Page 26 - C.A.L.L. #47 - Winter 2020/2021

Building Eco-Paradise in End Times: Lessons

from Ecoaldeas (Ecovillages) in Mexico

September 29, 2020
By Olea Morris.

What might it mean to be “self-sustainable” in a world that is more connected than ever?
During the wave of lockdowns in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, self-
sufficiency was having a moment. As supply chains became less certain and millions became

indefinitely homebound, popular interest in the “simple life” flowered – hobbies like baking
bread, planting backyard gardens, or sewing masks were suddenly hot. The surge in interest
in sustainable living suggests there’s something undeniably appealing – therapeutic, even –
about imagining and practicing alternative livelihoods, especially the face of intensifying
social, political, and environmental precarity. But what might it mean to be “self-sufficient”
in a world that is more connected than ever?

In order to explore this question, I spent a year living in “ecovillages” – ecological
communities with a focus on sustainable living and self-sufficiency – throughout Mexico,
primarily visiting sites in Yucatan, Veracruz, and Jalisco. Ecovillages, a community model
popularized in the late 1990s by practitioners in Europe and organizations like the Global
Ecovillage Network, have gained a substantial

following in Latin America over the last
decade. In Mexico, ecovillages are an
emergent thread of a much wider
constellation of interlinked environmental,
agricultural, and social justice movements. My
goal was to understand how diverse sets of
actors – young people from the cities, hippie
caravans, feminist separatists, and foreign
retirees – understood and practiced
community differently, depending on how they

were articulated to these broader networks.

Huehuecoyotl is one of the most well-known
ecovillages in Mexico and part of the Global Ecovillages can be understood as enactments
of what Burke and Arjona (2013) call
Ecovillage Network. Photo by author
“alternative political ecologies” – new
iterations of how communities, systems of production and consumption, and relationships
with the environment are, and can be, interrelated. Because ecovillage communities are
designed by their residents with the aim of creating socioecological systems that sustain
their community, they’re useful artifacts for understanding how different groups imagine
these systems to function. Of course, plans don’t always work as expected – plants and
animals die, others seem to refuse cultivation, and social groups break apart. But these

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