Reinventing the future: The global ecovillage movement as a holistic knowledge community

Abstract

Within the field of global environmental politics, a distinction is commonly made between top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top-down approaches typically focus on international environmental treaties and institutions, with the primary policy agents being technical experts and norm entrepreneurs working in states and international organizations. Bottom-up approaches generally focus on social movements and global civil society, with the primary agents being nongovernmental organizations directing their actions toward states, international organizations or, increasingly, firms. In both cases, the empirical focus tends to gravitate toward institutions and states, thereby privileging a state-centric understanding of politics. Consistent with the other chapters in this volume, this chapter seeks to simultaneously elucidate and complexify our understanding of global/local linkages. Yet it also offers a potentially more hopeful reading of the knowledge/power nexus by shifting the focus to small-scale place-based, yet tightly networked, collective efforts toward self-empowerment in response to the life-alienating forces of technocracy, the administrative state and global capitalism. While this top-down/bottom-up distinction is a useful one, it overlooks animportant group of actors who do not fit easily into the field’s understanding of politics: those who are pioneering ecologically sustainable ways of living. From the perspective of global environmental politics, there are three good reasons to sidestep the lifestyle politics of ecovillages. First, their numbers are relatively small, and their actions barely register on the radar screens of media coverage and political officialdom. Second, for the most part, these individuals tend not to be organized beyond their local communities, and so therefore have little national or transnational influence. Third, as the few scholars who are attentive to such phenomena as the voluntary simplicity movement and the local currency movement are quick to note, these groups do not actively counter the broader institutional and structural dynamics that foster unsustainable ways of living (Princen et al. 2002). Yet there is a powerful counterbalance to these good reasons: if current human systems are unsustainable, it is prudent to look to those who are pioneering sustainable living practices. To ignore communities that are actually reducing their ecological footprints dramatically, that are creating models of sustainabilityliterally from the ground up, would be intellectually negligent and pragmatically unwise. In response to the gradual disintegration of supportive social and culturalstructures and the creeping global ecological crisis, small groups of people the world over are coming together to create modes of living in harmony with each other, with other living beings, and with the Earth. If these communities were isolated experiments, disconnected from one another and from larger social and political processes, they might not be of interest to the study of global environmental politics. Since 1995, however, with the formation of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), thousands of these communities have come together for the purpose of sharing and disseminating information about sustainable living practices. Network members include large networks like Sarvodaya (11,000 villages applying ecological design principles in Sri Lanka) and the Colufifa network of 350 villages in Senegal; the Ladakh project on the Tibetan plateau; ecotowns like Auroville in South India and the Federation of Damanhur in Italy; small rural ecovillages like Gaia Asociacion in Argentina and Huehuecoyotl, Mexico; urban rejuvenation projects like Los Angeles Ecovillage and Christiania in Copenhagen; permaculture design sites such as Crystal Waters, Australia, Cochabamba, Bolivia and Barus, Brazil; and educational centers such as Findhorn in Scotland and the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. These communities trace their roots to diverse lineages (Dawson 2004):1 The ideals of self-sufficiency and spiritual inquiry that have historically characterized monasteries and ashrams, and which are also prominent principles in the Gandhian movement;2 The “back-to-the-land” movement and, later, the co-housing movement; 3 The environmental, peace and feminist movements; 4 The appropriate technology movement; 5 The alternative education movement.