Examining Change

Examining change explores some of the social tensions around aging, food, and consumerism that contemporary intentional communities address. The chapter offers a brief historical overview of social change in the US, but focuses on contemporary anxieties that have motivated the formation of more recent intentional communities. While independence is a critical American value, many people crave stronger community ties, especially as they age. Similarly, a newly food-aware U.S. public wants the freedom to experiment with foods such as raw milk, but demands the safety that accompanies regulated foods, demonstrating tensions between risk, regulation, and authority. This chapter outlines why some people want change and how intentional communities are testing solutions to social problems.

Extreme DIY for Interdependence

This chapter explores how intentional communities strive for interdependence or regional self-sufficiency in areas such as transportation, building, and food. These communities link themselves to individuals and communities in broader networks of interdependence, sharing goods, information, and expertise. They run demonstrations and workshops—open source education—to pass on skills that contribute towards self-sufficiency and negotiate legal obstacles such as building codes. These communities experiment in areas including: natural building, sustainable agriculture, alternate currencies and time banks, and alternate energy such as bio-fuel. Communities that identify as feminist still must address tensions that arise when women enter male-dominated areas such as building.

Sustainability in Community

This chapter explores the role of participatory democracy in sustainability-oriented intentional communities. These communities share goals of social equity and nonviolence and have created a variety of governance structures and practices to enfranchise all residents, ranging from consensus to sociocracy, incorporating nonviolent communication and restorative justice circles. Residents echo Gandhi’s assertion that inner change must precede social change, and communities such as the Possibility Alliance stress integral nonviolence, that nonviolence must permeate all aspects of life. Intentional communities demonstrate multiple patterns for interweaving lives, resolving tensions, and creating balance between their obligations to communities and maintaining integrity of the individual.

Bringing It Home

The final chapter illustrates how these bundled values— nonviolence, self-sufficiency or interdependence, participatory democracy, and voluntary simplicity—might be brought home to the mainstream to address broad social tensions such as rampant consumerism and environmental degradation. Cohousing communities—the closest to suburban patterns of living—offer potential to rethink existing patterns in urban and suburban areas and illustrate how shared spaces in places such as apartment buildings offer ‘unintentional sustainability’. Intentional communities and the sustainability movement continues as primarily white middle-class spaces, and urban communities, in particular, attempt to create broader coalitions through outreach and micro-industry. Despite challenges from entrenched financial interests, solar power energy, and transportation alternatives such as bike commuting and bus travel have engaged the mainstream, and communities such as cohousing groups offer solutions to problems such as aging.

Asking What’s for Dinner

This chapter illustrates how intentional communities translate their bundled values of nonviolence, self-sufficiency, equity, and voluntary simplicity through producing and consuming food. These communities ask what constitutes violence in terms of food and make choices that accord with their specific contexts, goals and geographies, e.g., local vs organic. Catholic worker houses must balance goals of hospitality to the poor with their goals of sustainability. Food rescue helps them combat waste and feed the poor. Whether to eat meat and communal eating become two areas of tension in communities. This chapter explores first, how these communities perform these bundled values in their food practices, including what they eat, what they grow, and what they purchase or gather; and second, the processes and trade-offs of practicing these values.

Creating Cultures

Residents of intentional communities attempt to create new cultures, enabling them to be the change they wanted to see in the world and not simply complaining about the world they live in. Producing their own food, living simply, and community interdependence provide them a freedom from larger social structures and a consumer-oriented cultures, also redefining what constitutes labor and freedom. Does growing food constitute freedom, or is freedom attained through the efficiency of purchasing a ready-made meal? In this way, community residents redefine freedom and have interpreted the term bread labor, popularized by Tolstoy and Gandhi, into a 21st century context.

Choosing a Life

Choosing a Life explores who joins intentional communities and what draws these individuals to community life. Millennials and boomers, women in particular, have sought out community life, from communes to looser home-sharing arrangements, not wishing to retire as their parents did. Potential members must decide ‘how much community they desire’, from communal eating arrangements to looser cohousing community structures. This chapter also explores the process of finding and joining communities and the resources of the Federation of Intentional Community. Potential members often spend weeks visiting a community and meeting members; the process is a two-way vetting process, in which both sides must assess suitability long-term residence.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Contemporary intentional communities have learned important lessons from the successes and failures of previous communities in areas such as governance, labor, and skill-building. Nonetheless contemporary communities are haunted by the ghosts of the cults and less-structured communities of the 1970s. Communities have functioned as social laboratories to test out new ideas that later spread to the mainstream, e.g., The Farm helped mainstream midwifery, and circulating ideas—rather than longevity—is one indication of a community’s success. Community residents draw from sources including Catholic Worker founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing, and Mohandas K. Gandhi as well as foundational communities such as The Farm in Tennessee. Further, the existence of homesteaders and past and present communities in a given area offer social capital and expertise to newer communities.

Rethinking Abundance

This chapter illustrates how intentional communities rethink abundance and ask how much we need to be happy. Sharing resources, from car sharing to food, provide access to goods and services without formal ownership and offers residents a form of freedom; for example, performing labor in bulk offers efficiencies that free residents from time-consuming tasks. Residents demonstrate that sustainable buildings such as strawbale houses can be comfortable and beautiful and that practices such as riding a bicycle for transportation can be fun and social. Some have critiqued intentional communities and the voluntary simplicity movement which hails primarily from the white, middle-class.

Introduction

Being the Change explores how intentional communities such as ecovillages, cohousing communities, and Catholic worker houses have tested alternative models of eating, building, and governing and what these communities can teach the rest of us about sustainable and harmonious living. The introduction lays out the book’s central arguments, introduces the communities, and highlights the language of intention, that we can be intentional about nonviolence, participatory democracy, and voluntary simplicity in our communities. Communities including Catholic Worker houses and farms, ecovillages, and cohousing communities illustrate how some communities have translated these values into practice.