The development of the ecovillage movement has been an evolution that began at the apex of the counter cultural movement during the late sixties and early seventies—that we are out of the sacred loop. Hippie communes evolved from the desire to as Timothy Leary put it “drop out” out of the prevailing competitive mentality of modern consumer society and seek a more spiritual, community and nature based alternative. Then came the need to redefine communes as something less alienating to people, as the nation turned to the Right as it felt very threatened by many countercultural ideas, and embraced free market, libertarian economics and Reaganomics, hence the term intentional communities.
The Ecovillage Movement
Now environmentalism and social justice have merged as a variety of new fields are converging towards the development of an new ideologically powerful post-industrial paradigm that seeks to weave nature, community and spirituality back into our lives.
The model for this new paradigm is the ecologically integrated community. Designed human scale with regards to human needs, to integrate these new fields and create a new model for building human settlements. The desire is to reconfigure the built environment aware from the synergetic relationships and interactions, seen between the car, suburbia, commercial culture and the mass media, and putting forward a new cooperative energy between various alternative socioeconomic systems to create an alternative symbiosis.
Defining what it means to be an Ecovillage
The definition of an ecovillage is based a set of criteria developed by the GEN (Global Ecovillage Network). They have come up with a series of ecological, social and spiritual criteria called a Community Sustainability Assessment. This assessment is designed to determine a community's status and progress in becoming a bona fide sustainable community. The idea is that those entities called ecovillages are at least in some way moving towards this status in terms of sustainability. Ecovillages are seeking to create an economic reality that allows for a level of growth that will begin to achieve significant changes in relation to modern civilization.
Building Locally Based Restorative Economies
Gaviotas in Columbia and Auroville in India have demonstrated the viability of locally based restorative economies. They grow a portion of their own food while helping people to feed themselves while providing provide valuable services to the developed world such as appropriate technologies, carbon sequestration and most importantly inspiration. Western agriculture relies on crop monocultures that involve large plantations or farms and a high level of inputs like petroleum, chemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers and as well as expense farm implements.
In order to create an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit within ecovillages and aspiring ecovillages, decentralized economic interactions have to be encouraged and cultivated.
Why is there only a handful of ecovillages in the US. I go to the GEN EcoVillage USA page and I find a handful of places one of which I live in but it isnt really a EcoVillage - its an “EcoVillage in the making” to quote the MSN Real Estate best places to live off the grid page: http://realestate.msn.com/best-places-to-live-off-the-grid.