Page 9 - C.A.L.L. #29 - Winter 2007

I believe people are sensing, as Ivan Illich called it, "the shadows our
future throws." Once you grasp the full significance of runaway climate
change, and the exhaustion of virtually all of our natural resources under
the pressure of human consumption, you go through a change in your
personal outlook. History becomes nearly irrelevant in these circumstances, as do most of the plans
our parents made for us. We will not be colonizing Mars. In the centuries to come, we can speak of
success if there are still human colonies on Earth.

Ecovillages are seen by many as kind of quirky, radical environmentalist communes. In reality they
are the prototype of the future we will have and must have, if a future for humanity is still an
option. I often say that we have the wind of inevitability at our backs. There is an ecovillage
coming to your neighborhood, soon.

Many years ago, the movement began defining "success" in
village design by creating a set of objective criteria like net
carbon sequestration, wilderness expansion, and so forth. A
metaphor we often use is a three-legged stool, with one leg
being ecological - permaculture, renewable energy, green
buildings, recycling; a second leg being economic, that is,
how you financially support yourself does not offend your
principles and should contribute to a healthy planet; and
the third leg being social - the ways you manage the
community should be fair, transparent, and egalitarian. It
should also be fun, because if it is not fun, no one would
want to live there.

The three legs create stability and beauty. If one is weak,
the whole stool totters. What we have seen is that where
the stool is strong you get tremendous creativity. Arts,
music, sports, science, literature, and other human pursuits
all flourish. That makes for a good ecovillage.

For the past half century the environmental movement has been fighting a defensive, rear-guard
battle. In recent years it has begun to go on the offense, with Al Gore's slide show and Leonardo
DiCaprio's new movie marking a kind of transition. Ecovillages (and Green Kibbutzim) are part of
the remedy. They point a new direction, a positive one, for environmentalists to walk their talk.
We are the future, and this is where it starts.

The Farm's main contribution to the ecovillage movement is its staying power. We are in our
fourth generation now, with midwives assisting at the birth for mothers whom they midwived as
babies 20 years ago. My mother lived here until she died, and my granddaughter was born here,
just last year. We have the whole package here: a 5000-acre conservation land trust, consensus
governance, primary health care, socially responsible businesses, our own school, and a tight,
multi-generational bond.

In 1994 we founded the first ecovillage training center here. Today there are others like it on six
continents. Of our thousands of graduates, who can now receive university degrees for this work,
many have gone on to design and inhabit ecovillages elsewhere. That may be the major
contribution of The Farm. When we left the Haight Ashbury in 1971 as 320 hippys in school buses,
we said we were "out to save the world." This is one way we are doing it.

Albert Bates is a permaculture instructor at the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community in
Summertown, Tennessee. He was founder of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas in 1995 and is past
president and a founder of the Global Ecovillage Network. He is author of several books, including Shutdown:
Nuclear Power on Trial (1979), Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (1990, with
foreword by Al Gore) and the Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New
Society, 2006).

9 9 9 9