"It Takes a Village" to Foster Accountability

I attended the 20th anniversary celebration of EVI (EcoVillage at Ithaca) a couple of weeks ago. There are now two 30-home cohousing neighborhoods at EVI and on Saturday they held a groundbreaking ceremony for a planned third neighborhood. When it is completed there will be almost 300 people living at what has become the country's most advanced ecovillage settlement (http://EcovillageIthaca.org).

There is an organic CSA vegetable farm on premises, office spaces for cottage industry, a neighborhood root cellar, community gardens, and varied natural areas. Over 80% of the 175 acre site is planned to remain green space, including 55 acres in a conservation easement held by the Finger Lakes Land Trust.

Village residents have the opportunity to share community dinners several times per week in the two Common Houses. Residents volunteer about 2-3 hours per week on various work teams to keep things running smoothly: outdoor maintenance, finances, governance, meal preparation/clean-up, collective child-care, and more. The evolving village culture includes plenty of neighborly support for families in need, various annual celebrations to mark the seasons, social events, clubs, and even educational study-groups.

Before the modern era most people lived in village-like settings, but during the last several hundred years the constant-growth trendlines of our society have resulted in an out-of-control situation that I call the "Modern Leviathan." Real face-to-face interdependent communities have been displaced, over-run, and overwhelmed by the institutions and technologies of the urban-industrial Leviathan. This is problematic because the latter constitutes a whole other (misguided) way of life vis-a-vis our original and natural locally-oriented ways.

The institutions of the Leviathan are simply too big, complex, remote, and opaque. This tends to result in unaccountable and irresponsible behavior. For example: the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice released a report last week that raised lots of eyebrows. It detailed some extravagant expenditures (on conferences and amenities) that the department probably hoped would never come to light. Beltway elites were apparently feasting on $10 muffins at the expense of us taxpayers.

But it's not just the government. This kind of behavior is common in large-scale institutions of all types: big corporations, governmental units, universities, hospitals, and even big non-profits. I saw it personally when I worked for Dow Jones, Inc. in Princeton and then when I worked for the state government in Trenton. The mega-institutions of both the public sector and the private sector will spend like a drunken whatever if they can get away with it (and they usually can).

There's no way that would happen in a truly communitarian setting where people directly see and respond to the behavior of their collective entities (committees, clubs, etc.) . . . because visibility and direct knowledge result in immediate, personal feedback. At EcoVillage/Ithaca the collective bodies are felt to be "us." In the case of Leviathan-scale institutions we talk in terms of "them" and we are at their mercy (remote government and multinational corporations). We like to think in terms of democracy or purchasing-power, but in actuality the masses of people don't have very much influence. Within the context of the Leviathan the rich and powerful elites hold sway and so "they" just keep getting richer, more powerful, and less accountable.

If you get a chance to drive up to Ithaca, NY (the trip can be done in a day), check out the EcoVillage there. It's a model showing the way forward to a new lifestyle of communitarian, eco-responsible living. A group of us have been so inspired by that model that we are starting a project to create something similar here in New Jersey, tentatively called Mount Eden Ecovillage. Contact me if you'd like to hear more about it.