Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Intentional Communities
Intentional Communities
Intentional Communities
JOSHUA LOCKYER
Introduction
Sustainability has become a central concem for many contemporary in-
tentional communities. More and more of today's intentional communitarians
are cooperating with one another to reduce their impact on the earth. This is
especially apparent in the rapid growth in the number of ecovillages over the
last fifteen to twenty years. This concem with sustainability is also present in
many cohousing communities and a variety of other intentional communities
that do not refer to themselves as ecovillages. The concem with sustainability
in intentional communities parallels concems in the broader society; it began
in the 1960s and increased dramatically beginning in the early 1990s.
Sustainability and community have become buzzwords in a variety of
circles. Concem with sustainability is widespread and certainly not limited
to the members of intentional communities. Sustainability is valued by many
sectors of society, but it is rarely addressed in as holistic a manner as it is
in today's intentional communities. The idea of community is also of wide-
spread interest. Community is frequently imagined as a place where actions
can be taken to address the sustainability challenge. However, what exactly
constitutes a community often remains unspecified and the exact role of com-
munities in achieving sustainability vague.
In this article, I suggest that intentional communities provide unique
entry points for addressing sustainability, in part because the meaning and
practice of both sustainability and community are made more explicit in these
contexts. Using the tragedy of the commons as a foil, I suggest that sustain-
ability-oriented intentional communities are recreating the commons and, in
the process, moving toward sustainability. I focus on three sets of factors that
characterize sustainability-oriented intentional communities: explicit atten-
tion to sustainability, practical political and economic institutions, and differ-
ent kinds of relationships with people and place.
18 COMMUNAL SOCIETIES
Conclusion
The general characteristics of intentional communities discussed above
create the strong potential for intentional communities to contribute solutions
to the sustainability challenge. Many intentional communities are increasing-
ly oriented around shared sustainability values and are attracting people with
the knowledge and skills to address these concems. As sustainability-oriented
intentional communities become more smoothly functioning, democratic and
enduring social entities, they also gain popular relevance. More democrati-
cally organized sustainability-oriented intentional communities become an
Intentional Communities and Sustainability 27
NOTES
' I am grateful to the Communal Studies Association for providing support for
the research that led to this article in the form of their inaugural Communal Studies
Association Research Fellowship.
^Garrett Hardin, "Tragedy ofthe Commons," Science (1968) 162:1243-1248.
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Intentional Communities and Sustainability 29
^" Willett Kempton, James S. Boster and Jennifer A. Hartley, Environmental Val-
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