“Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love.”
-Teilhard de Chardin
Ecovillages are laboratories of human relations, in which we test the power of new systemic thinking to bring about necessary changes in the local and global economic, social and ecological environments. Ecovillages provide conditions for cutting-edge sustainability experiments. In these living and learning laboratories, we quickly learn from mistakes and advances. Both are held in a complex framework of dream and vision, earth and cosmos, technology and spirit, intention and love, dance and chant, cycle and balance, death and renewal.
What is sustained in an ecovillage is not economic growth or development, but the entire web of life on which our long term survival depends. A sustainable community is designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, social activities, physical structures and technologies do not interfere with Nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.
As laboratories of sustainable living, ecovillages offer widely applicable insights for the planning and reorganization of our societies. Ecovillages combine a supportive social-cultural environment with a low-impact/high-quality lifestyle. When we look at the ecovillage model developed on five continents, it is clear that ecovillages are creating a sustainable middle ground between rich and poor, while designing interdependent and life-enhancing bio-physical and psycho-social processes. In these experiments we find no sign of the deprivation that the popular media depicts as the necessary price to be paid for reducing resource consumption.
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