Ecovillages – a solution to our many climate and resource problems?

On one of my last days in Denmark, in the wake of a meaningless deal at COP-15, I went to visit ’The Self-sustaining village’ (or Den selvforsynende landsby), an eco-village a couple of hours train ride out of Copenhagen. As I mentioned in my post on agricultural alternatives, eco-villages have the potential of freeing us of being so dependent on the individualistic, consumerist and commodified system in the cities. They have the potential of letting us learn how to live together on the land again in a genuinely more sustainable way, which is especially important given the climate crisis and resource shortages that we face. Rather than repeat myself, if you want to read more about why cities are completely unsustainable and why we need to move back onto the land, have a look at this article and this one.

The ’Self-sustaining village’ comprises of 15 hectares of land with around 30 adults and 30 children now living there. Each family is allocated 800 square metres and the rest of the land is shared between everyone. The founders spent two years working on a plan for the village before they bought the land, with loans from two ’green’ banks, for around 4 million Danish Kronor (530,000 Euros at current rates). Each adult pays a rent of 1300 Danish Kronor a month (174 Euros), which goes towards paying off the 30 year bank loan as well as contributing to a shared food budget. After 30 years the land will then belong to the community.

This money does not include the cost of the personal houses that needed to be built. A large farm-house existed there already, which is now used as a communal cooking, eating, childrens and meeting space. The 2 people I met there had built straw bale houses (to protect the straw, one was covered with clay, the other with wooden boards) which had taken around 5 years to build and cost around 300,000 Danish Kronor (40,000 Euros) each. Both houses had large glass conservatories on the south side to get heat from the sun, keep water off the walls and provide a space to grow food in. They both had amazing clay thermal mass heaters in them, inspired by one of the models that Ianto Evans outlines in his book, ’Rocket Mass Heaters: Superefficient Woodstoves YOU Can Build.’

Even though they had built them themselves using mostly natural and reclaimed materials, the houses had cost so much because they had to follow a wide range of expensive housing rules and regulations to make their homes ’legal.’ Other houses in the village are larger and more expensive.

When the village first started, because they needed a lot of money to buy the place and they feared defaulting on the bank loans, they opened up the community to allow anyone to come and live there. Some of the people who moved there were more interested in permaculture and being self-sufficient than others. Some of them are more materialistic than others. Some of them are more committed to the village than others.

If new people want to live there now there is a two month trial period and then a group consensus decision is made if the community want them to carry on being there. As one person told me, it can be difficult to really get to know someone in that period and as there is no way to ask people to leave the community once they have been accepted, therefore it can be risky letting new people in. If someone wants to leave and sell their house, they can only sell them for so much because a price roof has been put on them to prevent people just selling their houses to make a lot of money.

Meetings were initially held every week but are now every two weeks as there are less decisions to make. Decisions, from the beginning, have been made by consensus. This made changing things in the village a very slow process. Now, if a consensus can’t be reached, a vote is done and if only one or two people don’t agree, the decision goes through. One of the reasons voting was introduced was because one person in the village consistently used their veto power, which often made decision-making impossible. This person left after a few years, partly because they were unhappy that voting was introduced.

Because many of us have been brought up in such an individualistic society, the community thought it was necessary to have 8 communal work hours a week. This is done through a highly organised rota system, with everything, from cooking to gardening to looking after animals, being divided up between everyone. According to two people I talked to, this is a very fair and efficient system which leads to much more getting done in the village. It also prevents some people from doing an unfair share of the work while others do next to nothing. There are also communal meals every evening, although people don’t have to go. Two washing machines and 9 cars are shared between everyone in the community and people have to book in advance if they want to use a car.

The village has its own sheep, cows, Musk ducks and chickens which provides all of its meat, half of its milk and a third of its eggs. The ducks also eat the slugs in the garden.

Some of them aim to work with nature, not against it, in the form of agroforestry and permaculture (apparently they have the first forest garden in Denmark!). The people in the community grow half of the vegetables that they eat and they are planting trees which animals like to eat the leaves from. Areas of willow trees have also been planted to act as a wind break, a grey water cleaning system and to provide firewood! The willows are manured with the human shit from the community and are harvested every 4 years. A wide variety of fruit trees have also been planted..

A critical look at eco-villages

While much of this sounds quite idyllic, the main problem with eco-villages is how much they can cost. They can require vast amounts of money, time and knowledge to buy land, get planning permission, build houses and to successfully hold the many meetings required to co-ordinate and organise them. We have to ask ourselves: Who can afford to do that? Are they an option for all under our current economic system or are they just for the relatively rich?

And many of these ecovillages are definitely rich. For example, the Global Ecovillage Network gave 5,000 Euros for a sauna to be built in Christiania just for the week of the COP-15! Or you just have to look at the houses and temples that the Italian eco-village Damanhur have made to see how much money they must have.

While I know that we need to learn to live on the land again in a more sustainable way, I am deeply cynical of highly expensive – and therefore elitist and unsustainable – ways of doing it. The more work for money we need to do to set up eco-villages, the more production happens, which means more turning of living nature into dead commodities, which means more economic growth, which means more destruction of the planet. Even if we enjoy our work for money or do work which we don’t think is destructive to the planet, we are dependent on the majority of us not enjoying it and often doing repetitive, alienating, destructive, dangerous and low-paid work.

If we all have to work for many years to save the money needed to set up ecovillages, the planet will really suffer. We will have to do many terrible things to make that money.

I am also critical about some of the volunteering opportunities at these eco-villages. While we can see them as opportunities for us to meet people and learn to live on the land in community, we must also realise that they are a covert way of turning the landless poor yet again into peasants for the rich landowners. For example, at ’The Self Sustaining Village’, “as a volunteer , you work a minimum of 6 hours a day 5 days a week. In return we provide you with all meals. In most cases it will also be possible for us to offer free accommodation in our guest room in the farmhouse.” Working at least 30 hours a week just for food and accommodation seems like modern-day peasantry to me.

One big problem, as I mentioned in another post, is that we live in a system of private or productive property where most of the land is owned and controlled by states, the rich and corporations to make as much profits out of us as possible. We often have to spend large amounts of money if we want access to an area of land large enough to build and grow on. This prevents many ecovillages from taking off and from us learning to live on the land again in a more genuinely sustainable way. The ones that do take off often have to make very big compromises to get there.

Even if we wanted to move back on to the land, many of us can not afford to do it. Many of us are trapped in the cities, whether we like it or not.

It is important that we always remember that the people in power don’t actually own the land, they just think they own it because they have pieces of paper saying that they do. The system of private property only continues because we also believe that they own it, or let them think they do. Why should we have to pay just to live on the planet? Do the foxes and owls pay rent or mortgages?

Only humans are trapped in to this system and we perpetuate it with our continued buying and selling of land.

It is understandable why so many of us pay rent or mortgages. We want to have security and not face the potential state violence of police evictions, court cases, fines, bad credit records and so on. If we are squatting and have children, the kids may even be seized by state social services if they find out. Many people around the world squat or occupy the land with their families, often out of necessity. However in some European countries, such as Sweden, we have such a fear of the authorities – and are maybe too comfortable benefitting from global capitalism – to really start occupying the land in a big way, at least for now. It also doesn’t help that squatters have no legal rights in Sweden, unlike in some other European countries. I have heard of many rural squats with families in Spain and Italy.

I often wonder what would happen if everyone just stopped paying rent or their mortgages. The economic system as we know it would collapse because rent and mortgages are a major driving force behind why people have to work for money so much. This would be a good thing as we could then focus on living on the land and only doing what we need to do (building houses out of local materials, growing food, getting or growing firewood to keep our houses warm, etc), rather than being forced to work so much for money so we can pay for rent, food, utilities, etc.

When I say ideas like this, some of us have accused me of being crazy while others nod their heads in agreement while carrying on buying into this system. Others squat land or buildings in defiance.

When more ’environmentally friendly initiatives’ or ’green mechanisms’ are discussed by those in power in western Europe, access to land or land redistribution is almost never mentioned.

I’m definitely no communist but it is interesting to see the example of state-led land redistribution in Cuba. After the revolution of 1959 there has been four waves of agrarian land reform in Cuba, which have put upper limits on how much land any one individual can own as well as redistributing hundreds of thousands of hectares to farmers across the country with certain conditions. In some of the reforms they have also encouraged co-operative farms to form and run this redistributed land. I’ve heard with the latest reforms that if an area of land is seen to be unused, then anyone can claim it for free as long as they use it! (For more important details, read this, this and especially this)

Compare that to land policies in most countries. In Europe we are trapped into being consumers in the cities unless we have large amounts of money to buy our way out of it or decide to just squat the land but face the insecurity that comes with it. A few of us are lucky enough to be given land or be let to live on the land for free.

So what are some of our options if we don’t have much money and want to live on the land in community?

1) Squatting the land but face potential eviction. Forest dwellers and/or land squatters around the world have developed techniques to deal with the threat of eviction, such as having a nomadic way of life with shelters which can be quickly built and are warm. Food is got from hunting, gathering, fishing and growing in the forest. For many indigenous people this has been their traditional way of life, moving on so that areas are not overexploited and have a chance to grow back. The problem with this is that it can take years to build up soil fertility in an area or to plant and have fruit bearing trees. It can also be a lot of work to build new shelters. Also, state violence against squatters can be terrifying. For example, a few years ago peoples’ homes in a squatted forest community in a Nacka nature reserve (or Reservatet) in Stockholm were burnt down in the night by the authorities. Although they received a small amount of compensation afterwards, it was nothing compared to the fear and anguish that it caused. It also succeeded in helping split up the community that was living there.

2) Buying cheap land without loans which is often – but not always – in remote and poor growing areas. In Sweden the further north we go the cheaper the land is, but the harder it is to grow on (although hunting and fishing can be better further north). Some of us have also suggested buying unwanted clearcuts to grow and build on because they are so cheap, although it would be a lot of work to turn them into good agricultural land.

3) Renting land for the rest of our lives. By doing this we would further enrich landowners. They would get a regular income without lifting a finger. We are also at the mercy of the landowners once our contracts expire. I’ve heard of landowners doubling, tripling, even quadrupling rents once a contract has expired, and if we live in an area of land which we have spent a lot of time and energy building up, we have little choice but to pay if we can.

4) Move to a country where land is cheap. I have heard that it is very cheap to buy land in Lithuania and Estonia. Apparently there are some eco-villages in Lithuania which already have the land but are desperate to have more people! I have heard that in some parts of Sweden and Finland we can get land for free because the local government is trying to get more people to live there. However moving to other countries can mean leaving behind friends and family as well as questions arising about some kind of environmental neo-colonialism happening. It is also not so easy for many of us to just change countries, as the No Borders campaign shows. It is a luxury that we, in the EU, can move between member states.

5) Buy good quality land with loans from banks. We can set up a co-operative or trust to get a loan from the bank and then pay rent over a long time period, say 30 years, to pay off that loan to the bank. In the end, the land belongs to us and our families. This is what the people at ’The Self-sustaining village’ have done. The details of how to do this in the UK are explored more in this pamphlet. However, we don’t know what will happen over the next 30 years. With peak oil and other resource shortages soon approaching – as well as unpredictable climate change – it seems crazy to put ourselves in massive debt, unless we believe that economic collapse or significant change will make those debts meaningless. This is a big hope to base our actions on and one which we can not rely on. If the system continues, and we can’t keep up the bank payments, then we will be evicted.

6) Build/buy wagons or vans to live in so we can always move on if we need to. We then don’t have to build houses every time we have to move on. However, if we have vans we are dependent on cheap oil to move them and need to pay motor insurance as well as other costs that come with automobiles. Small wagons can always be moved by horses and don’t need road insurance! However, like with squatting, if we move around we have to spend a lot of time and energy building up soil fertility and getting fruit bearing trees. We also still need land, and often planning permission, to put wagons or vans permanently on the land.

7) Join an existing eco-village. Many exist out there already and it may be a lot less work for us to just join something which has already been set up. Some of them are more expensive to live in than others, although many of them face many of the problems outlined above. Have a look at the Global Ecovillage Network for more info.

8 ) Create – or advocate – a land revolution where the land is redistributed to all of us. This can be done in a grassroots way, with mass autonomous land grabs or through joining organisations like The Land is Ours in Britain or Reclaim the Fields (RtF) in many other European countries (For more information on RtF have a look at one of my previous posts. We could also try a state-led approach through lobbying the state on access to land, however for large-scale land redistribution to happen we need to realise that the current state may well need to be destroyed or overthrown as it is in bed with corporations and large land-owners.

Land redistribution is possible as the Cuban example shows. There have been revolutions and/or land redistribution programs around the world. The forces of private property have been successful in suppressing debate in many European countries around land – and other property – redistribution. To mention ‘land redistribution’ nowadays can be seen as controversial, unrealistic and even dangerous, especially to the rich and/or market forces.

If we want many of us – including maybe ourselves – to be able to live in a more sustainable way on the land again, then we need to get land redistribution back into peoples’ minds and on to the political map. We need to make it a political reality. If we just focus on sorting out our own living situations then we will leave most of us behind. We will all then face climate chaos and resource shortages because the way of life of most of us in the global North will still be incredibly energy intensive and destructive.

/Jack Daw, 20 december 2009

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