Sunday, May 22, 2011

Building Ecotopia: Intentional Communities, Part 1

by Chuck Hall
"Once I was in Victoria, and I saw a very large house. They told me it was a bank and that the white men place their money there to be taken care of, and that by and by they got it back with interest. We are Indians and we have no such bank; but when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our way of giving is our bank." - Chief Maquinna, Nootka Tribe
At its most basic level, an Intentional Community is simply a group of people who come together in one place with a shared vision of what living in a community means. In the opening quote for this chapter, Chief Maquinna has nicely summed up the idea behind intentional communities. It’s about caring for one another as one big family.
The term ‘intentional community’ comes from the 1944 article The Small Community by Arthur Morgan. Morgan saw the small community as the ‘seedbed of society,’ and he felt that America was at risk of losing its core values if the small community disappeared. Shortly after World War II, communities began to form across the United States with the intention of preserving those small town values. The rapid industrialization after the war had led many to feel disenfranchised, so they began to come together to preserve a way of life they felt was beginning to fade. At first these groups were known as ‘cooperative communities,’ because of the cooperative nature of their organization, but Morgan felt that the name ‘intentional community’ was more appropriate because these communities were founded intentionally, with a shared vision. The term has since expanded to include co-housing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives and ecovillages. Since this series of columns deals with building an Ecotopia, and one of the characteristics of an Ecotopia is sustainability, I’ll be focusing mainly on ecovillages.
There are 186 communities listed in the Intentional Communities directory of the Federation of Intentional Communities (FIC) at: www.ic.org. According to this directory, there are over 8,000 people, including 2,000 children, currently living in those intentional communities listed publicly with the FIC. There are also at least 700 other intentional communities listed with the FIC that have not given their permission for a public listing, so the number of people living in intentional communities in the United States could in reality number in the tens of thousands. If you factor in communities of a religious nature, such as monasteries, ashrams and kibbutzes, the number is even higher. While people aren’t yet fleeing cities and urban centers in droves, the movement is growing steadily. For the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing how these communities work, what it means to be a part of one, and how to choose an intentional community or start one yourself.

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