intentional community

Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community

by Diana Leafe Christian  · 14 Jun 2007

them. — Ernest Callenbach, author, Ecotopia An amazing, comprehensive, collaborative and kaleidoscopic achievement! By showing community seekers practical living examples of cohousing projects,ecovillages,and other intentional communities, Finding Community has the potential to change the suburban way of life and help North America reconcile its ecological footprint. — Professor Declan Kennedy, architect, and

…

member of Lebensgarten Ecovillage, Germany This stunning overview of ecovillages and intentional communities is not only a terrific read, but abounds with essential, profoundly important information for anyone seeking more community and a sense of belonging in their

…

Their Love series and The Three Mrs. Parkers Finding Community is full of wisdom and “Convenient Truths” for anyone wanting to join an ecovillage or intentional community, and packed with advice for ecovillages and communities wanting new members, too. — Max Lindegger, cofounder, Crystal Waters Ecovillage, Queensland, Australia; director, Global Ecovillage Network Asia

…

in Community Make a Difference in the Age of Peak Oil? . . . . . . .229 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .243 Acknowledgments am grateful to the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) for kind permission to excerpt liberally from Communities magazine, and to FIC board member and Communities Directory editor Tony Sirna for exceptional, invaluable assistance

…

offer a realistic perspective, based on years of experience — my own, and those of experienced colleagues living in ecovillages, cohousing neighborhoods, and other kinds of intentional communities. I’d like to guide you on this journey because I’ve explored the subject from several perspectives — from those of community seekers, community founders

…

6 through 10). Now, back to the reasons you might enjoy living in such a place. But Šrst, what do we mean by “ecovillages and intentional communities?” “Intentional communities are formed when 3 4 FINDING COMMUNITY 1.You’ll live on the planet with a smaller ecological footprint. Clearly sharing resources not only saves

…

communities true?  Chapter 2 Ten Most Common Fears about Joining a Community T he following is adapted in part from the Fellowship for Intentional Community’s “13 Myths About Intentional Community.” in common? They tend to be health-conscious, environmentally aware, and politically and culturally progressive — the “cultural creatives” whom authors Paul Ray and

…

ecologically conscious over the years it has added the term “ecovillage” to its community name. Does installing solar panels and building a greenhouse make an intentional community an ecovillage? Sometimes housing developers call their new subdivision projects “ecovillages.” Recently at a conference where I was ECOVILLAGE OVERVIEW ONLINE For a quick online

…

, Heart of Now. lostvalley.org • Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, northern California. Permaculture design, natural building, organic gardening and seed saving, watershed organizing, starting your own intentional community. www.oaec.org • Center for Appropriate Technology (CAT), Powys, Wales. cat.org.uk • Findhorn: Ecovillage Training. findhorn.org/ecovillage • EcoLogical Solutions, Crystal Waters Ecovillage, Queensland

…

.) Even though cohousing units are not more expensive than market-rate housing,cohousing communities nevertheless cost considerably more to join than most other kinds of intentional communities. Joining a cohousing community essentially means buying a house — which means qualifying for a mortgage, having enough cash to make the down payment, and

…

suspicion has mellowed quite a bit in recent years. Now the Cohousing Association of the US (Coho/US) regularly invites activists from the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) to present workshops at their biennial national conferences. Communities magazine, which is published by the FIC, features cohousing in every issue, and developing

…

got built. The other 90 percent disbanded before they ever got off the ground. (See Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities.) But Chuck Durrett believes one cohousing start-up in three gets built, which suggests that cohousing community founders are considerably more successful than non-cohousing

…

Prescott, Arizona. Organized Neighborhoods Housing Co-ops Sometimes when people want more community in their lives, they organize their neighborhoods to make a kind of intentional-community-rightwhere-we-live. The founders of Los Angeles EcoVillage organized a small part of their downtown neighborhood, and a supportive nonproŠt bought two adjacent apartment

…

and processing and selling sorghum syrup, tempeh, garlic, mustard, horseradish, and honey. They also generate an income by doing administrative work for the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), whose ofŠce is on their property. One Sandhill member offers group process consulting nationwide; another is an organic farm inspector. “We like to keep

…

“right belief ” and doctrine especially affects the contact between non-Christian and Christian communities. Some Christian communities are so uninterested in or distrustful of other intentional communities that they decline being listed in the Communities Directory. While these folks certainly live a community lifestyle, they identify far more strongly with the 67

…

the property. Christian communities are often similar. At Nada Hermitage in Colorado, and many Catholic Worker communities, you exchange work for room and board. Protestant intentional communities are often organized as income-sharing communes. In income-sharing communities you usually pay no joining fee.You either work at a community business, at

…

in communities directories! Print and Internet Resources The ways to Šnd out what communities are out there include Communities Directory, an invaluable reference book about intentional communities in North America and worldwide; the “Communities Seeking Members” classiŠed ads in Communities magazine; and the hundreds of community listings (with links to their websites

…

) on several different online communities directories, including the Online Communities Directory of the Fellowship for Intentional Community: directory.ic.org. Associations of speciŠc kinds of communities — ecovillages, cohousing, and others — also provide online directories of their member communities or search functions for

…

Living in Aotearoa New Zealand, R. Greenaway, et. al., ed., Umbrella Trust, 2004. straw@paradise.net.nz Online Directories • Fellowship for Intentional Community: directory.ic.org • Intentional Communities Database: icdb.org • WikiPedia, Intentional Communities: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/communities • Ecovillage Network of the Americas (ENA): ena.ecovillage.org • Ecovillage Network of Canada: enc.ecovillage.org • Urban

…

. The FIC also publishes the print version of the Communities Directory and Communities magazine; runs Community Bookshelf, a mail-order book service with books on intentional communities; distributes Geoph Kozeny’s two “Visions of Utopia” videos; and hosts regional “Art of Community” conferences around North America. Searching Online At the directory.org

…

description of yourself and what kind of community you’re looking for, which communities looking for new members can read. En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_community, is the intentional communities section of WikiPedia, the largest free, online encyclopedia in the world. It’s written collaboratively by readers online and by experts in their Šeld

…

been my privilege to edit this magazine since 1994.) Communities is the only print publication in North America (as of 2006) that focuses solely on intentional communities of all kinds and organized neighborhoods — “creating community where you live now.” Besides its numerous “Communities Seeking Members” classiŠeds in every issue, Communities magazine has

…

. cohousing.org • Canadian Cohousing Network’s online newsletter, cohousing.ca • The Findhorn Book of Community Living, Bill Metcalf, Findhorn Press, 2004. A great introduction to intentional communities worldwide and, unlike many community books out there, it’s not North-America-o-centric. Leafe Christian, New Society Publishers, 2003. Although I wrote this

…

tours, and sometimes do a little informal consulting. Visitors leave inspired by seeing so many interrelated sustainable systems being developed and by visiting a vibrant intentional community. They feel good about having contributed to a valuable demonstration project. And they feel supported by the conšuence of like-minded people work- ing together

…

.ic.org • The Cohousing Handbook, second edition, Chris and Kelly ScottHanson, New Society Publishers, 2004. newsociety.com or store.ic.org Workshops • Starting and Sustaining Intentional Communities. Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), Occidental, California. Sowing Circle community and OAEC co-founders Dave Henson and Adam Wolpert. oaec.org • Starting Successful Ecovillages and

…

the community, particularly if you’ve lived a fairly mainstream-style life until now. Here are examples of some typical cultural differences found in many intentional communities. Self-revealing emotional honesty. In some community cultures (though usually not in cohousing communities or senior housing co-ops), it’s considered normal and

…

, communication skills, legal structures, and finding and financing land) and on how to research, visit, evaluate, and join a community. Her articles on ecovillages and intentional communities have appeared in publications ranging from Mother Earth News, Communities, and Earthlight magazines to the Encyclopedia of Community. Her work has been cited in the

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

by Diana Leafe Christian  · 1 Jan 2003

Daniel Greenberg, Jeff Clearwater, Rob Sandelin, Luc Reid, Larry Kaplowitz, Elana Kann, Bill Flemming, and Patricia Greene. I am deeply grateful to the Fellowship for Intentional Community for generous permission to excerpt information from ten years of articles in Communities magazine, which helps illustrate community principles in every single chapter of this

…

and alienated, and want something more satisfying. This can mean seeking to create community where they are, or it can mean seeking residential, land-based intentional community. It includes cohousing, shared group households, ecovillages, housing co-ops, environmental activist communities, Christian fellowship communities, rural homesteading communities, and so on. INTRODUCTION Many

…

completed cohousing communities were up and running in North America, and approximately 200 more were in various stages of development. xvii The growing interest in intentional communities, whether ecovillages, cohousing, or other kinds of communities, isn’t just wishful thinking. By 2002 the yearning for community, and individual communities, has been

…

with a developer, raising development financing, getting a construction loan, and securing individual mortgages. (See Chapter 12.) This is an increasingly popular model of intentional community in which people develop, build, and manage their OUR GROUP HAS GATHERED FOR VISITING ESTABLISHED COMMUNITIES Visiting communities can bring a sense of reality to

…

their money back, but not their injured pride or dignity, and certainly not their community dreams. Disgusted and embittered, they never wanted to see another intentional community again. Remembering Things Differently True stories just like this one happen all too often. Some forming communities have made verbal agreements — but … what was

…

Are they progressive, “alternative,” politically or religiously conservative? Would they welcome a group of families or households moving next door? If they heard the term “intentional community,” would they feel apprehensive? Would they assume “hippie commie cult?” What is their lifestyle? Are they into loud parties, drinking, or drugs, and if

…

again. Zoning Issues and Your Property The General Plan and zoning regulations of a county or municipality are aimed at regulating new development, and most intentional communities fall into that category. Therefore, the same regulations designed to limit the excesses of large commercial developers also limit what community founders can do.

…

with information or scare them off with environmental or sustainability jargon. Use the word “community” sparingly if at all, and avoid altogether terms such as “intentional community,” “spiritual,” “sustainable,” “ecospiritual,” or “ecovillage.” It may be far better to simply say you’re a group of families and individuals who want to

…

because they intended to demonstrate workable alternatives to conventional development, including a sustainable, home-grown financing method. Banks don’t often want to loan to intentional community groups, as they’re wary of financing non-standard or alternative development. Banks FINANCING YOUR PROPERTY (LOANS YOU CAN LIVE WITH) evaluate a loan

…

know your property intimately first — “listening to the land” over several seasons to understand its needs. “I have had numerous occasions to work with intentional communities,” observes permaculture designer Ted Butchart.“I have been struck by the subtle but important contribution made by the community members who first pierce through to

…

townhomes, each painted a different brilliant color, Nyland is one of the largest cohousing communities in the United States. Members share a COMMUNITY ASSOCIATIONS AND INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES Community Associations (also known as “common interest community associations” or “master planned communities”) are generic terms for ways people can own shared property together.

…

set up by developers of real estate subdivisions and multifamily developments, and are used by the residents to own and manage their shared property together. Intentional communities can use these forms of property ownership as well. Community associations are required to have a board of directors, regularly elected officers, and annual

…

least 90 percent of its expenses that year must be for the acquisition, construction, management, maintenance, or other operating costs of its physical infrastructure. But intentional communities aren’t just about physical infrastructure. A community, unlike a suburban housing subdivision, might have other sources of income; for example, from a members’

…

We Wish We’d Left Behind Here are how certain habitual “old paradigm,” “dominator culture” behaviors and attitudes are often expressed when transplanted to intentional community. We can begin to dismantle these behaviors in ourselves by first realizing that if we want to live more sustainably and harmoniously in community than

…

of consultants experienced in working with forming community groups. The site also features schedules for upcoming workshops and public talks about forming new ecovillages and intentional communities, information on how a group can schedule a workshop. What follows is a list of some of the best resources from the site. process,

…

half, is useful for founders of non-cohousing communities as well. Website <www.cohousingresources.com> Books and Magazines Communities Directory: A Guide to Intentional Communities and Cooperative Living, Fellowship for Intentional Community (2000). Information on over 600 communities in North America — where they are, what they’re doing, how to contact them, maps, comparison

…

and Ellen Hertzman, Ten Speed Press, Second Edition (1998). The book that introduced cohousing to North America. Website <www.cohousing.com> Communities magazine, Fellowship for Intentional Community. Articles from experienced communitarians on various aspects of community living — raising children in community, growing older in community, conflict and Great Meetings! How to Facilitate

…

net> Self-Counsel Press. Similar to Nolo Press, but for a Canadian readership. Website <www.self-counsel.com> Organizations and Associations Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC). Membership organization serves intentional communities and community seekers in North America with information and networking. Publishes Communities magazine, Visions of Utopia video, the Communities Directory, and more. Website

…

Network. Promotes cohousing communities in Canada through public education and networking. Website <www.cohousing.ca> Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC). Support network for North American intentional communities that value income-sharing, nonviolence, participatory decision making, and ecological practices. Website <www.thefec.org> Community Associations Institute. Provides information and advice to community associations

…

cautionary tales; downloadable Sucessful Ecovillage Assessment Tool; updates on profiled communities; author’s workshop schedule. Website <www.CreatingALifeTogether.org> Community Bookshelf. Mail-order books on intentional community living, ecovillages, cohousing, consensus decision-making, effective meetings, conflict resolution, and sustainable living. Website <www.store.ic.org> Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT is

…

> 244 CREATING A LIFE TOGETHER Videos, Workshops, and Other Resources Visions of Utopia: Experiments in Sustainable Culture [video; 90 min.], Geoph Kozeny, Fellowship for Intentional Community (2002). Profiles seven diverse communities, explores the “glue” that holds communities together, offers candid assessments from community members of what works and what doesn’t

…

<www.oaec.org> Culture’s Edge Workshops at Earthaven. Workshops and community internships in permaculture design, natural building, water catchment, constructed wetlands, and forming new intentional communities or ecovillages. E-mail <culturesedge@earthaven.org> Website <www.earthaven.org> Ecovillage Training Center. Workshops and community apprenticeships in ecovillage design, renewable energy, environmental building

…

building, and organic gardening. Website <www.lostvalley.org> Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. Workshops and community apprenticeships in permaculture design, natural building, and forming landbased intentional communities. Website <www.oaec.org> Sirius Community Educational Programs. Workshops and community apprenticeships in permaculture design, natural building, and organic gardening. Website <www.siriuscommunity.org>

…

This Magazine. Diana leads workshops for forming-community groups and educational centers nationwide and at communities conferences, on the practical steps to create ecovillages and intentional communities, including the land-purchase, zoning, and legal stages of these projects. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina, one of the “successful 10

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

own communities, how many of us could do it? And what would make any of it more robust than the last counter-cultural wave of ‘intentional communities’ which sprang up after the 1960s and failed to create utopia? This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

,” May 10, 1965, https://www.tsra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Restrictions.pdf.     5.  Lawrence Halprin and Bill Platt, “The Sea Ranch as an Intentional Community,” Ridge Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 1983), http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/2149774/71f003a25682dd4abc2c7aa0b93720b6.pdf?1525789191.     6.  Hadley Meares, “From Russia with Love: Fort

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

by David C. Korten  · 1 Jan 2001

return to the often insular and oppressive model of the extended biological family. It is possible, however, to create virtual families within the context of intentional communities — such as co-housing compounds and ecovillages — that offer many of the benefits of the extended biological family, with fewer of the disabilities. Such communities

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer  · 14 Apr 2013  · 351pp  · 93,982 words

the use of creativity-enhancing technologies that facilitate co-sensing, co-creating, and co-using. What does it take? It takes the formation of some intentional communities of creation, like the one that Torvald started with a simple email. To create these communities more often, more intentionally, and also more inclusively, we

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia

by Adrian Shirk  · 15 Mar 2022  · 358pp  · 118,810 words

2: COMMUNE utopianotes: Salt Lake City Temple Grounds Living utopianotes: minutes from a meeting The Bruderhof utopianotes: The Aurora Colony The Ancestors utopianotes: Lost Valley Intentional Community The Big Muddy Ranch utopianotes: St. Jude’s Day Living utopianotes: Adjunct Flophouse The Simple Way utopianotes: Benincasa The Farm utopianotes: earthships The Flesh Failures

…

at a moment of perennial American utopian uptick. A recent New York Times article reports that the number of communities listed in the Foundation for Intentional Community’s directory (an eighty-year-old clearinghouse of U.S. utopian activity) nearly doubled between 2010 and 2016, to approximately 1,200, with a collective

…

thing is you don’t have to do that much digging before you hit another stratum. You’ll often find that, for instance, a permaculture intentional community in rural Oregon bought the land from the Jesus People Shiloh Youth Revival, and that they bought it from some descendants of the Aurora Colony

…

which would consider their history nor their present “utopian” (a pejorative in this case), like Gethsemani Monastery where Thomas Merton lived and the Twin Oaks intentional community in central Virginia, which has been in continuous existence since 1967—but I suppose that is why a groupie’s perspective is useful, in this

…

colleges in America, Antioch College, the alma mater of Coretta Scott King, as well as the place where the term “intentional community” first emerged in the 1940s when the Foundation for Intentional Community—still the single largest organization in the country working to “promote peaceful, cooperative living arrangements”—planted its headquarters. As I read

…

picking up our plates and glasses, with their various tattoos and septum piercings. “I hired them for the day,” Karen said. “They’re from the intentional community down the block.” One of her kids, now twenty-five and living in Brooklyn, was home for the weekend and walked into the party. We

…

, he was all, ‘Yeah, community, man,’ but twenty years later it’s still sort of hard for him.” I could hear the girls from the intentional community jetting around in the kitchen behind the wall, clattering dishes, laughing. When we got back to Woodlawn, I got my ovaries examined by a new

…

with their lost Bruderhof comrades and moved to New York and joined their business together. This couple, the Wilsons, had themselves connected with other Christian intentional communities a few years back, when the Bruderhof actually sent them on such a mission, which happens from time to time: they were given the community

…

this trauma, all of this horror, all of this will toward torture and conquest, coursing through their veins like the River Styx. utopianotes Lost Valley Intentional Community I’m seventeen, and my friend Maggie and I have both graduated from high school early. The week after our commencement ceremony, I get my

…

first full-time job at a paper goods store and feel miserable, and she leaves Portland for three months to study permaculture at an intentional community outside of Eugene called Lost Valley. She shaves her head. I take a Greyhound down to visit her, winding in and out of the old

…

’s parents’ 1986 Volvo to drive across the Willamette River to the wooded land trust behind Lewis and Clark’s campus where a student-led intentional community had developed, and where we sat by fire pits or drum circles or went naked into a cob sauna, and maybe drank a beer. There

…

started to bureaucratize things a bit, and then he died, and then the larger paradigm-changing vision of the community—and the nascent network of intentional community that had formed around it—began to thin out. But between the Whitedeer community, Mark Lakeman and the like, cob builders

…

built to house six thousand, and around gatherings and festivals the population reportedly rose into the tens of thousands. But just a year later, this intentional community met its dramatic end when its two most powerful leaders, the Bhagwan himself and his fearsome spokeswoman, Ma Anand Sheela, were charged variously with immigration

…

that the city was trying to demolish, turned into six friends who bought a condemned house in Kensington for pennies and committed to live in intentional community for five years while they lived into their mission of continuing mutually caring networks in this neighborhood, upon which time they could renegotiate their terms

…

of that position, in the early eighties, when the shared-purse commune model had gone full broke and reorganized itself as the more financially informal intentional community—but Rose didn’t really reflect or expand on Stephen’s work at all, and I didn’t ask. We wandered on foot for a

…

ebbing toward Troy, there’s Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous centered farming cooperative and school, and on the river slope there’s East Brook intentional community. In the central peaks there are two massive Buddhist monasteries, where people retreat for short stays or live year-round in long-term monastic commitments

…

to turn Richards’s proposition into a way of evaluating my own life, my own communities? Are all communities art projects? Are my classrooms an intentional community, where “we approach our meetings with the earnestness and attention we give to other performances” and where we extend ourselves to the world outside our

ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet

by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)  · 30 Jun 2015

, coming down to the ground, meeting the people, welcoming tangible experience and the general messiness and complexity of life. My engagement with the ecovillage and intentional community movement has been inspired by all the above. When I turned 23, I went on a pilgrimage through my home country at a time when

…

less and less as individual phenomena, but increasingly as a part of a larger whole. We call this whole the community of communities. This includes intentional communities and neighbourhood initiatives, traditional village communities, action groups for more democratic and ecological awareness, self-help groups in slums, eco-caravans and initiatives in refugee

…

, ecological and economic dimensions of sustainability. The mandala can be applied to systems on all levels: to the life of an individual, an organisation, an intentional community, traditional village, urban neighbourhood, a region, etc. Over the years, integral or participatory design was clearly recognised as a fifth dimension and placed at the

…

. During this vulnerable time, a local newspaper accused us of being a sect. Such an unfounded accusation can serve as a death sentence for any intentional community. Through the Come Together Network (a community network) we were collaborating with the community ‘ZEGG’, which had experienced a similar, equally unfounded, accusation. A pastor

…

crazy and out of my realm of understanding. Jamaica Returns… I lived in Philadelphia, owned 2 busy restaurants and had no clue about villages or intentional communities. For the next 5 years, I catered for and managed the restaurants and built up a number of development projects in the larger community. All

…

inspired by our ecological systems. The EcoCampus at night. Decision Making Making community decisions, and airing issues publicly is both the challenge and strength of intentional communities. In the beginning everything was discussed in our general assembly. Now more is processed in committees and then resolutions are brought forth for approval. I

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff  · 22 Mar 2022  · 573pp  · 142,376 words

self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” the brief announcement read, adding that as a preliminary to the Catalog, the Truck Store would travel to intentional communities, experimental schools, and design departments during the summer to do market research. In preparing for his new project, Brand went back to the roots of

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

by Kristen R. Ghodsee  · 16 May 2023  · 302pp  · 112,390 words

enthusiasts or opera aficionados, and maybe even multigenerational cohousing for feminist Wonder Woman fans. Today, the Cohousing Association of America (or CohoUS), the Foundation for Intentional Community, the Canadian Cohousing Network, the UK Cohousing Network, the National Union for Cohousing (or Landelijke Vereniging Centraal Wonen) in the Netherlands, the association Kollektivhus NU

…

238 intentional ecovillages, 138 religious or spiritual ecovillages, and forty-nine that are listed as traditional or Indigenous. Since communards prefer the terms “ecovillage” or “intentional community” over the more pejorative term “commune,” because the latter conjures images of “cults” and drugged-out hippies, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many

…

of both Buddhism and Shintoism. In recent years, Chinese millennials can also choose from a small but growing collection of back-to-the-land-type intentional communities as they flee grueling work schedules and burn-out in the country’s urban areas.44 These communes include the “Southern Life Community” and “Another

…

family member or “a person who reasonably relies on the employee for care.”40 On the other end of the spectrum are those living in intentional communities that practice both polyamory and collective child-rearing. Like the Oneida Community in the nineteenth century, the permanent residents of the ecovillage of Tamera in

…

Place,” which doubles as a school. Residents of Tamera educate their children within the community following the curriculum of Portuguese public schools. As in other intentional communities, all adults take responsibility for the care and provisioning of the younger generation, and the older children enjoy nurturing relationships with multiple alloparents. The way

…

rupture with the past is necessary reject the transformative value of a group of people joining together to build a phalanstery or live in an intentional community. Utopians are derided as clueless dreamers at best; as wealthy, self-indulgent, virtue-signalers at worst. This disdainful attitude rears its ugly head in the

…

public morality. Members of the Oneida Community faced charges of adultery and threats that their children would be taken away from them. Today, ecovillages and intentional communities like Tamera are derided as “cults.” Tax lawyers admit that our economy could be destabilized if too many groups decide to live together out of

…

and opportunity to do so, why not shake things up entirely? Start a free store or join an upcycling collective. Uproot and resettle in an intentional community or ecovillage. Explore different forms of cooperative living and working. Adopt a mononym. Try to meet new people way outside of your established circle of

…

-social-isolation. 60 Lucy Sargisson, “Second-Wave Cohousing: A Modern Utopia?” Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (January 2012): 28–56. 61 Website of the Ibsgården intentional community: http://www.ibsgaarden.dk. 62 de Melker and Saltzman, “Cohousing Communities Help Prevent Social Isolation.” 63 Sargisson, “Second-Wave Cohousing.” 64 Dansk Bygningsarv, Fremtidens bofællesskaber

…

in a Changing America,” JURIST, January 31, 2012, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2012/01/edward-sanfilippo-intentional-community/. 37 Website of the Global Ecovillage Network: https://www.ecovillage.org. 38 “Ecovillages,” Foundation for Intentional Community, https://www.ic.org/directory/ecovillages/; Website of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities: https://www.thefec.org/about

…

” (Engels), 79 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 79–80, 107, 167, 209, 245–46 communities, 14, 17, 32, 37, 74 agricultural, 153 intentional, see intentional communities Community Playthings, 157 compadres (co-parents), 222 compersion, 221 Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels), 79 Congress, US, 123, 158–59, 192

…

, 192 1st Indigenous Ecovillage, 160 Fisher, Mark, 240, 246 FitzRoy, Henry, 190 501(d) organizations, 158–60 Folbre, Nancy, 76 Fortunato, Laura, 189 Foundation for Intentional Community, 66 Fourier, Charles, 14, 24, 253 Engels and Marx influenced by, 40, 251 passionate attraction theory of, 8 secular phalanstery envisioned by, 40–42, 41

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

by Nicholas A. Christakis  · 26 Mar 2019

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

by Charles Eisenstein  · 11 Jul 2011  · 448pp  · 142,946 words

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community

by Karen T. Litfin  · 16 Dec 2013  · 322pp  · 89,523 words

Future Sex

by Emily Witt  · 10 Oct 2016  · 197pp  · 64,958 words

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

by Scott Rosenberg  · 2 Jan 2006  · 394pp  · 118,929 words

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez and Monique Tilford  · 31 Aug 1992  · 426pp  · 115,150 words

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World

by Jamie Bartlett  · 12 Jun 2017  · 390pp  · 109,870 words

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist

by Michael Shermer  · 8 Apr 2020  · 677pp  · 121,255 words

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow

by Tim Jackson  · 8 Dec 2016  · 573pp  · 115,489 words

Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then

by David William Plummer  · 14 Sep 2021

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

by Eric Garcia  · 2 Aug 2021  · 398pp  · 96,909 words

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

by Peter Marshall  · 2 Jan 1992  · 1,327pp  · 360,897 words

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

by Benjamin K. Bergen  · 12 Sep 2016  · 364pp  · 102,926 words

EcoVillage at Ithaca Pioneering a Sustainable Culture (2005)

by Liz Walker  · 20 May 2005

Howard Rheingold

by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)  · 26 Apr 2012

Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century

by Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston  · 18 Apr 2016  · 338pp  · 92,465 words

The new village green: living light, living local, living large

by Stephen Morris  · 1 Sep 2007  · 289pp  · 112,697 words

The Simple Living Guide

by Janet Luhrs  · 1 Apr 2014

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky  · 1 May 2017  · 1,261pp  · 294,715 words

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis

by Julie Holland  · 22 Sep 2010  · 694pp  · 197,804 words

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach

by Ashlee Vance  · 8 May 2023  · 558pp  · 175,965 words

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

by William Easterly  · 1 Mar 2006

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton  · 19 Sep 2016  · 1,048pp  · 187,324 words

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live

by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers  · 2 Jan 2010  · 411pp  · 80,925 words

Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project

by Karl Fogel  · 13 Oct 2005

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

by Richard Heinberg  · 1 Jun 2011  · 372pp  · 107,587 words

American Foundations: An Investigative History

by Mark Dowie  · 3 Oct 2009  · 410pp  · 115,666 words

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community

by Chris Scotthanson and Kelly Scotthanson  · 1 Nov 2004  · 305pp  · 73,935 words

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen  · 9 Jan 2018  · 215pp  · 61,435 words

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

by Max Blumenthal  · 27 Nov 2012  · 840pp  · 224,391 words

Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

by Herminia Ibarra  · 17 Oct 2023  · 200pp  · 67,943 words

1939: A People's History

by Frederick Taylor  · 26 Jun 2019  · 535pp  · 144,827 words

Respectable: The Experience of Class

by Lynsey Hanley  · 20 Apr 2016  · 230pp  · 79,229 words

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter

by Susan Pinker  · 30 Sep 2013  · 404pp  · 124,705 words

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs

by John Doerr  · 23 Apr 2018  · 280pp  · 71,268 words

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica

by Nicholas Johnson  · 31 May 2005  · 363pp  · 109,417 words

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic

by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor and David Horsey  · 1 Jan 2001  · 378pp  · 102,966 words

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities

by Howard P. Segal  · 20 May 2012  · 299pp  · 19,560 words

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention

by Simon Baron-Cohen  · 14 Aug 2020

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

by David Lewis-Williams  · 16 Apr 2004

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 28 Jan 2020  · 501pp  · 114,888 words

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

by George Zarkadakis  · 7 Mar 2016  · 405pp  · 117,219 words

Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler  · 1 Jun 1984  · 286pp  · 94,017 words

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey  · 19 May 2025  · 439pp  · 125,379 words

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet  · 21 Mar 2023  · 308pp  · 97,480 words

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

by Aja Raden  · 10 May 2021  · 291pp  · 85,822 words

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife

by Marc Freedman  · 15 Dec 2011  · 233pp  · 64,479 words

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby  · 22 Nov 2013  · 165pp  · 45,397 words

Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune

by Kristin Ross  · 6 Apr 2015  · 175pp  · 52,122 words

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians

by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman  · 21 Mar 2017  · 441pp  · 113,244 words

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein  · 23 Apr 2018  · 282pp  · 81,873 words

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America

by Writers For The 99%  · 17 Dec 2011  · 173pp  · 54,729 words

Pattern Recognition

by William Gibson  · 2 Jan 2003  · 385pp  · 99,985 words

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

by George Packer  · 4 Mar 2014  · 559pp  · 169,094 words

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

by Benjamin Wallace  · 18 Mar 2025  · 431pp  · 116,274 words

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

by Ruth Kinna  · 31 Jul 2019  · 405pp  · 103,723 words

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality

by Jaron Lanier  · 21 Nov 2017  · 480pp  · 123,979 words

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice

by Molly Scott Cato  · 16 Dec 2008

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth

by Chris Smaje  · 14 Aug 2020  · 375pp  · 105,586 words

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (P.S.)

by Pete Jordan  · 1 May 2007  · 372pp  · 96,474 words

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

by Erik Baker  · 13 Jan 2025  · 362pp  · 132,186 words

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

by Jeff Hawkins  · 15 Nov 2021  · 253pp  · 84,238 words

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr  · 14 Jun 2017  · 431pp  · 129,071 words

The Peripheral

by William Gibson  · 23 Oct 2014  · 513pp  · 128,075 words

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us

by Joel Kotkin  · 11 Apr 2016  · 565pp  · 122,605 words

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

by Ross Douthat  · 25 Feb 2020  · 324pp  · 80,217 words

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs

by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips  · 23 Jun 2015  · 210pp  · 56,667 words

Interactive Data Visualization for the Web

by Scott Murray  · 15 Mar 2013  · 186pp  · 50,651 words