Creating Community
(Page 6 of 8)
June/July 2003
By Dan Chiras and Diana Leafe Christian
Rural ecovillages also can be plagued with difficulties of making a living. Most residents of Ecovillage at Ithaca and Los Angeles Ecovillage are able to keep the jobs they had, although many changed their mode of transportation, and some now do more work at home. But Earthaven is 50 minutes, and Dancing Rabbit 90 minutes from jobs in the cities.
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A handful of Earthaven members formed the worker-owned Forestry Co-op, felling and milling community trees and building timber-framed homes, and a few others operate on-site businesses that employ other members part time (Red Moon Herbs, Permaculture Activist magazine, and soon, a tree nursery), but many barely cover their expenses doing odd jobs for others or taking part-time jobs in nearby towns. A few have intermittent consulting gigs as permaculture teachers or landscape designers; some commute several days a week to a nearby college town; and several live on retirement or investment income.
At Dancing Rabbit, several members have sufficient computer skills to make a good living telecommuting to jobs in Silicon Valley. Others work construction on and offsite; a few work for the community doing repair and maintenance, gardening or cooking. Some work cyclically, alternating their time between work and leisure.
Although ecovillage living is not without its challenges, residents avow the rewards are many.
"Earthaven is a positive response to the world crisis," says cofounder Chuck Marsh. "It's an opportunity to figure out how to live social and ecologically responsible and spiritually conscious lives in right relationship with the natural world. We desperately need living examples, and the best examples to be found are in the ecovillage movement."
IT AIN'T EASY BEING GREEN
Cohousing-based urban and suburban projects like Ecovillage at Ithaca often are funded by two-salary professional families that buy into them, are aided by bank financing for the construction loan and individual mortgages, and sometimes supplemented by grants from nonprofits or government agencies. Urban retrofit projects affiliated with nonprofits, like those in Los Angeles and Cleveland, also tend to get grants and low-interest loans with interest-only payments for several years. But rural, more ecologically radical projects such as Dancing Rabbit and Earthaven face a stiffer challenge. Most don't obtain bank financing to buy their properties, partly out of choice and partly because of many banks' refusal to back alternative construction methods. Members don't secure construction loans or mortgages to build individual homes, either, primarily because they don't want them—and they can't qualify anyway since they don't have title to their home sites but lease them from their communities. To purchase their properties, founders often borrow money from friends, family and more affluent members. As they can afford it, they construct their homes incrementally.
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