by the rolled-up cuffs of his pant legs, as he placed one bare foot
in front of the other.
a legal entity in 1984. Armed with only the academicized definition
of what an eco-village is — “a full-featured, human-scale
settlement that minimises its environmental impacts and conserves natural
heritage, works toward self-reliance, supports healthy human development,
is created by its residents, and employs a consensus model (or other
form of direct democracy) in making decisions,” according to Brian
McCosh, in his dissertation, Can Nature Ever Really Be Our Home?
Ecovillage Realities in British Columbia and Ontario — I
knew the term was something that could not be conceptualized in textbooks.
Something that could only be experienced in the real world.
“Hey, well, I guess we’re an eco-village then,”
chuckled a woman dressed in a loose tie-dyed cotton dress with diaper-style
safety pins fastening up the sides, when I explained to her why I was
there and what the term “eco-village” meant. After wandering
around for several minutes, I had finally come across the woman (who
later identified herself as Dawn) and a few of the other eco-inhabitants:
a bright-eyed, dreadlock-sporting young man, a shy, pubescent boy who
had grown up on the farm, raised with a set of values that promote respect
for the natural world that are otherwise lost on a whole generation
raised on plastic McDonald’s toys, plastic wrappers, plastic surgery,
plastic smiles on television, plastic, plastic, plastic. Fake.
And Gerhard.
Gerhard Dekker. His mature, piercing blue eyes stood out under a mop
of white hair bleached blondish by the sun. Sporting a white beard to
match his hair and a T-shirt with a Spanish poem (praising everyone’s
favourite Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara), Gerhard was the perfect
image of the patriarchal figurehead of Northern Sun Farm, in my eyes,
at least.
At first sight, I fathomed Gerhard was a leftover hippie from the
baby-boomer generation, though I’m not one to make assumptions
based on lingering stereotypes from a generation that my generation
knows nothing about (but often likes to dream of). Having lived on the
farm for the past 28 years (one of its founding members), he had seen
the farm through the hippie commune period, into the co-operation stage,
and right up until the present day.
The concept of “eco-village” may have originally stemmed
from the peace-and-love communes of the late ’60s, (and can even
be traced further back to the monastic communes in the medieval period),
but since then they have changed quite a bit. According to Timothy Schwinghamer,
who holds a master’s in plant biology from the University of Manitoba
and wrote a pre-master’s dissertation on Canadian eco-villages,
the first recorded demonstration of the official term “eco-village”
was at an environmental forum (Forum Alternativ) in 1979. A few years
later, the Gaia Trust association was formed in Denmark in order to
promote the concept, and in turn established the Global Ecovillage Network.
In addition to that, Gaia Trust has also given out hundreds of grants
to budding sustainable community developments. Over the last 30 years,
thousands of eco-villages have popped up all over the world, from Europe
to Latin America. In Canada alone, the number of eco-villages has been
doubling every year for the past few years.
“This alternative is not only viable, it is necessary,”
Schwinghamer remarked, when asked to explain the main role of eco-villages
in modern society. “The main role of eco-villages today is to
provide models of sustainable society, and to disseminate the necessary
skills. Cities, in the current mode, are not sustainable at all; that’s
obvious, right? We need a cycle to return wasted nutrients to food-growing
sites. We also need to employ a system of food production (such as organic
and/or biodynamic agriculture), which is not fossil fuel-dependent.
To have these systems, we will have to accept a simpler (lower quality
of) life.”
Simpler indeed. I couldn’t take my eyes of Gerhard’s feet,
exposed by the rolled-up cuffs of his pant legs, as he placed one bare
foot in front of the other. He stepped nonchalantly through mud and
over rocks as he showed me around the farm, wandering through asymmetrical
garden plots and pens full of sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs. The pigpens,
he explained, precede the garden plots, as the pigs naturally chew up
the roots of lingering plants and fertilize the soil leaving the plot
in perfect condition for planting.
He informed me that all of the electricity and heating on the farm
was either derived from wind power, solar power, or from wood stoves.
“When people don’t have hydro, everything changes immediately,”
said Gerhard, showing me the inner workings of a solar oven he had built.
“There’s no humming fridges, no bright lights anywhere,
no power tools, no washing machines. The whole quality of life becomes
so much simpler.”
Leading me inside a screened-in kitchen structure, he sat down at
an old wooden table, took out a leather pouch of tobacco (which he had
grown himself), and rolled up a cigarette with rough, tanned hands —
a tan that would make any tanning-booth beauty green with envy, but
alas, was only obtainable from spending one’s life outside, working
and living in the natural world.
Puff.
“So, what do you want to know?” he asked, beckoning me
to sit, while sinking back into his creaky wooden chair. I stammered
for a question that hadn’t already been answered, and came up
with a question regarding the sustainability of the farm.
“It is not possible for people in this part of the world to
live sustainably,” he remarked, debunking that naive, illusionary
myth right off the bat. “So, I would hesitate to call us sustainable,
though we are very ecological, and we’re way ahead of the pack.
We have to try to cause as little harm as possible, but also realize
that we always cause some harm and that the living world has a great
capacity to heal itself, so it’s OK to cause a little harm.”
Naturally, inhabiting a part of the world that wasn’t designed
for permanent human settlement leads to inadequate conditions for complete
sustainability, but he mused that with the population what it is today,
there’s not much else place to go.
Why Gerhard had given up a good part of his life to founding and building
the sustainable eco-community, I was dying to know. “Mostly dissatisfaction
with the materialistic culture,” he said, trying to recall what
had initially sparked the desire to create the community almost 30 years
earlier. “Dissatisfaction with the oppressive nature of our society,
and wanting to be free from that as much as possible. The goal is to
create and maintain a place here that is a
positive experience for all who come here, and that live here. And
based on mutual respect and respect for the land, we try to live within
the limits of the natural world.”
He ashes his cigarette in an ashtray on the table, slaps his knees,
rises, and says, “Shall we continue?” I follow him out the
door. Those bare feet. They killed me.
We wandered back through the gardens, back to the woman in the tie-dyed
dress’s (Dawn’s) house. She didn’t need to tell me
she was a mother; the way she quickly offered me the shirt off her back
to protect me from the mosquitoes said it all. But it was when she told
me why she had originally come to live at Northern Sun Farm that the
notion of what true motherhood really meant became clear.
Dawn’s story began 14 years earlier, when she found herself
with a seven-month-old baby and a full-time job, running her own business
in the city. “I knew I couldn’t be a good parent under the
circumstances,” said the glowing woman, standing between her now
14-year-old son, Sam, and her eight-year-old son, Noble. “I knew
that at one point he was going to be walking, and I couldn’t imagine
keeping him in a fenced-in yard in the city, and having to limit his
exploration of his natural environment.”
She fiddled with a smooth silver “om” charm that hung
around her neck (the same symbol that Gerhard bore a tiny tattoo of
on the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger). It was as if
she was drawing her airy sense of vitality and motherly warm glow that
radiated from her (brighter than any tie-dye dress could match), from
the smooth metallic symbol of the sacred Dharmic syllable.
“I knew [Northern Sun] was a really good place to have children,
and to build myself a home, and manage to look after myself without
spending all my time working a job to make money, and instead I could
stay home with my children, and be with them, and be the kind of mother
that I respected.”
Often, the term eco-village seems to conjure up images of enviro-nuts;
however there are more reasons that one might choose to live here than
just environmental sustainability. Conditions in eco-villages are ideal
for single parents; the phrase “it takes a village to raise a
child” begins to have meaning outside of its typical empty rhetoric.
Many villages have been created around the need for healthy food, and
began with the creation of vast organic gardens, created by a community
in order to ensure food security. Also, those with marginal incomes
don’t need to work two jobs or make six figures to have a comfortable
quality of life; Gerhard said he needed a mere $3,000 a year to live
comfortably on, while Dawn explained that her house cost only $500 annually
to upkeep.
Dawn showed me around her house, pointing out worm-compost toilets
and straw-bale rooms, the roof that was made out of old newspapers,
and other marvels of sustainability. As she fluttered about, bits of
skin peeking out from the gaps in the safety pins, she freely chatted
about this and that, hopping from one dreamy thought to the next. She
talked of possibly moving away once her children were grown up, that
she needed to get out in the world and use her talents and do this and
see that and she liked working in “intense situations like canoe
trips where you don’t know if you’re going to make it home.
You know, something with a little craziness to it.”
It was what she said next, when I asked her one final question as we
headed out the door, about the effect that living at Northern Sun had
on her mentality, that nearly knocked the wind out of me. To this day,
I can’t decide whether or not to weep at her answer, in joy, in
jealousy, or simply just because of the beautiful simplistic depth of
such a fundamental principle of life that is so often unfulfilled:
“It’s peaceful,” she said, “to wake up in
the morning and be able to say, ‘What do I want to do with my
day?’”
After assuring Dawn I would come back soon to visit, Gerhard led me
back out of the house, pointing out his wind-powered flourmill, and
a hand-built sauna. “Nothing builds community like a bunch of
people sitting around naked,” he chuckled. Also, he showed me
a summer kitchen that was in the process of being built, which would
eventually serve as a commonhouse in which all of the members of the
community (who currently eat in one of the eight houses erected on the
property) could share meals.
As he wandered around, he often stopped to pluck this and that from
the garden, offering me stalks of garlic to chew on, bits of dill, cilantro;
the way he offered them up with a tinge of pride, I could tell he was
pleased with them. He then proceeded to eat other random things growing
about the yard, bright yellow dandelions and the brilliant pink blossoms
from a bush of bleeding hearts, pointing out that this is edible, and
that is edible, and it’s all edible, and it was somewhere between
the row upon row of untainted organic food and the heart bushes that
my own earth-tender heart started to bleed, as I became increasingly
fascinated by this small sustainable community. Maybe it was the butterflies
or the lilacs, or the hope that the natural world may not be doomed
after all, or the romantic notions of a simpler time where abstract
concepts such as freedom come alive in ways that only the most naive
of dreamers can imagine or read about in dog-eared copies of hard cover
books found in second-hand bookstores, and, and. . . .
Sweet hippie Jesus, I think I’m in love.
Our next stop was the house of another eco-inhabitant, a man with
a shaved head, who eyed me critically as I walked up the path. He seemed
a little wary of the idea of a nosy reporter poking around the farm
at first, but quickly warmed up, introduced himself as Tim, and hospitably
offered up his seat for me to sit down.
“So you live in Winnipeg?” Tim asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you an environmentalist?” the sarcastic question
dripped playfully off his tongue.
“ No, she’s a phil-os-o-pher,” Gerhard interrupted,
recalling my answer from a previous conversation with Dawn.
“Ahh yes, so you’re studying So-crats, and all that other
stuff.”
“So-crat-e-s,” Gerhard corrected.
They preceded to talk about the varying philosophy books they had
read, naming books penned by Aldous Huxley, books concerning the nature
of the sacred in our world, books about chaos theory, among others.
“Is mathematics a philosophy?” pondered Tim, after giving
it some thought.
“Pretty much everything comes down to philosophy,” I offered.
“Haha, yeah. Should we be doing this? Should we not be doing
this?”
“That’s ethics,” remarked Gerhard.
“Isn’t ethics a branch of philosophy?”
“But a pure philosopher don’t need to be concerned about
ethics.”
“Yeah, they’re just looking for the meaning of life,”
smiled Tim.
“And what is the meaning of life?” I never miss an opportunity
to ask the question.
“To have fun,” Gerhard proclaims, and we all laugh. “There’s
no definition, really. To have fun, and to love, and to make the world
a better place for everyone.”
“We’re here, and we’re supposed to make it up when
we’re here, like a big experiment,” Tim continues. “If
you think the meaning of life is to have fun, then, well, experiment
with ways that make life the most fun. And well, if you think the meaning
of life is to earn billions of dollars, then, well. . . .” We
all laugh, again.
“All right, time to shut this light off,” Gerhard rises
from his chair, deciding it was time to get on with the tour.
“Yeah, I think we shed some light on the subject,” Tim
smiles, again. “Any last questions?”
Again, I clumsily reach for a question. “Um, what do you do
in a typical day?”
“Hmm, well, this!” he replies.
We visit one more of the households — a couple and their two
children, preoccupied with barbecuing burgers in their yard —
and then our tour slowly comes to an end. On the walk back to the main
road out of the eco-village, Gerard abruptly stops and, as if to end
the tour with one last final thought, he stares off into space.
“Listen to those birds, they never stop, always going,”
he says, not addressing anyone in particular, except for perhaps himself.
Maybe it had some significant meaning, gently summarizing the past hour
or two in a delicate observation about the nature of the universe, of
society, or some other deep question, or maybe it was just a passing
wonderment. Whatever the reason, it was definitely a true statement;
upon reviewing my tape-recording of the tour, the faint sound of chirping
birds that can be heard throughout the recording brought me back to
that moment.
The tour in its entirety left a lot to think about. What Northern
Sun Farm Co-op, among thousands of other so-called “eco-villages,”
have essentially done is taken man’s linear, top-down way of thinking
and turned it into something sustainable; something circular. They allow
people to live within a community that respects the limits of the natural
world, demonstrating that while utter sustainability may never be fully
realized, huge steps can (and must), be made. Eco-villages also exist
as much in the mental world as they do in the physical world, as they
teach people to respect not only the world around them, but to slow
down and truly take the time to listen to and respect themselves. As
was unanimously expressed by the Northern Sun Farm residents, life on
the Farm permanently changed all of its inhabitants’ mentalities
and outlooks on life.
However, there are many problems and challenges that eco-villages
face in the long run. “They are different from the plan of the
dominant hegemony in North America,” said Schwinghamer, outlining
the main difficulty facing eco-villages today. While ecologically based
communities may be viable for small-scale developments of specifically
concerned people, are they a viable option for the populace at large?
Urban developments such as Windsong in Langley, B.C. (the first community
in Canada to be recognised as an “eco-village”) and Conservation
Co-op in Ottawa demonstrate that while urban sustainability may not
be obtainable to the extent that it is on a small rural-scale, huge
strides can be made at the urban level in order to promote a sustainable
lifestyle. However, it is a simple undeniable fact that the general
human population is simply not interested in tediously growing their
own food, composting their excrements, or accepting a simpler quality
of life in order to reduce their personal footprint.
Also, another problem facing eco-villages has to do with the ability
they have to sustain themselves. “I don’t know why, but
30 years seems to be the maximum lifespan of eco-villages in Canada,”
mused Schwinghamer.
I thought back to the conversation I had with Gerhard earlier, in
the screened-in porch.
“So, you’ve been here for about, 30 years now?”
I asked.
“Twenty-eight years,” He corrected me immediately, as
if he was acutely aware of the looming anniversary.
“Do you plan on ever leaving?”
“I’m not guaranteeing that I will never leave,”
he began, carefully. “I mean, circumstances may change, but I
came here with the intention of staying here until the end.”
And then, without batting an eye: “We have a graveyard, a coffin
already sitting in the shop, we thought if we have a graveyard we might
as well have a coffin around just in case someone dies you don’t
want to be scrambling around for a coffin. But I am prepared to live
here until I die. I can’t think of a better place.”
One would be hard-pressed to find a better place. Northern Sun Farm
Co-op exists as something like a proverbial bittersweet Garden of Eden,
created not out of a vision of paradise, but out of necessity to combat
the realities of an over-populated, over-polluted, dying world. A place
where “oms” are subliminally found everywhere and there’s
no need for shoes, and the hummingbirds are beautiful, and they make
their nests with scraps of cola-bottle labels and old newspapers and
from their perch they calmly flutter about and watch as the rest of
the world around them collapses in on itself.
It is this teetering equilibrium, the complex interaction between
the natural world and the technological one combined with the unknown
attitudes of future generations that leave the fate of the eco-village
uncertain. Do eco-villages truly represent the United Nations praised
“Best Practice”
