Why Eco Villages?
Would you consider living in a sustainable community?
Updated August 2015
Ryan at Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage
This week’s Making Ripples column in the Free Weekly is about eco villages, a topic Ryan & I have had personal experience with. We stayed at Dancing Rabbit eco village in Rutledge, Missouri, for a week in 2006 after we met during college, and got an introduction to many of the topics you find here on Ripples. Dancing Rabbit is still thriving, so you may want to check out their website here.
But if Dancing Rabbit is too far for you, don’t worry! There are many urban and rural eco villages locally, nationally, and internationally that may appeal to you, even if you’re not going to become a resident or member of one. Read about four new eco villages in the Northwest Arkansas area. Learn more about Fayetteville’s own urban eco village, Green Acre, in this week’s People Making Ripples! They have tons of other cool projects in various stages, so be sure to check them out and tell your friends that applications are now being accepted! (Green Acres has since been shut down)
We can learn so much from communities of people living sustainably, or if not sustainably, at least “in community” with each other. Some intentional communities don’t have a sustainability focus…but most of the ones I’ve found do. Many intentional communities seem to go the way of drive-in movie theaters, shutting down quietly without much press or internet updating, but you can almost always find a community that’s been thriving for a long time and shows no signs of failure. Check out these communities and resources:
- Red Earth Farms, a 76-acre land trust and community in northeast Missouri
- Wikipedia’s List of Intentional Communities
- Global Ecovillage Network
- Fellowship for Intentional Community Directory of all known communities worldwide
- Eco Village Development, a non-profit dedicated to helping eco villages
- Sustainable Eco Villages, low-impact affordable housing
- Eco Village Network on Facebook has over 50,000 “Likes”
- EcoVillage Design Curriculum from Gaia Education, a manual:
- “The Ecovillage Design Curriculum has a wide range of practical application and is full of innovative materials, ideas and tools that have been developed and tested in ecovillage communities and urban transition settings worldwide. Updated regularly and now available in its 5th version, the EDE Curriculum is available for free, for personal use only.”