in which human activities are integrated into the natural world in a way that supports healthy human development and that can be successfully continued indefinitely. A human-scale settlement is one that is small enough for people to know and be known by the others in the community, and in which each member of the community feels he or she is able to influence the community's direction. A full-featured settlement is one in which all the major elements of normal living—residence, food provision, work activities, education, health [Page 424]care, leisure, and social life—are present in balanced proportions.

The eco in ecovillage indicates the principle of equality between humans and other forms of life: Humans do not attempt to dominate nature but rather find their place within it. Another important principle is the cyclic use of material resources, which stands in contrast to the “extract, use once, throw away” pattern that has characterized industrial society. Ecovillages use renewable energy sources, compost organic wastes, and recycle as much as possible; they also avoid using toxic and harmful substances.

History

Ecovillages were the fruits of ideas that developed more or less simultaneously in disparate parts of the world. In 1975, Mother Earth News, an alternative-lifestyle journal, coined the term ecovillage to describe an area of its experimental farm near Hendersonville, North Carolina, where it was constructing renewable energy systems, novel buildings, and organic gardens. In 1979, it started hosting workshops from this educational center.

About the same time, the term ökodorf (ecovillage) came up in West Germany in connection with political resistance to disposal of nuclear waste in the northern German farming town of Gorleben. Activists at the nuclear site attempted to construct for themselves a small village that was ecologically based. Their camp was ultimately removed in the largest police action seen in West Germany since World War II, but the concept lived on in small ökodorf experiments in East and West Germany. The magazine Ökodorf Informationen began publishing in 1985 and later evolved into Eurotopia. After the reunification of Germany, the movement coalesced and became part of a larger international ecovillage movement.

Also at this time, a number of communities in Denmark began looking beyond the social benefits of cohousing and other cooperative forms of residential development and toward the ecological potentials of a more thorough redesign of human habitats. The oldest ecovillage in Denmark is Svanholm, which began in 1978 and has 100 residents today, although the idea of “ecovillage” was not a part of Svanholm's thinking at inception. In 1993 a small group of communities inaugurated the Danish ecovillage network, Landsforeningen for Økosamfund, the first network of its kind and a model for the larger movement that was to follow.

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