2024-04-07

The super-ecovillage enthusiast Nicole Reese recently (2024-03-31) published a very stimulating question: Why Aren't There More Regenerative Villages? It's a question close to my heart also, as I share the sense of need; I share the sense that this seems a vital part of any plausible plan to escape the worst consequences of the meta/polycrisis. Nicole writes directly about three things:

• There aren’t enough actual villages
• The villages out there are not publicizing themselves
• This person is a village builder at heart and needs to create one

and I want to build on each one of these. I'm very grateful for this nudge to lay out my relevant thinking, and I'm going to link here from a comment on her Terrenity Substack (which is very well worth a browse, by the way!)

Totally. Let me add that the kind of community I'm referring to here includes ecovillages, but also other intentional or regenerative communities, even if they are not villages, as they also play a part in the whole regenerative ecosystem.

Count up all such villages/communities that exist. Add the ones that are planned. Maybe double that, to account for ones that aren't publicising themselves (more on that below). Realistically, how many new people could become part of all of these combined, say in the next ten (pretty important!) years? Thousands, maybe? Or, optimistically, tens of thousands? Certainly not hundreds of thousands. Then compare that with the earth's human population, and it is barely more than a drop in the ocean. Nicole ends up by advising us to “build one”. I wholeheartedly agree, and the third question, below, addresses that ambition.

Now, the main point I want to add is that is that also, there aren't a sufficient variety of communities to appeal to the variety of people. We need a range, many of which could be combined, including for example:

• communities to get on with the work of regeneration, permaculture, lowering our carbon footprint
• therapeutic / healing / health restorative communities
• communities where we can live and learn the skills and competencies
  • necessary for regenerative living in community in the first place
  • to take on and spread to new communities
• communities bringing in money and resource from the existing economy, e.g.
  • giving residential courses to people who don't yet live there
  • doing research funded by business, foundations, and (in Europe) by EU funds
  • running any kind of regenerative business that trades in the established economy
• ICT tech communities, to build the software and services like RegenCHOICE
• intermediate tech communities like the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales
  • Tamera was doing good work on solar power
• communities to find your collective ikigai
• spiritual communities, to tap deeper into the sacred
• intergenerational communities, bringing up the next generation

It's really not ideal to have all communities and villages with the same flavour. The more variety there is, the more compatible healing narratives they are working on, the more people will be able to find a place where they can thrive, or just work on their journey towards thriving.

Last year, while I was at Liminal Village, I was talking with Roberto and Laura about this. We all recognised that not everyone is ready for a completely collaborative self-responsible co-living experience. Some people need to learn things, about themselves and about how to get out of patterns that don't really work in community. It would be wonderful if, when someone tries living somewhere for a few weeks and clearly doesn't fit in, they could be told, “look, sorry, this isn't the best place for you right now, but we know of a place that might fit you much better”. No condemnation, no blame, just an honest recognition that different people need different environments to grow and to flourish. And this also helps to take away a sense of collective shame, that “we should have been able to accommodate that person”. Sure, it is hard to push people away if there is nowhere else for them to go. So let's try hard to create those diverse places for diverse individuals.

This year I am engaging more with Life Itself. Their well-established research on Deliberately Developmental Spaces seems highly relevant to some of the categories of community above.

Earlier this year 2024-02-08 I wrote about “A Framework of Competencies(?) for Living in Intentional Community” so I won't repeat here what I wrote there.

I'd like to expand on the sound points raised by Nicole here.

First, some places don't have the tech skills to get themselves out there on the Web to be found. And I have a highly relevant personal story for this. Just a year ago, I was at the Blissness Regen Retreat at the beautiful Les 4 Sources community in Wallonia. Xavier suggested that a great way to try out the idea of RegenCHOICE methodology would be to match tech people who wanted to live in community with communities who wanted a tech person — this is because tech people don't always find it easy to explore the “touchy-feely” land of co-living, and on the other side, the inherent suspicion of tech that Nicole mentioned. If we could facilitate this kind of connection, both sides would benefit, and that would spread to us all, as we could expect the development of more tech genuinely in service of human connection.

The other point concerns Nicole's advice: “If you know of a community, take the time to onboard them to online directories, like Tribes, GEN, IC, or Agartha.”. Full support there! But … why are there different online directories in the first place? Wouldn't they be so much easier to find if there was, if not one single directory, at least a commonly agreed approach to holding information that can easily be kept updated, and shared between trusted directory services? Ideally, people should be able to find the community they want on one service, not have to do a repeated search in many places. This is, by the way, the kind of way that Murmurations thinks. Murmurations may not be perfect yet, but it surely is a good step forwards.

And in case it's not obvious, I'd like to beg everyone, please do not start another separate project to map the network of networks! Every separate project confuses and dilutes the findability of every network or community. Instead, join an existing one! Better still, if you can, act as an intermediary to help them merge and synergise.

The other side of a community or village putting itself out there is potential members finding it. The more effort it takes, the more those in difficult circumstances (maybe through discrimination or oppression of various kinds) may find it difficult to find the time and energy to do the search. To be genuinely open, enabling, inclusive, we need to make the process as simple and quick as it could possibly be. That's part of the motivation for bringing together any directories into one service.

Nicole again:

“Whatever your personal circumstances are, if you want to build a bioharmonic haven, it’s important you don’t do it alone.
It’s a proven part of my own creative process that whenever I feel stuck, it’s because I either need to let the project rest in short repose, or I need to source the perspectives and energies of others.”

I resonate so strongly with this need to be in collective strength, not just by myself! ¹⁾

This is where I find the real challenge to be. Nicole says “build one”, but how do we find the other people who we fit together with well enough, strongly enough, securely enough, to develop the trust that enables that collaborative co-creation that is necessary for something as complex as putting together a regenerative village, or any co-living space? How do we find the people who share enough of the same vision, the same passion, so that we really love working on living together? For me, the vision is to be working together; but even if people end up “earning their livings” separately, it is real work to create the co-living place.

This is the heart of the idea of RegenCHOICE, built around the original CHOICE architectural concept. I'm still looking, earnestly, for people to help realise this, because I am certain that it will help greatly with people finding the other people who are close enough in values and in spirit to make a success of creating regenerative villages or communities. I deeply hope that this can be my (long-term) contribution to the challenge of helping more viable regenerative villages come to life, come into being.

Nicole starts her article with the Constraints of the Domain. I won't just now go into “ecovillage economics”, about which there is quite a lot findable with web search, and also appears on the P2P Foundation wiki as both Ecovillage Economics and Economics of Ecovillages. But one day I may well chase up what I see as related to mesoeconomics: between microeconomics and macroeconomics, though I am no economist. What I am keen on (another day) is to look at the regenerative community as a whole, as if it were a country, and look at how it fits into the wider economy. Alternative economic systems frequently depend on trust even more than the established economy, and developing trust ties in very closely with the whole agenda of regenerative co-living.

I do wholeheartedly support the effort to find ways of tapping into the existing economy and funnelling it into the regenerative economy. This can be called transvestment. This could be through, e.g.

• offering consultancy services on matters of value within the currently dominant economy
• offering courses on skills that we are better at and are of value to …
• offering services that have been prototyped in the regenerative community, like ReGenCHOICE as a better and more effective recruitment service than the current online services.

But, I would say, not through going via a normal venture capital route.

The last point may be the closest of all to my own past experience: “complexity and integration”, as my own PhD was all to do with humans and complex tasks. It is also vitally connected to collective wisdom, because any single person will have a simplified view of a complex system in line with their own background, just to give them agency in that complex domain. But that is unlikely to solve any polycrisis, when solving one simplified problem exacerbates other ones not in the immediate frame. There is a need for ontological commoning.

Lastly, the idea of leading with questions as a way of bringing people together for the Gathering of Tribes (led by Victor Vorski) actually came from me, so naturally it brings me much joy to see that recommended by Nicole

• relating in collectivity