how to save the world

You always learn more from seeing and doing than from research and reading, and I learned an enormous amount. Here’s what I learned in particular:

1. A lot of people in Intentional Community really ‘get’ sustainability. The people I met were extremely well-read and, thanks I suspect to the Internet, well-informed and well connected. They know about the organic/local food trade-offs, more about the challenges of permaculture, bioregionalism and biodynamic agriculture than I could ever hope to know, and about how close to self-sufficiency and sustainability an eco-community can reasonably hope to get in our modern economy and society. 
• What this meant to me: This was hugely encouraging — I felt immediately as if I were among friends, people I hope to spend more time with in the future.
2. Intentional Community is a hard sell. Diana Leafe Christian’s research suggests the average IC only has about 11 members, and the failure rate is phenomenal. Half of the total IC’s (planned and under development) are still at the idea stage, and most of them will never get past that stage. To even contemplate joining an IC you have to have three things: (a) a shared vision and shared principles with others in, or aspiring to start, an IC, (b) the freedom to pull up stakes and move to where the IC is (which is probably not close to most workplaces) and (c) the resources (money and/or time) to invest in becoming a full member and participant in the work on an IC. How many of us have that? One person I spoke to compared it to joining a monastery. It’s a big and complicated change. Because of this, despite the success of Whole Village, I suspect I would not have much difficulty getting accepted — there are a few memberships available, rather than the waiting list I’d expected. But once you’ve bought in, you might find it difficult to find someone to buy your membership if you change your mind or if circumstances force you to move. 
• What this meant to me: Until I know for sure where I belong, I probably won’t invest in an IC.
3. Intentional Community, done right, is affordable and responsible. The members of Whole Village did two things very well: They did not start until they had a core group of people (three women with farming backgrounds and three men with carpentry or other useful construction backgrounds) to build, rather than buy, much of what they needed. And, they paced themselves and used connections, frugality and reciprocity to acquire much of what they needed at less than market cost. They did this, to their credit, without compromising on quality, sustainability, or principles: everything there is locally-made, natural/organic, free of toxins and pollutants, energy-conserving and durable. You can buy a small unit (close to 1000 s.f.) and a share in the 6000 s.f. common areas and huge acreage, giving you a much larger ‘effective’ living space than the average single family dwelling in the ex-urbs of Toronto, for a fraction the cost. What’s more, food grown on the premises, and shared labour, save you a fortune and hours of time every week compared to owning your own nuclear-family home. 
• What this meant to me: After hearing about some ICs that are priced out of reach of most people, I was very relieved to hear that some ICs are very reasonably priced. For me, this is no longer a pipe-dream.
4. Skill mismatches are a chronic problem with Intentional Communities. Like most non-urban ICs, Whole Village is, commercially, a farm. What such communities need, therefore, are people who know about farming, about maintenance and construction, and people with the time and enthusiasm to do this hard physical work. What such communities tend to attract, by contrast, are idealists, thinkers, writers, white-collar office and technology people looking for life closer to the land, but not very good at it, and people who are too busy (with their wage slave office jobs, and commuting to them) to learn and help out with what needs to be done. I suspect this is probably the largest reason why most ICs, even successful ones, have so few members. 
• What this meant to me: I know nothing about farming, gardening or construction, and I’m pretty useless with my hands. And my job keeps me so busy I have neither time nor energy for pitching in with the hard labour. What is really needed for ICs, and where I might be able to help, is mechanisms for creating Natural Enterprises in ICs, so that members can make a viable living right there, in ways other than farming, maintenance and construction, without the need to commute or work long hours. Until then, I have to confess I’m not very useful to an IC, and I know I’d feel badly about not contributing my fair share. What’s worse, the commute would kill me. As determined as I am to become part of an IC, now is evidently not the time. Now I need to decide where I belong in the meantime.
5. Communal living requires a lot of compromise and adaptability, and some passion for living simply. I was already aware that most ICs have had to develop, and teach their members, the art of consensus-building and conflict resolution. I wasn’t aware of how difficult it must be to move into a place where most of the area is communally owned and used for what the majority want to use it for, and decorated the way they want it decorated. Inevitably, this compromise leads to a fairly utilitarian and ‘institutional’ look to the common areas. Like most homeowners I’m used to being able to decide exactly how to use and decorate ‘my’ space. In an IC, your personal space is pretty small, and because you’re at close quarters and have a responsibility to the others in the community, you don’t really have that much leeway on how it’s decorated either. The apartment-dwellers at the orientation session didn’t seem phased by this, because they’re probably used to it. For single-family homeowners this would take some getting used to. It helps therefore to keep in mind that this is probably the most painless way to achieve a radical reduction in your personal ecological footprint, and to dramatically simplify your life. There simply isn’t room for most of your stuff, and that’s probably a good thing.
• What this meant to me: The idealist in me envisions something that I can never hope or expect to find in a ‘real’ IC, which is of necessity a communal invention, a compromise, a consensus. How much of my ideal am I prepared to give up to be part of such a ‘reality’? I guess I will find out.
6. Farms are not ‘natural’ places, are not particularly attractive, and require huge amounts of land. The farmers I know have been quick to tell environmentalists this, but for many it takes a while to sink in. I am always surprised at how shabby farms look, how many chemicals most of them use, how much natural habitat of wild species they destroy. Brenda has the two-volume set on forest permaculture called Edible Forest Gardens, from my publisher Chelsea Green, which is perhaps as close as we can get to a ‘natural’ farm, at least in temperate climates. Nevertheless, I somehow expect to see a lot of forested land in ICs, and frequent glimpses of wild animals, and I am usually disappointed. The cleared farmland in Whole Village takes up much of the 200 acres, both for edible plants and, even more substantially, for feed crops and pasture for the village’s farm animals (dairy cattle, chickens for eggs, sheep for wool).
• What this meant to me: The vegetable gardens and fruit groves at Whole Village provide enough for 50 vegetarian families, far more than live there, so that some revenue can be achieved at small additional cost to defray other expenses, and to attract visitors to the IC who might become members or at least learn more about what ICs have to offer. I am not sure whether this is perhaps too high a price to pay. I would hope that an IC could operate with most of its land in wilderness, open and inviting to wild creatures. That would require it to be subsistence, and to do without pasture and animal feed crops, and hence, without farm animals. So if I believe this, it behooves me to do without the products of farm animals. I’ve resolved therefore to go the next step, from vegetarian to vegan. It’s the least I can do for wilderness.
7. Canada is cold, most of the year, when you’re working outdoors. My recent visits to Belize (wonderfully warm, but soon to become another failed state struggling nation), Australia (warm in the more tropical parts, but already environmentally challenged and so very far away), and New Zealand (delightful, lovely and full of smart, knowledgeable people, but almost as cold as Canada) have persuaded me that the country that I have called home for almost all of my life is, perhaps, not where I or any other human was really meant to live. Whole Village has invested an enormous amount of money and energy just to keep its indoors comfortably warm — geothermal, solar and masonry wood furnaces. They have done wonderful work, but still, as anywhere in Canada, it means that much of the year you have to retreat indoors. This is not natural, not healthy, not entirely sustainable.
• What this meant to me: When I retire, I will live someplace warmer, someplace where I can be outside almost all the time.

So I will be revisiting Whole Village, to learn more and help out and build new friendships as my time permits. But I will probably not be joining as a member. More likely, when I retire, I’ll be joining a vegan IC in a warmer nation, probably one in an early stage so I can have a hand in co-designing it, while striving for radical simplicity and zero footprint. In the meantime? I haven’t the faintest idea.

If you have been looking for a way to live lighter on the land, find a community of people with whom you share values and purpose, live more responsibly and sustainably and self-sufficiently, the Intentional Community model may be for you. There is a global list of ICs to contact, visit and explore, and books about how to create your own. One of the residents of Whole Village, Shane, spent much of the last two years visiting and documenting eco-villages across North America in his very thorough eco-tour blog.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or if you’ve ever lived in an IC, I’d be interested in knowing: Why wouldn’t you consider living in anIntentional Community? And what would it take to make you reconsider?

If we were living outside of our terrible civilization, the first things we would learn would all be through our senses. Our senses are there to give us joy, to make us want to live, and to help us survive and thrive in communion with the rest of life on Earth of which we are a part. As animal babies we immediately start to move around and see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. We do the things that give us sensory pleasure. Our instincts guide us — they tell us to smell our Mother’s breath to learn what is good to eat, and find those things to eat, and, for reasons we don’t really understand, or need to, not to eat other things. And our instincts also tell us when to flee and what to flee from, when to migrate, and when to stay and, if need be, to fight. We learn enough language, depending on our species, to communicate the location of food, our presence, and the presence of danger, and to express ourselves. But most of our time for our wholelives is spent just experiencing sensations and enjoying life.

But then…

Read the rest.

Stephen always asks intelligent questions, and I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot.

Like Stephen, I tend to be somewhat contrary by nature. We’re both natural skeptics of conventional wisdom, and acutely aware of the fact that, although we are social animals, we are always vulnerable to propaganda.

I think my answer to his questions lies in that tension. I’ve recently been talking about Love Conversation Community as the Answer to Everything, or at least the best approach to complex questions and issues. Love, conversation and community are all intensely social activities, especially if you take the Improv “Yes, And…” approach to them, where you build on what others have said, collaboratively, consensually, accessibly, in relation to others.

But at the same time I am intensely aware of how, in the effort to achieve peace and find love and build community and attain agreement in conversation, we can start to acquire ‘gunk’ that isn’t us, stuff that is everybody-else, stuff that is what everybody-else believes. And if you’re not careful, you can lose yourself in that gunk.

I’ve mentioned before that some of the unorthodox ideas that, in trying to become more authentically myself, I have warmed to, ideas like polyamorism and intentional community and that we belong to the land communally (rather than it belonging to us), are viewed by many as dangerous ideas, and are extremely unpopular beliefs. People who hold these beliefs tend to be viewed as eccentric at best, and are often ignored, shunned or discounted as incredible.

If you want to create a model of a better way to live and make a living, you don’t want to be written off as a nut case.

So you walk a thin line. You tease people closer to your incredible idea, by helping them imagine it working, by showing them it can work, maybe even by criticizing it yourself and seeing how people rush to its defence. When you get too comfortable with the acceptance the idea is getting, you pull away a little closer to the Edge, to see who follows and how far you can get people to let themselves change, to accept what is socially unacceptable. You compromise, give a little, concede that some aspects of your idea are probably impractical.

If you want to get things done, important, enduring, meaningful things, you have to collaborate. Except perhaps for works of art, these things cannot be done alone.

It would seem, then, that it comes down to a choice, a decision between doing and being. Become mostly everybody-else and then you can ‘be the change’. Or you can be authentically yourself. Or, like me, you can go back and forth, alternatively scraping off the accumulated gunk and making yourself more accessible by taking on more of it.

Can the issues that haunt and challenge us, the things that keep us awake at night, be dissolved or resolved by simply acknowledging that they’re only issues because of modern relentless human social propaganda? I suppose, if we don’t care what anyone else thinks. In a natural world, perhaps, no one would or should care what other people thought about their wild ideas, eccentricities, authentic and unique characteristics.

But we don’t live in a natural world. We live in a fearful one, one where love, conversation and community are the only currencies that really accomplish anything, and a world where so much needs to be accomplished.

It is a bit of a false dichotomy, I confess. But it’s a real factor in letting yourself change, becoming authentically yourself, making the world a better place. You can’t have it both ways. In fact you can’thave it either way. You can only be aware of the tension, what’s been gained and what’s been lost, and make the best of it. 

So: Where does the idea that you’re missing something in your life come from? It comes from two places. From outside, from those who you love, converse, and make community with, telling you that you belong with them, if only you will give up those annoying, unacceptable parts, please. And from inside, where something wild, primeval, uncivilized, some vestige of nobody-but-yourself, tells you to just be more authentically human, to fly, to be free.

* Both these words come from the Latin word meaning “to loosen”.

1. Use cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources (energy, wood and other raw materials). Set caps according to source (scarcity of resources) or sink (waste produced in using the resources and loss of carbon absorption) constraint, whichever is more stringent. In other words, cap the maximum amount of usage of each natural resource at levels that are sustainable, and then allow the market, by auction, to determine how to allocate that maximum amount of usage by setting the price where the demand is greatest.
2. Institute ecological tax reformóshift the tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to ìthat to which value is addedî, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), through the economy, and back to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs and raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously unpriced contribution of nature. In other words, tax ‘bads’ (depletion, pollution and waste) not ‘goods’, by lowering social and income taxes and taxing extraction and pollution instead.
3. Limit the range of inequality in incomeóset a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to inequality. The minimum, he argues, should be sufficient for a comfortable life; the maximum probably not more than 100 times the minimum.
4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and yearóallow greater option for leisure or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth. In today’s automated world, there is no need for everyone to work all day every day to produce a comfortable living for everyone. I have argued before that one day a week, or one hour a day, should be all that is needed; most of our labour is wasted in bureaucracy, hierarchical politics and the production of junk.
5. Re-regulate international commerceómove away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, and adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition from other countries. This is not an argument for reducing trade, but rather for eliminating the component of trade that exploits weak social and environmental standards and unsustainably low long-distance transportation costs.
6. Reduce and amend the authority of the IMF-WB-WTO, to something like Keynesí plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balancesóseeking balance on current accounts, and avoiding large capital transfers and foreign debts. Instead of being an ideological force for globalization and deregulation at any costs, it would become an arbiter and a check on reckless and unsustainable national policies.
7. Move to 100% reserve requirements instead of fractional reserve banking. Return control of money supply and purchasing power to governments rather than private banks. This step is designed to curb irresponsible lending and borrowing practices, speculation and currency devaluation, and allow elected bodies to manage fiscal and monetary policy, not private sector parties with an inherent conflict of interest.
8. Move all remaining publicly-owned natural capital (the ‘commonwealth’ of land and resources) to public trusts ‘priced’ at their true value, while freeing from private ownership the ‘commonwealth’ of knowledge and information, making it free. Stop treating the scarce (natural capital) as if it were non scarce, and the non scarce (intellectual capital) as if it were scarce.
9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus immigrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
10. Reform how we measure and manage national well-beingóseparate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop ‘growing’ the economy when marginal costs start to exceed marginal benefits. Never add the two accounts. This reflects the fact that many economic activities (e.g. the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez disaster) actually add to GDP, and that hence GDP is not in any way a meaningful measure of economic prosperity or well-being.

It’s an interesting list, but Daly has acknowledged that he’s not optimistic that governments and those who would have to cede power to achieve these policy changes will ever voluntarily agree to such economic (and political) reforms, or that they could collaborate and do so even if they were so inclined. I share his pessimism. People with wealth and power simply don’t give it up without a fight, and I know of few governments that would have the heart for such an ‘unpopular’ fight.

Nevertheless, even though it’s probably impossible, it’s interesting to know what we would haveto do, top-down, to achieve a truly sustainable global economy.

An Intentional Community is a group of people with shared values and shared purpose who agree to live together to further those values and realize that purpose. Around the world there are hundreds of ICs, but the large majority of them are very small (smaller than the average struggling-nation family) or very short-lived. For awhile I doubted that ICs had enough urgency and commitment to compel most members to stick them out when times got tough or disagreements arose. Joe Bageant’s son’s argument that ‘communities are born of necessity’ is pretty compelling. And in Second Life the turnover in ‘communities’ is enormous — many people change their ‘home’ as often as they change their clothes.

But while ‘accidental communities’ may outlast intentional ones, the evidence is that most of them are not happy places — nor are they sustainable in a modern world quickly running out of room, resources, and the essentials of life. We’ve left community formation up to accident, and we got what we deserved — greedy real estate developers telling us where we can and cannot live, turning the Earth into unnatural wasteland.

My study of indigenous, ‘tribal’ communities suggests that, while they are sustainable (at least they were until our civilization encroached irrevocably and dramatically into their habitat), they are not necessarily happy places, especially for non-conformists and especially when they abut other such communities (this seems to trigger an endless cycle of inter-tribal violence).

I have a perhaps idealistic view of the communities of wild creatures, which are not nearly as violent as the makers of sensationalist nature films would have us believe. From my studies of birds in particular, I’ve learned that life for other creatures in the wild is mostly joyful, peaceful and care-free. I’ve also learned that Gaia, the complex self-regulating system of all-life-on-Earth, is graceful, respectful, honourable, and astonishing.

If all-life-on-Earth can figure out how to live as responsible, sustainable, joyful and mostly peaceful life, what’s wrong with us? Are we really a rogue species, unable to fit into the ecosystem that has evolved so effectively for millions of years? Or are we just going about the business of belonging to Earth all wrong, and, if so, what do we need to learn (or unlearn) and show to get us back on the right track?

My fall-back, if I cannot find a way to join with others to be a model in community, is Radical Simplicity, a model of a personal way of living devoted to:

• leaving the Earth as we found it, unhampered in its ability to sustain itself indefinitely
• consuming as little of the Earth’s resources as we need to be fully ourselves
• measuring our ‘success’ not by material wealth or GDP but by the quality of our lives (‘our’ meaning that of all creatures we share our ecosystems with) — health, well-being, happiness, learning, love
• relearning to listen to the Earth, to pay attention, and to live in harmony as a part of it

Perhaps because I’ve lived a prosperous, materially comfortable life, yet not found in it the happiness or health or well-being that I have always intuitively sought, it is easy for me to shrug off material measures of success. I can appreciate how those who have struggled for basic necessities all their lives would find my quest elitist, disconnected from the reality of the modern human condition. What good is a model of a better way to live if 90% of the people on this horrifically overpopulated planet will be completely unpersuaded of its value, even if they could afford to emulate it?

Yet I can’t shake my fascination with the idea of Intentional Community. In theory it still makes sense. For the same reason, I’m also still fascinated with the idea of polyamorism, the idea that we’re not meant to love or be loved by just one person, and that monogamy demands so much of us that we end up losing ourselves to compromise, or fracturing. I hear the two common objections to polyamorism: That it’s a self-indulgent and absurdly unrealizable fantasy of middle-aged males. And that it’s fearful, an attempt to insulate ourselves against the loss of love, against commitment, against responsibility, against being hurt. Maybe so.

(listening to House in the background — a woman says to her new lover, one of the House doctors, after he indulges her: “I need you to do what you want. I can take care of me…I need you to take care of you.”)

All of this internal debate inside my own head is, perhaps, the crux of the problem. I need to learn to let go, not to be afraid to be truly human, truly myself, to live in the real world. Not to be afraid of intimacy or responsibility. To be fearless. To try not to try too hard.

I need to think. I’m such a slow learner.

Or maybe I think too much. Maybe what I’m lacking is data. Maybe I spend too much time thinking and not enough time being. Before I can decide where I belong, perhaps I have to try belonging somewhere outside my own head.

Or maybe I should lock myself in a lab and learn biology and invent some dust that, spread from above the Earth, could halve the probability of women everywhere becoming pregnant. Or invent a meat, tasty as the finest on the planet, that could be grown in a test tube, in anyone’s garden, and spare the world’s creatures the outrage and misery of factory farms, and the horror of famine and hunger.

If not Intentional Community, then what?

I have no idea. I know it’s not political or social reform, or ‘free’ markets, or new technology, or revolution, or spiritualism. We’ve tried all these things for ten thousand years, and they’ve only made matters worse. And I know that there is no going back, that there are no noble savages, that history has many lessons but no better models of how to live.

When I know myself a little better, when I know who I really am and start to have an inkling where I might belong, maybe I’ll have some answers, some possibilities that make more sense. If so,you’ll be the first to know.

Image: Erskine Falls, Australia, photo from my Picasaweb collection