The Ecovillage/Bioregional Vision in a Nutshell
Posted by Steve Welzer on 06/04/07The idea is to re-create village life.
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It takes a village to raise a child. More generally, it takes a village to foster a sense of care, responsibility, identification, and land stewardship.
The concept of human scale is key. A self-governing village embodying genuine participatory democracy and personal interrelationship should comprise no more than five or six hundred individuals - certainly no more than a thousand. Even five hundred is large if consensus decision-making is desired, so a village might consist of clustered neighborhoods of perhaps thirty households (about a hundred people), each of which sends representatives to a governing Village Council.
At the level of polity: Scale and ecology argue for a bioregional vision. There might be five hundred or so sovereign bioregional entities within the North American continent.
Within a bioregion it would make administrative sense to group the villages into townships or counties.
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We want to move away from urban-industrialism, away from impersonal institutions and Leviathan-scale technologies.
We want to move toward responsible, sustainable, democratic eco-communitarian lifeways.