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  • From: lbsaltzman@aol.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Natural Succession in Community Building
  • Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:31:44 -0400


How to Turn Your Neighborhood Into an Eco-Village

http://www.hopedance.org/food/linda-buzzell-saltzman

Above is a link to an article that my wife wrote a couple of years ago. It is
relevent to an idea I am kicking around and want to develop. Recently there
has been a discussion on this list on how hard it is to develop rural land
and be self-sustaining. At the same time Rain commented on how hard it is to
start ecovillages or intentional communities.?



Some years ago Toby Hemenway wrote a great on essay on why he left the
country and moved into the city. He described contacting his neighbors and
building some neighborhood cooperation in food growing.? Where I live in
Santa Barbara a movement has started creating neighborhood food exchanges,
where people came together in at a neighbors home to exchange produce, seeds
and plants.? It is expanding all over the city and becoming an outstanding
success.? It has been an excellent exercise in community building.



All of this leads me to a thought that I want to write about and expand.? I
majored in Anthropology and also have a masters degree in human systems
analysis.? The idea is that there is a process analogous to natural
succession in forests?required to do successful community building. There
have been some notable successes in creating ecovillages or intentional
communities from scratch, but there have been many, many failures.? I think
that maybe that?is because community building makes the difficulty of
desiging a food forest look trivial by comparison.?



In?most cases moving from?the disturbed landscape of
our?dysfunctional?culture to a sustainable community in one step is to big a
leap to usually succeed.? Perhaps a process of?natural succession in
building?communities can be designed, and may be a more effective way of
building?sustainable communities in the long run.? I think many people?have
articulated portions of this idea but that there is a more comprehensive
theory that can be developed.? ?The bonds of trust and mutual support that
makes a traditional community function probably need a lot of nurturing to
succeed. I think this needs to start by linking up existing people,
properties and neighborhoods with events like neighborhood exchanges.? As
bonds develop we can work on the process of sharing. Eventually our existing
neighborhoods will hopefully become ecovillages in place.



We are working on defining a series of succession steps in building a
sustainable?community.



More to follow...



Larry Saltzman




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