Four Reasons Why Ecovillages need Academia

How can we educate for a sustainable future?  How can we best engage students in gaining the inspiration, knowledge, and experience necessary to build more equitable, just, and ecological lifestyles for themselves, their communities and the planet?

In this blog series, I have explored these questions and why academia needs to utilize and help develop ecovillages as campuses for sustainability education.  To conclude this series, I’d like to turn the equation on its head and consider why ecovillages also need academia.

So far, I have offered the following nine comparisons:

These may seem like nine arguments to run, not walk, away from traditional academia.  Okay, I do believe ecovillages represent our best available campuses in which to teach integrated sustainable community development.  In fact, this is why I founded Living Routes, which partners with UMass Amherst to offer college-level study abroad programs based in sustainable communities around the world.

Still, there’s no question we must teach about sustainability within all college and university settings.  In so doing, however, we must also recognize and make explicit to our students that what academia “says” and what it “does” are often quite different matters, especially with regard to this topic.   If we don’t at least address the cognitive dissonance in the left column above, students may come away confused, angry or worse, apathetic.

So, yes!  Let’s strive to make sustainability a core component of every college and university’s curricula and operations.  And, let’s acknowledge our challenges and limitations along with our efforts and successes.  And, let’s also reach out to ecovillages as more integrated models of what we are attempting to teach. Okay. ‘Nuf said.

Now, I want to look in the opposite direction and share four reasons why I believe ecovillages should also reach out to academia.

1. Academia is the biggest game in town. In the U.S., higher education is approximately a $360 billion/year business.[1]  And this is not counting the trillions of dollars invested in facilities and endowments.  Almost 70% of high school graduates in the U.S. go directly to college.[2]  Nationwide, more than 20 million students are currently enrolled.[3]  Worldwide, there are over 150 million college students and this number continues to rise.[4]  If we want to have anything to do with higher education, colleges and universities are where the students and resources are!
2. Academia is changing. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) represents a quickly growing network of faculty and staff within academia who “get it” and are actively working for positive change within their institutions.  With an increasing focus on internationalizing curricula, creating community partnerships, and implementing ecological design and interdisciplinary research, ecovillages are no longer seen as eccentric throw-backs to the 60s, but rather as leading edge sustainability innovators.  In addition, technology is creating new opportunities for collaboration, such as through an online course on ecovillage design offered in collaboration between Gaia Education and the Open University of Catalonia.[5]
3. Ecovillages are R&D centers for appropriate technologies.  Sustainable solutions must be developed within real-world ecological, social, and cultural contexts if they are to succeed.  Ecovillages represent a network of potential field research sites for the development of integrated, community-scale systems such as active/passive solar, wind, composting toilets, water purification, alternative transport, even hydrogen fuel cells.  Through research programs and funding, colleges and universities could greatly support the further development and dissemination of these technologies.
4. Ecovillages need help to reach their highest potential as campuses for sustainability education.  While programs offered through Living Routes and individual ecovillages are a good start, we are still in elementary school in terms of what is truly needed to educate professionals capable of building the institutions and systems required for a sustainable world to be possible.  We need to further collaborate with academia to create “communiversities” where students can spend years in ecovillages and related organizations to gain the background and skills needed to enter the workplace as professionals in fields as diverse as habitat restoration, sustainable agriculture, group facilitation, holistic health, ecological design, green building, and more.

College students represent a powerful leverage point in the world’s “Great Turning toward a more Ecological Age,” as Joanna Macy refers to it.[6]  These “emerging adults” are mature enough to ask the big questions yet are also open to radical alternatives such as those modeled within ecovillages. The world desperately needs leaders who are able to think—and act—outside of the box and today’s students are key to the generation of tomorrow’s paradigms and new ways of approaching local and global issues.

We are living in an amazing moment, not just in human history, but in planetary history.  We have exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity and must now transition to a post-oil world if we are to survive as a species.

It is possible to live lives that are both high quality and low impact.  I know this because I have seen thousands of people manifesting positive visions in ecovillages around the world.   While not utopias, these communities represent living laboratories, beta-test centers, and innovative campuses for learning how to live well and lightly together.  We have so much to learn from each other.  Building bridges between ecovillages and academia is literally building bridges to a more sustainable future.

Thanks for reading!  Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

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