ETC Voices Podcast 015

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast015



KMO talks with two ETC permaculture apprentices about how their desire to live close to the land has created a rift between them and their families. Later, Jason Deptula, a wizard in hippie's clothing, describes how his normally harmonious interactions with the muggles of rural Tennessee sometimes takes an odd turn.

Power Down - Trade Up

The daughter of one of the Ecovillage Training Center staff arrived home from the Farm school last week and exclaimed, “I HATE Nonviolent Communication!”

According to Wikipedia:

Nonviolent Communication is a process developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It is a way to communicate with greater compassion and clarity. It focuses on two things: honest self-expression— exposing what matters to oneself in a way that's likely to inspire compassion in others, and empathy — listening with deep compassion.

The girl had been studying honest self-expression and empathy at school, and apparently it's tedious stuff. Even so, if you plan on living with other people, and if you imagine that the day may come when you cannot or choose not to rely on authoritarian institutions to resolve disputes and ensure domestic tranquility, then expanding your communicative repertoire might be just the thing.

I see myself as living a little ways into the future here at the ETC. Compared to how I was living just a short time ago, I use far less energy and engage in far fewer economically quantifiable activities on most days. Yesterday, I broke that pattern and spent a couple of hours driving to and from the town of Spring Hill where I lingered in a bookstore, ate in a restaurant, and got my hair cut. That's a lot more travel and commerce than I engage in most days here at the ETC, but yesterday would have seemed like a normal day for me as recently as last December when I worked nearly an hour's drive from where I was living. Now, I live on a reduced energy budget that might soon be the North American norm. It turns out that a seemingly modest amount of energy can power a rich and fulfilling existence, particularly compared to the quality of life of a corporate debt-serf.

Here in the ecovillage pseudo-future, I use cars, computers, and the internet. I'm recording podcasts and writing for blogs. I'm also packing shipments at a mail-order business and doing household and outdoor chores, but more than anything, or so it seems to me, I'm living and interacting with people far more than I'm accustomed to doing.

When I arrived here, I was accustomed to eating alone while reading a book or listening to a podcast. Now, I eat at a table with other people where we have a formalized arrangement concerning who was to prepare the meal and who will clean up afterward. I'm coordinating with people to get chores done and to pick up the mail in town.

In the past, when I kept chickens, if I didn't put them up at night, they didn't get put up. Not so at the ETC. Here, several people share the chicken-care duties, and that requires communication. Some of that communication has become routine and is accomplished with logs and sign-up sheets, so it's not a matter of constantly having to be tuned into someone else's pyschological needs, quirks, and tics, but being here shows me the degree to which mainstream life enables and encourages us to run on emotional autopilot.

Having to marshal my psychic energy to deal with the people around me can be a drain, but in the absence of the normal standardized roles and scripted exchanges of life in the mainstream mode, there's no getting around it. Working stuff out with people can be a pretty complicated affair, and most of us are out of practice. Formalized techniques like Nonviolent Communication would have us say things that we would feel more comfortable leaving unsaid, at least in the short term. It might have us talking about feelings and judgments when really the other person just needs to get some facts straight. It can seem absurdly touchy-feely or new agey, but it beats Mad Maxy, and it beats getting your doctor to write you a prescription for a pharmaceutical aid to get you through one more cycle of scripted interaction with other alienated debt-serfs.

When I interact with a person as a person, I have to summon up more psychic energy than I do for an automatic exchange with an anonymous stranger playing a standardized role. Who deserves the benefit of my full emotional engagement and consideration? Are there times when it is morally permissible to deal with some people according to a role they play?

When I think of the people I deal with on any given day here at the ETC, I understand that some of them, like the ETC staff, will be here indefinitely. The apprentices have been here a month and will be here for a month longer. Then there are the eco-hostel guests who stay overnight or a few days at most.

The people who will be gone in a month seem like members of my community; people with whom I really need to stay tight, but not so people who will only be here a few days at most. I don't want to say that I ignore or tune out the itinerants, but at the same time, I make no effort to remember their names. I know that some other congenial but equally temporary face will occupy that same role shortly.

I wonder if this mix of practically permanent, short but significant, and largely ephemeral relationships will prove typical in an energy-descent future. I can imagine a scenario in which some people have found their workable, long-term living arrangement, and a lot of other people are still looking for their own long-term gigs and are traveling around checking out the various arrangements on offer.

This scenario comes in two distinct flavors. One is the “just how it all shakes out” flavor in which the old way of life becomes increasingly unworkable for more and more people who do what they have to in order to survive while corporate and governmental entities continue the program to sustain the unsustainable and continue doing everything in their power to deny the need for new modi operandorum. This makes for an exciting period of historic transition, but its the sort of excitement that is the acquired taste of the war correspondent or disaster first-responder.

The other, more quixotic flavor is the “let's see what we can do if we decide to do it right” flavor. In this possible future, corporations and governments recognize that a spontaneous, bottom-up, phase change is inevitable and decide to help people explore the space of possible alternative living arrangements without desperation driving people to accept whatever marginally livable situation presents itself first. It may smell a bit like hobbit holes and unicorn horns, but I can see a future in which people have the leeway to sample a variety of post-petroleum lifestyles before committing themselves.

This second flavor is definitely within our technical means, but it's not anything you can vote for. It's not a message that a politician can use to get elected, but it is a message that people can nurture and share and use to inspire each other. There are different ways of living both sustainably and within our means. Seeing a diversity of living examples, hearing about them, trying them on to see how they fit, all help to erode the facade of conditioned expectations that keeps us going through the stressful and alienated motions. The transition is upon us. What's needed is the understanding that in powering down we can trade up.

The Short Happy Life of Bobby McGee

Last week, I wrote of buying four hens and a rooster at a local Mennonite store and bringing them back here to the Ecovillage Training Center to inhabit the cob henhouse that has stood vacent since my arrival here in late February. Chickens generally don't like a change of scene and require an adjustment period before settling in and going about their regular barnyard business. Not this group. They hit the ground happy and instantly started acting as if they felt at home. The rooster in particular seemed quite pleased with his change in circumstances.  I closed that blog post with, “I'm typing these words on my ancient laptop computer at the kitchen table, and every couple of minutes as I've typed the rooster has crowed, voicing his approval and enthusiasm for his new situation. I concur.”

That rooster, named Booby McGee by one of the apprentices, died that very day. He spent one night and two glorious days at the ETC after spending a month in a small wire cage by the side of the road and before meeting a violent death. We found a scattering of feathers about a hundred yards from the henhouse near the edge of the woods. The modus operandi of snatching the prey and carrying it swiftly away to make the kill indicates a fox, according to Albert Bates. In all likelihood, death descended upon Bobby McGee around dusk but before the chickens put themselves to bed (or roost) in the henhouse.

Bobby McGee was a different breed from the four hens he came with. He was the same size as the hens themselves, and he had tufts of feathers on his feet. I took many pictures of those hens that first day, but Bobby shows up only as tail feathers or as a red blur in amongst the hens. Cliff, the ETC gardener brought us a replacement. The new rooster has lived on site before, and while these hens are new to him, the gig is one that he performs with authority and aplomb. His name is Gordon Lightfoot, and he is about one and half times the size of the hens. According to Cliff, Gordon is an Americana. He looks a lot like the Aracana rooster I used to own and whose crow you can still hear at the end of each episode of the C-Realm Podcast. He has long silver feathers that stream down his neck and back, and he has formidable spurs on his ankles. Gordon the rooster is no joke.

Click photo to enlarge

During Gordon's first night in the henhouse a raccoon pried open the henhouse door and got inside. The sounds of chicken panic woke Merry, the innkeeper, who lives on a school bus quite close to the henhouse. She got there in time to prevent any casualties and send the raccoon packing, but not before he had taken a chunk out of the thigh of one of the hens. That hen stayed close to the henhouse for the next couple of days, but now she follows Gordon and her sister wives around the ETC site. She can't keep up and must take frequent rests, but then she will get up and hobble in the direction of Gordon's continuous crowing to rendezvous with the group.

What lessons come from these experiences? The obvious and practical lesson is 1) to count the chickens in the hen house before securing it for the night, and 2) to remember that EVERYBODY loves the taste of chicken.

The fate of Bobby, who spent long weeks in unpleasant confinement, was placed into chicken paradise and shortly thereafter died a violent death raises (but does not beg) the question of whether it is better to live safely in drab confinement or to live dangerously in a paradise that answers to your every natural inclination, including the inclination to beware of predators.

I may dwell on that question in future posts, but for now I'd like to return to the question of the Changeover; the process by which the Farm re-organized and transformed itself from an idealistic religious movement under the charismatic leadership of a spiritual teacher into an economically viable community which accommodates the sink-or-swim moral assumptions of modern capitalism.

A lot of the people who come through here have visited other intentional communities, some of which operate as collectives. The one that comes up most often in conversational contrast to the Farm's Changeover is Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Virginia founded in 1967. Twin Oaks started out as, and remains, an economic collective. The example of Twin Oaks leads some folks to question the official Farm narrative of the Changeover which casts it as an unavoidable realignment needed to keep the community viable in the larger context of a money economy. In a previous post, I shared a portion of a conversation with Frank Michael in which Frank provided an alternative take on that official narrative, and I'll close out this entry with a transcript of part of a conversation that I recorded with Albert Bates and Joe of the Occult Sentinel Podcast. I used a different portion of this same conversation in episode 201 of the C-Realm Podcast. The transcript starts in mid-sentence because that's when I turned on the recorder.

Albert: ...fourth generation family here on the Farm. My mother died in 2003. She had been living here for 15 years. I'm now 63 years old. My son has 80 acres just outside the Farm where he's doing an edible landscaping nursery, and my granddaughter is just turning three. So, that's like four generations of family right here, and there are several families on the Farm that are that way.  

So, you know, you can't, on the budget that we're talking about, turn every house into this kind of utopian landscape, but you can start, and you can get the ideas passed down through our alternative school to the next generation, and they can pick up and run with it for themselves. 

Joe: So the goal, probably, if you had too much funding, would be to just become totally off-grid, self-sufficient solar...

Albert: I don't think there's any such thing as too much funding for a project of this type. If we had too much funding we would probably spend a lot more time on activism. And we're kind of Buddhist in the sense that we're not feathering our own nest. We're looking at the big picture. Insofar as we can make ourselves more harmless than we are right now, that would be great. 

The other thing is to try to create a scene where people can come through and have the hospitality and a sense of what it is we're trying to do, so maybe it spreads that way too. 

Back in 1980, or there'bouts, eighty, eighty four, somewhere in that region, The World Bank gave a grant to [the village of] Gaviotis in Columbia of $8 million, and he [Paolo Lugari] was able to use that to create this meme  of sustainable living and sustainable production in a very rough and rural area, in the middle of a civil war, out in the middle of nowhere, [with] very poor soils, [and a] wicked hydrological cycle, and he created a forest system and an industry for making pine tar where eventually it was able to pay for itself and generate its own income, but in the interim, it began as this grant that enabled him to build community facilities: this kitchen, housing for his scientists, a shop for making windmills, [and] different kinds of things like that. 

Well, if the Farm had gotten an $8 million grant in 1984, this would be a much different place today, because in 1984 we were just starting a solar car manufacturing company. We had ambitions to have a sailing fleet that would go through the Caribbean on a fair trade circuit. We had two thousand acres, and about a third of that was under cultivation, and, you know, it was a beautiful vision, and what happened instead, because we didn't have that external input was that we came up against bank loans, the Regan recession in building trades—the things we made our money from—and we ended up going into a different system. We de-collectivized. We had to say, “You know, okay, well, no longer can we just have an economy of love; a gift economy, where somebody does this job and they can go to the store and get everything for free.” Instead we had to exchange pictures of dead presidents between people, and that was the economy, and if you wanted to send your kid to the Farm school, you had to come up with the tuition. 

Well, that changed the way everybody started doing things, and a lot of people actually left at that point. Some left because we didn't change fast enough, and some left because they thought we were selling out the Revolution, and the Farm population went from over a thousand to down  250 or so, and leveled off at that point, and it's been like that for 15 or 20 years now. 

Those that stayed, curiously enough, were a lot of the people that had been in the original caravan that arrived here. So rather than selling out the Revolution, they were sort of like the people who stayed and washed the dishes after the party, and paid off a million dollars in debt to the banks, [and thus] bought the land a second time, and have been risk-averse ever since, and [they have grown] conservative in progressing the thing very slowly, in stages, so as not to become vulnerable again. 

In future posts I will return to the question of creating community within the confines of a capitalist society that would rather see ersatz community sold as a commodity than real community arise spontaneously and organically as people work collaboratively to fulfill their own needs.

Growing Up

In last week's post I shared the first part of a conversation that I recorded with Frank Michael. He is the proprietor of a mail order business here on the Farm, and he lived on the Farm in it's glory days prior to the Changeover in 1983, when the Farm switched from operating as an economic collective into a something more in tune with the economic realities of the larger culture. Before the Changeover, those who worked outside the Farm surrendered their paycheck to the collective. Now, people make and keep their own money and pay membership dues to support the community. Even non-members visiting the Farm pay a per-night bed tax, even if they are staying with friends.

Though the land is still held in common, a fundamental determinant of whether Farm residence is even a viable consideration is one's ability to generate an income in rural Tennessee. Some people make the 140 mile round-trip commute to Nashville. This option works best for Farm residents who can earn sufficient income working in town a couple of days a week. There are a handful of profitable businesses operating on the Farm which create employment for some residents, but not enough to offer ready-made economic niches for prospective new residents who come without a grubstake.

The official story of the Farm presented to visitors holds that the Changeover was a necessary economic adjustment to mounting debts and that it allowed the Farm to avoid the loss of the land to foreclosure and prevent the dissolution of the community. This narrative makes sense to me, and I hadn't questioned its fundamentals when I asked Frank for his perspective on the Changeover. I listened as he gave his answers, but each time I asked Frank a question, I tried to get him to address the Changeover in the economic terms in which it had been presented to me. While I still suspect that there's a meaningful story along those lines to be explored, Frank has convinced me that the official story omits a very real dynamic; one that doesn't fit comfortably with the communitarian narrative of the Old Farm.

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KMO: What caused such a dramatic depopulation of the Farm after the Changeover? 

Frank: Okay. A little background. We were extremely different individuals to begin with. You know, there were people from all walks of life here, and what brought us together and kept us together for ten years or so was the strong glue provided by the philosophy of the Farm and by Stephen Gaskin and Ina Mae's real charisma, and good sense, intelligence, and loving personalities. You know, they're some of the most loving people I ever met. And also some of the smartest and funniest people I ever talked to. 

So, I think the philosophy; non-violence and vegetarianism, and the practical idealism that we practiced on the Farm was the glue that held such a disparate group of people together when we were living in tents and buses and in impoverished situations. But we had fun. We enjoyed it. We had rock-n-roll; we had great parties; the food was fantastic. We were healthy because we got a lot of exercise. You had to really work here to make it.

I would say that there were two main reasons for the Changeover and the sudden population drop. One of them is psychological, and that is that, willy nilly... I mean, I don't think I ever did this. I was one of the older people on the Farm. I was 32 when I first came to the Farm, and I've been here ever since, but a lot of young people took Stephen and Ina Mae to be like their parents. They would actually call them up in the middle of the night, and say things like, “My old lady's not giving me any. What's wrong? Why can't we work it out?” Or, “The kids are crying, and I don't know what to do for them.” Or, you know, “My grandmother sent me some money, but she doesn't want me to spend it on anybody else.” All kinds of crazy things.

Well, not crazy things, but they were using Stephen and Ina Mae as their gurus, or parents, or councilors, instead of trying to figure things out for themselves. They were in a parent/child relationship with those people, and then what happened was they all grew up at about the same time. And why do teenagers rebel and dis their parents before they split? Well, some psychologists say that it makes it less painful to leave that way. Others say it's because they've been so dependent and so de facto slavish towards their parents all these years, and now they want freedom, and they just explode with it.

Whatever the theoretical explanation is, that happened on the Farm, and some of the people leaving held strong animosities against Stephen. They called him a guru or a cult leader, and in many cases they made up a long list of wrong-doings for Stephen, and they were not true at all. Not that Stephen was a perfect person at all. He screwed up enough, but a lot of the charges were ridiculous.

In my opinion, the philosophy we had [on the Farm before the Changeover] was the best ever. I mean, I cannot fault anything [about it]. We did make a few technical mistakes. For example, we used to say that anger is optional and that you should take that energy and do something useful like wash the dishes or chop wood with it. You were not supposed to express it. That's a hard one to follow, but it was well-intentioned. It was all inspired by the acid vision of a bunch of idealistic young people.

I would say that the second large reason is that we were getting older. Not only was there rebellion of the teenagers against the [surrogate] parents, but also, as we got older... To me, this is probably the most important thing, and this is just my opinion. I've never heard anybody else express this, but I feel like young people are full of energy and curiosity about all kinds of things, and they will dedicate long hours in the daytime to working on whatever it is, and then long hours at night to partying or having meetings and discussions and just hanging out with each other. And as you get older and start getting attached to a certain person – your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever – some of the energy you spend in the group shunts over to your own personal affairs. And then if you get married, well, even more so. Now you have to manifest a house or a tent or whatever. Now your old lady gets pregnant and you have children. Wow. Now, even more or your energy has to be dedicated to your family.

Maybe at some point later on, you'll decide, “Well, you know, this is a great place, but I'd like to become a doctor, or I'd like to learn printing or something. Learn Japanese or whatever.” So that takes even more energy away from all the interminable meetings and community affairs.

So, that time and energy question, to me, is probably the most important one that caused the Changeover. It's surprising how little people realize that time and energy are strong determinants in your lifestyle and in your attitudes. The Changeover happened because people got older, and they didn't have the time and energy to be as communitarian as they were before.

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I can imagine a proponent of an anti-immigration narrative holding Frank's story up as an illustration of why any community has to control it borders and favor the material well-being of existing residents over the needs of prospective newcomers. With fewer than 200 adult residents, the character of the Farm could easily be lost in a rapid influx of new people. And after a few weeks here, I'm just starting to get a feel for what a loss that would be.

Most of the young people I've met since my arrival – and at age 41 I'm a young face around here – either grew up on the Farm or came to it via the Ecovillage Training Center. Some of the folks in that second category made connections with non-ETC Farm residents, found an economic toehold and have started on the road to full Farm membership, but it's a long road, and the Farm thus far has struck me as a cross between a laid-back retirement community and an understaffed re-enactment of the Old Farm; like a Renaissance Festival in the days before the actual start of the fair, and as it gets warmer and as more people start to arrive or emerge from their winter dens, I'm starting to feel the festival atmosphere taking hold. The first of this season's ETC apprentices will arrive tomorrow, and it feels like the show is just about to begin.

Images of the ETC

This video was made by Merry, the innkeeper here at the ETC. Last year she was an apprentice.



I'm going to get started on today's essay here shortly. Look for it later today.

Ecovillages in a Money Economy

I had a brief but in-depth email correspondence with someone who is certain that the industrial phase of human civilization has all but run its course. I'll call him Adam. Adam is sure that a collapse and Malthusian Correction are immanent. He is Canadian, and for a time he thought that ecovillage living was a viable response to impending calamity and something worth pursuing. So Adam set about looking for the ecovillage that was the best fit for his desires, skills, and financial means.

He eliminated all ecovillages outside of Canada from his list of candidates . He'd spent 10 years as a vegetarian and found that he required some meat in his diet for good health, and so he removed all vegan and vegetarian communities. He is an atheist who spent time in India and who now has a strong aversion to cults and gurus, and so he disqualified any ecovillage that set off his cult detector. By this time the list of potential ecovillages was growing short.

In his email dispatches Adam named names, but I don't want to make things personal or get into a shooting war, so I will withhold the details and give a brief summary of the opinions that Adam formed regarding ecovillages and their shortcomings.

Upper-Middle Class Enclaves: The list of remaining candidates that survived the weeding out of obvious cults left several candidates that, upon closer inspection, revealed cult-like characteristics; the most obvious of which being that they were seeking prospective members with money. The price of admission was rarely less than $150,000 and after buying in, new community members would still be expected to build their own houses. These ecovillages amounted, in Adam's estimation, to little more than gated enclaves of upper-middle class privilege, in which the residents paid a considerable amount of money in order to live in a spiritual/intellectual monoculture.

Not Interested in “Lifeboat” Skills: Adam claims proficiency in a range of skills that would qualify him for the lead role in a story by James Fenimore Cooper, but the ecovillage communities that he surveyed were not interested in people with such skills. He writes, “Few were asking for hunters, meat cutters, butchers, cheese makers, dairyers, livestock husbands, horse wranglers, mule breeders, oxen drivers, foragers, leather workers, shoemakers, clothing builders, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carriage makers, leather tanners, trackers, snowshoe builders, gunsmiths, bullet re-loaders, bow-and-arrow makers, or any other "lifeboat community" skills practical after the Great Correction.”

What these communities wanted and needed were people who could reside on the ecovillage and still make money, either by commuting long distances or by working remotely.

Exploitative Caste System: Folks who can afford to buy into an ecovillage because they have good jobs often have to keep working those jobs and don't have the time or energy for a double life as a farmer, and so these communities need farm hands. In other cases, the founding members of the community had grown long in the tooth and were no longer able to maintain the level of physical labor that their communities required and which they did, in fact, perform in years gone by. The members of these communities recognized the need for “new blood,” but in most cases the financial requirements for new membership disqualified almost all interested parties who possessed the physical robustness and vitality implied by the phrase, “new blood.” Communities in each of these situations turned to an organization called WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), and Adam reported that he encountered tales of exploitation and abuse from former WWOOFers on internet forums.

The email from which I'm quoting and paraphrasing ran to over 3,000 words, so I won't try to summarize all of Adam's complaints and comment on them in a 1,500 word essay like this one. The three complaints listed above form the core of the problem with ecovillages in Adam's experience, and they really all come down to a single phenomenon in my mind, but before I comment on their unity, let me say something in response to each of them.

Upper-Middle Class Enclaves: In a world where governments are no-longer giving out free land to homesteaders it costs a lot of money to create a new community. This is equally true for an ecovillage, for a mainstream retirement community, or for a gated community built around a golf course. That expense comes only in part from the need to acquire land.

An ecovillage can be established near existing centers of commerce and non-eco-residential areas, or it can be out in the boonies. If the former, then you have to build it to conform to a system of standards that codify waste and inefficiency and which provides a source of continuous income for the people certified in building to those standards and to inspectors and regulators who are the institutional defenders of the dysfunctional methodology.

If you build your ecovillage way out in the boonies so that you can do your own thing, then you've got an even tougher row to hoe in terms of generating income. Your members either have to commute long distances to jobs, have sufficiently fast and reliable internet access to do “knowledge work” at a distance (in most instances satellite internet will not cut it), or your community needs a sugar daddy or a sugar daddy caste, which creates a killer counter-current to any egalitarian aspirations with which you might have started out.

Not Interested in Lifeboat Skills: While you can use money to buy organic yogurt, you can't pay your property taxes by bartering your “lifeboat skills.” The government doesn't want you to shoe the Mounties' horses. They want you to cough up some cash or forfeit your property. Until the collapse is well under way you will have to have a way to make money.

Exploitative Caste System: I checked the WWOOF Wikipedia entry, and it doesn't have a section on “controversy” or “reported abuses,” but I don't know if that's because no such controversy exists or because vigilent WWOOFer sentries keep watch over that entry and “scrub” any dissenting edits. I can say that I have heard first hand from someone who described very callous and predatory exploitation while working on a supposed ecovillage. I have not asked for his permission to share the details of that experience, so I'll say no more for now.

I do have the permission of Merry, the innkeeper here at the ETC to share her experience as a massage therapist at a spa at a small Mississippi casino prior to hurricane Katrina and how it compares to her experience here on the Farm. She is a hired hand and not an official Farm resident, and so she is clearly a member of a lower Farm caste, but she says she feels more like a person in this environment and less like a unit of corporate production than she did at the casino. For the casino, extracting money from the patrons was the unifying goal of all the activities that took place under its roof. Here at the ETC, economic realities require that everyone contribute to making enough money to keep the operation running, but the unifying goal remains providing an educational resource for people looking to live in a more ecologically enlightened way.

I don't want to embrace cynicism, but the old adage seems true: Life (in a capitalist oligarchy) is a shit sandwich. The more bread you have the less shit your have to eat. The fact that this adage holds true on ecovillages operating within the larger context of a capitalist society only demonstrates that ecovillages are not utopias. Hopefully you know enough to put your hand on your wallet and back away slowly when someone tries to sell you shares in Utopia.

In addressing each complaint individually the general theme shines through. The system does not allow actual dissent. You can say whatever you like, but it doesn't matter what you say. You may not opt out. You are more than welcome to spend your money buying into the “opting out” demographic, but the talismans of membership for that consumer category remain quite pricey indeed.

Whatever the flaws of ecovillage living as it exists today, the more people who have some experience growing food and who have an informed idea of what a hard day's physical labor really feels like, the better. Better still the larger the pool of people who appreciate how a desire for community, sustainability, and a soft ecological touch can be turned to exploitative ends. The collective pool of skills and experiences that we'll have to draw upon in a post-collapse environment is richer for the existence of these ecovillage experiments and for the people who lived them. Our post-collapse prospects would be no better had those burned WWOOFers spent that time as standard corporate cubicle serfs.

A Village of One... and Counting

The weather is warming, and the Farm is starting to wake up. When I got here, it was cold, and keeping the wood-burning furnace in the basement of the Ecovillage Training Center going was a perpetual task. Now it rarely dips into the 30’s, even at night, and I haven’t kept a continuous fire burning.

I’ve also been selling the hours of my life, which long-time listeners to the C-Realm Podcast probably know is not my preferred mode of living, but this gig is cool because it’s on a human scale. I’ve been helping Frank Michael with his Farm-based mail-order mushroom spawn business. It’s called Mushroom People. Frank, a long-time co-conspirator with Albert Bates, is bubbling with ideas about all manner of topics that would fit right in on the C-Realm Podcast, but he does the bulk of his mail order business for the year in the month of March, so those wide-ranging conversations will have to wait.

Albert left for a two-week stint in Central America a few days back, and even when he was here he was working furiously on his upcoming book, The Biochar Solution, and he would spend many hours on at a stretch holed up in his two-story octagonal house which is next door to the Eco-hostel. The Eco-hostel is the largest building and the hub of social activity on the ETC complex, and it is where I lay my head at night and where I spend most of my days when I’m not packing up boxes of shitake mushroom spawn. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in the Eco-hostel as I type these words.

Yes, as the weather has warmed and the Farm residents are emerging from their winter dens, I have retreated indoors and planted myself at my computer. I am working furiously with the help of skilled volunteers recruited from the ranks of the C-Realm Podcast audience to prepare my book for publication. It’s called Conversations on Collapse: C-Realm Podcast Transcripts, and it features interviews with Dmitry Orlov, Albert K. Bates, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Sharon Astyk, Albert Bartlett, Cornelia Butler Flora, Bill McKibben, James Howard Kunstler, Colin Tudge, Joe Bageant, and Daniel Pinchbeck.

Albert is gone, but I’m not alone here at the ETC, the full-time, real deal in-keeper has arrived for the season. In fact she’s standing about three feet away from me at the kitchen sink cleaning up after her adventure in apple pie-making. For the first time in years I’m actually sitting down at a table to share meals with another human being on a daily basis. What’s more we’ve started pooling edible resources and collaborating on meals. Her efforts far outshine mine, and I’ll say nothing of last night’s attempt at grilled cheese sandwiches which would have set off working smoke detectors. In recent years, except on the recent Transitional Alchemy tour with Neil Kramer, I’ve eaten most of my meals alone and almost always while reading or listening to a podcast, and even, I admit, in front of the television. On weekends when my children stayed with me at the Heartbreak Hotel on eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, I was typically in the kitchen while they ate, and sometimes I would even be seated at the table with them, but mostly I stayed in motion preparing their individual meals, cleaning up, and attempting to keep the peace between them. It’s not like a shared meal with another adult.

I hope that these shared meals represent the beginning of the end of my isolation. A theme that comes up again and again in the transcripts I’ve been preparing for publication is that in the United States, we use the things that isolate us from other people as measures of our success. If you never have to share a bathroom with anyone, that means you’re doing well. According to this set of values, only losers who live in small houses or apartments have to share bathrooms with children or other family members. Pity the poor flunky whose financial situation forces him to cohabitate with roommates to whom he is unrelated. If he works hard and gets lucky, he may yet strike it rich and move into his own starter castle out in the ‘burbs where he can be assured that he and he alone pees into his porcelain bowl of drinking water.

Me, I like to pee outdoors. A couple of days ago I stepped outside with the intention of gifting a stand of bamboo with a bonus dose of nitrogen and found a young woman I did not recognize standing and admiring the very bamboo I had intended to visit. She was soon joined by three other young woman who turned out to be on the farm for a midwifery course. I ended up taking them on an impromptu tour of the ETC.

Bill McKibben talks about the poverty of more, by which he means the social isolation we experience because our fossil fuel lifestyle has transformed us into the first people in human history who have no need for their neighbors. It provides us with physical comfort but insulates us from the human interaction that is the key to our emotional satisfaction and sense of belonging. We compensate for our lack of genuine human interaction with on-line relationships of one sort or another, with video games or pornography, and mostly with television.

Other folks come through here most days. I haven’t asked them for their permission to reveal their identities, so they shall remain nameless for now, but they each take responsibility for helping the ETC fulfill its mission, though none of them live on site. I like them all and enjoy my regular interactions with them. For me, those face to face interactions and conversations about topics that I find worth-while represent tangible and verifiable progress in my transition to the kind of life I want to create for myself.

In April the first group of apprentices will arrive, and that will likely put my commitment to these touchy-feely ideas to the test. Ideas about community and human contact aside, I am accustomed to a life of quiet and solitude, or one animated by the frenetic energy of my children. A life in which adult conversations take place by phone at scheduled times or in the asynchronous realm of email is a life in which those contacts can be put aside at will. Not so when those people share your actual living space.

I’ve been getting emails and other communications from readers and listeners who encourage me to explore this or that topic in my conversations with my fellow ecovillagers. This reflects the misconception that the Ecovillage Training Center is an ecovillage. It’s certainly eco, but it’s not a village. You can’t have a village without villagers, and the ETC has only one-full time resident; Albert, and he travels frequently. The majority of my time here thus far has been solitary, but when the apprentices arrive, this place will morph into something much more akin to a village than it is now, and that experience my yet alter my fuzzy ideology about what makes for a satisfying human existence.

I’ll keep you posted.

Initial Mindset

At the moment, I live in the Ecovillage Training Center’s eco-hostel on the Farm, a long-standing intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee. The eco-hostel is a two story farmhouse with an attached greenhouse. Doors on both the first and second floor of the south face of the house open on to an attached greenhouse. The two second story doors lead out onto a wooden balcony called “the Beach.”

Day and night I feed the wood-burning stove in the basement which heats the eco-hostel, and if I’m diligent about it, the house stays in the mid 50s (Fahrenheit) throughout the day, but by mid-afternoon, it will be in the 80’s up on the Beach. Strangely, I spend very little time up there.

This morning I woke up to a cold house. I went down to the basement to discover that the fire had completely died. The house was 41 degrees. It was 21 outside. Usually, even when the logs in the stove have burned, a bed of hot ashes and glowing embers remains in the bottom of the stove, and if I just put some small pieces of wood on top of them I can get the fire going again without matches or kindling. Not this morning. It was completely done. I squatted by that metal stove in the cold basement for several minutes working with long matches, glossy pages from a catalog, and little scraps of wood to get it going again. I’ll need to go check it here in a bit.

After I’ve had my coffee and it’s gotten a bit warmer outside, I’m going to go out to carry and stack newly cut firewood that needs to cure before it can be burned, and then I’ll be hauling cured wood in a wheel barrow down to the entrance to the furnace room in the basement where I will split it with a maul (a cross between a sledgehammer and an axe) and stack it in the covered rack outside the basement so that it will be there when I need it.

Please don’t think that I’m complaining. The physical exercise does me good, and this really is the kiddie pool compared to what people living in suburbia would have to do (will have to do) to stay warm when the power goes out or the trucks stop delivering the heating oil which keeps their automagic furnaces in operation.

The ETC is in the woods, and there are plenty of downed trees around here which could be scavenged for firewood if need be, but I didn’t have to do that. A man in a truck brought logs, and Cliff, the ETC gardener, sized them with a chainsaw and split a good many of them with a maul. Most of the work has been done for me, but compared to the lifestyle to which my body has adapted itself in recent years, the piddling little physical exertion required of me at the very end of the process feels like work.

I’m grateful for this opportunity to ease into the process of chopping and carrying wood. At this point in time, I don’t have to carry water, and I probably never will here at the ETC. Many of the buildings here harvest rooftop rainwater, and there is a large cistern up the hill.

The ETC has solar power though it is also on the gird. It has a large garden, greenhouses, a series of lagoons for gray water reclamation, a cob henhouse, a propane-fueled on-demand water heater for the eco-hostel and solar showers elsewhere on the grounds. It has composting toilets, a root cellar, and the nearest neighbor has a sauna. All in all, not a bad place to ride out a storm.

Not a bad place to ride out a storm except for the fact that the Farm’s non-hippy neighbors hold a cultural grudge against the Farm and its inhabitants, and while my contact with the locals has been minimal and mostly congenial, they scare me. And I’ve got a leg up on other would-be pre-emptive refugees. I was born in Arkansas, and while I didn’t grow up there, I spent summers there throughout my childhood, and while I can’t pass for a local here in rural Tennessee, I can, when in need, put on a dialect that will provide me with some camouflage.

At this point, I should be working around to some sort of conclusion, but the obvious conclusion seems vacuous to me. Either you already recognize a need to prepare for transition and you’re taking steps, or you see it coming but think that whatever wiggle room your current situation allows will only permit you to make token efforts which only serve to highlight your consciousness of the need to prepare yourself and of the inadequacy of your efforts thus far. (If you think that business as usual is tenable for the foreseeable future or that god-like artificial intelligence with save the day, I doubt you’ve read this far.)

If you’ve tried gardening, you know that a home garden on anything but a grand scale cannot replace your regular supermarket. My own solo gardening efforts have been therapeutic, at best. Unless you own your home, you probably don’t have permission to install a composting toilet or modify your roof to harvest rainwater or replace your front yard with a vegetable garden. If you have a full time job and a long commute, you likely don’t have the time or mental energy do much of anything, and if you don’t have a full time job, you probably feel too broke to do what is necessary to extricate yourself from the vast but floundering life-support system upon which you depend.

My situation, while incredibly privileged from a transition point of view, does not point toward an obviously viable strategy for you. I didn’t build this place. I was invited in. And my situation still feels quite tenuous. I don’t have paid work here, and the money economy still makes demands upon me. Most importantly, my children are not here, and my ex-wife would offer up this essay as proof of my madness and lack of parental fitness.

While I don’t have the exact quote at hand, Albert K. Bates, my host and benefactor here at the Ecovillage Training Center has said something to the effect that the major stumbling block when it comes to ecovillages is that most people who feel called to ecovillage living try to start their own rather than join an existing community. I think that’s probably right.

I mentioned that my solo gardening effort provided mainly therapeutic benefits. I did apprentice under an organic market gardener for a season, and under his direction, my efforts helped produce a considerable quantity of high quality food. And I had a great time doing it.

Someone near you has some skill that you could learn from them that will move you in a helpful direction. The Internet might facilitate initial contact, but the most gratifying and useful interaction you have with that person will not be via email, instant message, or telephone. It will be face to face. You probably already know who that person is and where to find them.

As for the job that eats up the bulk of your time and energy…