Before the mangrove restoration program at Mbam, Senegal, and three years later, after a lot of work from the ecovillage members, the mangroves are growing back. Photo: Jonathan Dawson

ALONG THE PETITE Côte, just south of the Senegalese capital Dakar, the mangroves are growing back. Just three years into the re-planting programme, the villagers of Mbam are seeing their lands become more fertile as the mangroves filter the sea water, and a return of fish and other sea creatures as their marine ecosystem begins to restore itself to health. After years of silence, the air is once again filled with the sound of birdsong.

In the high hills around Kandy in the heart of Sri Lanka, the villages associated with the Buddhist non-governmental organisation (ngo) Sarvodaya are thriving: in Matale, a village-owned and -managed bank is providing micro-credit for a host of different small-scale, village-based activities such as handicrafts, milk processing, blacksmithing and organic vegetable production. Sarvodaya works with around 12,000 villages.

In the far north of Scotland, a community of 450 people - the Findhorn Foundation - is initiating a ‘model’ local economy using its community-owned bank, community-supported agriculture and renewable energy systems, and reusing and recycling most of its waste.

In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a town of several thousand people, Auroville, has been evolving over the last thirty-five years with the aim of becoming “a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and harmony transcending creed, politics and nationalities”. To date, over two million trees have been planted to stabilise and re-fertilise the soil, hundreds of fields have been ‘bunded’ to prevent water run-off, solar power is widely used for pumping and heating water, and there has been much experimentation in developing environmentally friendly building techniques.

On the hill west of the city of Ithaca, five hours’ drive from New York, at the end of Rachel Carson Way stands the Ecovillage at Ithaca. On 173 acres of land, they have just finished building the second cluster of thirty homes and are planning the third. They have one community house and are planning to build a second as well as an education centre. Through various design features, including a community-supported agriculture scheme, the community has reduced its ecological footprint to 40% of the us average. Co-operation with nearby Ithaca College and Cornell University is deepening, and the community is deeply involved in another new project, Sustainable Tompkins, that has the aim of making the county the most sustainable in the USA.

Other than being good-news stories, what do these five examples have in common? Each of the five communities in question calls itself an ‘ecovillage’, and all are members of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). So, what is an ecovillage - and can any one word that attempts to incorporate such a great range of social, cultural and ecological conditions retain any meaning?

“Ecovillages”, asserts GEN, “are human-scale settlements, rural or urban, in the North or the South, that strive to create models for sustainable living. They emerge according to the characteristics of their own bioregions and typically embrace four dimensions: the social, the ecological, the cultural and the spiritual, combined into a systemic, holistic approach that encourages community and personal development.”

Communities that tread lightly on the Earth have, of course, always been with us. For much of the life of our species, this has been how we have lived, our impact limited by the scale and nature of our technologies, and our numbers kept in check by the food supply in our specific bioregions. But the progressive industrialisation and globalisation of our economies over the last five hundred years have shattered all such controls. Today, the North is beset by the problems of affluence and all of its associated discontents. Meanwhile, the viability of low-impact communities in the South is under threat. The transfer of food production for local needs to commodity exports is undermining food security; and the bombardment of media images glorifying life in the money-rich North denigrates traditional lifestyles.
The ecovillage concept offers a model with varied local manifestations, as a response to this crisis. At the heart of the model lies a celebration of cultural, spiritual and ecological diversity and the impulse to re-create human-scale communities in which people can rediscover healthy and sustainable relations to self, society and the Earth. It is a model in which the skills and worldview of the peasant farmer and small-scale artisan are not a problem to be solved by the development planner but an asset to be cherished.