Ecovillage updates
Posted by Steve Welzer on 09/16/07From: Liz Walker
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007
Subject: EcoVillage at Ithaca in Time Magazine!
Hi everyone,
It is pretty amazing to have a two-and-a-half-page spread about EVI in the latest Time Magazine! It is on the newsstands now, even though it carries a September 17 issue date.
There is a version online (not as many photos or captions, so it presents a less complete view):
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1659708,00.html
Interesting how the mainstream is starting to catch up and is becoming interested in ecovillages.
Liz Walker,
Executive Director, EcoVillage at Ithaca
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Ithaca Journal 9/7/07
Figuring out how to grow a high school
EcoVillage project would focus on sustainability
By Linda Stout, Journal staff (excerpts)
EcoVillage at Ithaca already serves as a model of sustainable living, now some residents want to add a high school focused on sustainability to the mix.
Tina Nilsen-Hodges and her family moved to EcoVillage from Vestal five years ago. Nilsen-Hodges, who has a teaching background, said she hopes her interest in teaching people about non-toxic, energy-efficient homes, less reliance on fossil fuels and eating more local foods can manifest in opening a unique small high school two years from now.
She has already been involved in teaching sustainability courses at Ithaca College through a partnership with EcoVillage. Wednesday she represented EcoVillage at the United Nations Conference on Global Climate Change in New York City. Other programs focusing on local sustainable businesses are also envisioned in the educational center at EcoVillage.
“We’re targeting something in a 75- to 100-student range,” she said of the envisioned program. She hopes to have the school open to any student who’s interested and to reach out to a diverse group of students. They would study across disciplines, incorporating, for instance, math, science, economic development and writing into studies of farming, local biosystems or sustainable building projects. She particularly hopes to emphasize questions close to home, such as the local economy, agriculture or geology as opposed to deep research of far-off rain forests.
The EcoVillage school would focus on sustainability projects, preparing students for ways of living and building that account for global climate changes, Nilsen-Hodges said.
“It’s systems thinking,” she said. “EcoVillage would be a living lab of people, land and the built environment - a democratically-run school with hands-on projects and community-based projects.
Earlier this year, EcoVillage and Ithaca College brought Jaimie Cloud of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education for workshops on integrating sustainability topics into science courses and other local school curriculums. Nilsen-Hodges hopes a new alternative school at EcoVillage will teach teens to create new ways of living together inspired by the EcoVillage example, and that they’ll develop expertise in sustainability that they will carry on to college and their working lives.
It could be “the antidote to what ails us,” she said.
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9/12/07 article in the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald (excerpts)
Last November Sydney-based accountant Lyndall Parris launched the Sydney Coastal Ecovillage plan (http://www.scev.org) to establish an ecovillage on the NSW coast.
She now has a database of more than 500 people keen to help make the vision a reality. “It has just been through word of mouth; we have done no advertising,” she says. “It proves there are a lot of people looking for a different way of living.”
Parris’s inspiration has come from two very different ecovillage projects, one in upstate New York and the other in Western Australia.
The U.S. one, Ithaca, is on 80 hectares, 80 per cent of it dedicated to green space. Building there started in 1995, and facilities now include two 30-home neighbourhoods, an organic vegetable and berry farm, spaces for cottage industry, an education office, and an ecosystem restoration project.
Closer to home, SomerVille, near Chidlow, 45 minutes from Perth, is in its initial stages of development. Fifty families will soon start building on the 160 hectare site. The project is 100 per cent solar self-sufficient - the largest such development in Australia and has in turn created 35 new jobs in Chidlow.
Parris learned about SomerVille and teamed up with Greenedge Projects, the team behind it, to develop the SCEV concept further. She now devotes herself to it full-time. Her husband, David, works as a wind energy consultant. “My focus is communicating this dream so people can get an idea of whether they may be attracted to it,” she says.
Parris’s model requires 70-80 hectares, 10-20 per cent for housing, the rest left in its natural state or used for farming and community purposes. “The housing would be at market rates, but because we are reducing the ecological footprint for each house, we hope to get more homes on the land.”
- Keeli Cambourne