If you ever found yourself forced to define the term “community,” you might find yourself reverting to something akin to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s attempt to define pornography: “I know it when I see it.” While different communities have different purposes, goals, and activities, they’ve all got one thing in common: resource sharing. You may not give a lot of thought to this idea in your own community life (most of us don’t), but water supplies, waste disposal, police protection, and even economic opportunity are all forms of resources that we share within our various communities.

So, what defines a green community? You may come to the same conclusion that I did: mindfulness about those resources that we share, and a commitment to do so more efficiently,  with a eye towards future generations’ access to these resources… natural and other.

As such, I invite you to join me in a multipost (and multiblog) exploration of green community. What are the models? How well do they work? What can we learn from them as we move towards a (natural) resource-constrained world? I don’t know that I can provide all of the answers to these questions… but, as an online community, I’m sure there are ideas we can share…

What is an ecovillage?

The ecovillage concept is a great starting point for this discussion because its likely the most radical, and most holistic, vision of green community out there. Tony Sirna, one of the founder of Northeastern Missouri’s Dancing Rabbit ecovillage, defined this admittedly broad concept as”..places that are aiming for a village-like quality…,” which he defines as

• places that allow for a full scale of human activity: “A village is … a place for work and play, birth and death, trading of goods and services, celebrations, and all aspects of healthy lives.”
• places that operate on a “human scale”: “…a population where it’s still possible for people to know each other as people and not as anonymous masses…”

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