Could this centuries-long splurge possibly end well? Fortunately, the wise ones were betting on it, knowing how great it would feel when forests and seashores began to regenerate, and when people started trusting each other again. Rather than just watch history unfold, they vowed to actively steer it in a more secure, resilient direction. As individuals they were grateful to be alive, and as a movement, they were feeling unstoppable.

One thing was certain: this was a turning point, like no other. Would this adolescent species – far less senior than crocodiles or ants – move quickly enough to avert apocalypse as humongous chunks of glacial ice continued to crack into the ocean? It would not be easy. Remember the do-or-die actions of Bedford Falls neighbors in the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, bringing fistfuls of dollars to the bank just in time to save Bailey Building and Loan? That’s the kind of all-in teamwork it will take to rescue the planet’s natural systems and time-rich cultures: a spontaneous uprising of all the world’s people, committed to restoring the world’s natural and cultural systems, because everything else is small potatoes by comparison.

Really, wasn’t this the most gripping drama since the disappearance of the dinosaurs? (The obvious difference being that there wasn’t a single thing dinosaurs could have done to intercept and destroy an asteroid. Not a lot of cunning, no thumbs.) Woven into this life-and-death tapestry were billions of daily vignettes: honest folks going to work, rethinking household budgets and sticking their necks out in the name of fairness… Sure, there were sometimes bad eggs in power, but millions were earnest, conscious caretakers of the glittering blue marble that had birthed and nurtured them. One was a seasoned molecular biologist steadily on the trail of life’s timeless secrets. For him, the threat of social collapse was just an irrelevant distraction – a fly buzzing around the lab.

Another was a passionate flower gardener and political activist whose sunny thoughts were on  seedlings and  positive political interventions, not the collapse of civilization. No time for that! With their surplus of vitality and courage, these were the kind of clear-headed people who could make the change happen – even as huge as it was – by inventing less stressful, more grounded ways of living. Let the jittery Joneses stampede ahead on their Black Fridays and superhighways, the new cultural pioneers wouldn’t honor that burned-out definition of success, not anymore! Instead, like brilliant jazz musicians, they’d improvise a moderate, experience-rich civilization with instinct as a guide. Instead of deadlines and dying species, they would choose lifelines and living wealth.

David Wann is the author or co-author of many books, articles and TV documentaries about a sustainable “new normal.” These include Affluenza, Simple Prosperity, The New Normal, Superbia, Deep Design, Biologic and others. this essay will be included in an emerging collection tentatively called Rumors of Rain.

The post The Re-humbling of America appeared first on Dave Wann.

(A few excerpts  from my research for Simple Prosperity, Tickling the Bear, and The New Normal)

An ecological footprint is the total acreage of land and sea required to cook up an individual or collective lifestyle, whether simple or extravagant. Not surprisingly, the mainstream American lifestyle requires twenty acres per person – – about twenty football fields of resources from all over the planet, year after year. That’s roughly twice the average Italian or German footprint and seven times the Indian footprint.

Given the finite acreage available on this small but very popular planet, the arithmetic seems to grant each human a theoretical “right” to about 3.7 acres, but it’s not that easy! Those biological and geological resources are unequally distributed, and not insignificantly must also meet the needs of the rest of the world’s species. (By weight, humanity is only 0.01 percent of the life on Earth). Considering inadequate savings rates; high levels of stress and dissatisfaction; corruption at national levels and yes, the apocalyptic decline in natural resilience, it’s obvious our own footprints will soon be shrinking, and many are okay with that. With any luck they’ll adjust to a pre-Pop Tart-era lifestyle when we had less pocket money but arguably higher levels of gladness to be alive.

Here’s the key question: given this scientifically proven prognosis, what joyfully moderate lifestyle can we co-invent (quickly!) to create a less genocidal way of life? Why not artfully ride the horse in the direction it’s going? Won’t other species be eternally grateful for a saner, more evolved crew of humans?

In Radical Simplicity, author and activist Jim Merkel describes a project in which 75 teachers and students spent six weeks researching and demonstrating a three acre-footprint. With a spare three acres as a base of support, a person can consume enough food to remain healthy, but items like wine, beer, cheese, butter, and meat aren’t feasible. They only appear in the slightly larger six-acre footprint. Likewise, air travel and transportation by taxi are not part of the three-acre budget. Telephone use, medicine, medical insurance, small appliances, and computer use are available, but only in small, cooperative proportions.  Still, Merkel observed that participants adapted quickly to a small footprint without much discomfort. “Just like going overseas or moving to a new town, once the culture shock is over, the new life is just the new life,” he says.

Merkel, who has personally experienced all scales of footprint, believes passionately that with our current 20-acre blow-out we’ll destroy the survival zone we and our fellow species evolved with. Surgically lopping off 4/5 of that footprint, he insists, “With careful choices that reduce our mobility needs and housing size, a six-acre option could look like a typical North American lifestyle, only downsized, with less clutter and less waste.”

Related thoughts from Tickling the Bear, How to Stay Safe in the Universe

Marc thought about the average eco-footprint of a Denver resident, whose water was typically imported along with many of the ‘required’ consumer goods. Although Denver had a world-class light rail system, cars were eating up the metro landscape like vultures at a roadkill. Yet there were many opportunities for improvement: if a given Denver resident’s lifestyle was low in meat consumption as well as food processing and packaging – and if much of it came from regional sources, his footprint would begin to fall below average. If air travel was occasional rather than routine, and if this individual converted Colorado sunshine into kilowatts, he might boast a 12-acre footprint, especially in mild (old-fashioned?) weather when furnaces required less gas and houses needed less cooling.

As Marc told his students, Earth has in recent decades been running an ecological deficit since it now takes natural systems one and a half years to regenerate what humanity uses in a year. Simply put, there’s literally more destruction going on than production. Any region that runs a deficit meets its demands by importing from other regions. Typically a footprint debtor cashes out its own ecological assets and also emits more carbon dioxide than local forests, grasslands, and oceans can absorb. Marc shook his head woefully as he walked, wondering how many acres the Trump “household” required. Certainly way more than 100, and if every human lived at that greedy level, humanity would need the resources of at least ten additional Earths. (Sorry, Not Available).

Marc advocated for sustainable redevelopment of towns and cities, based on what a given region could supply, perpetually. Though Denver’s biological capacity should define how many people could live there, Denver was perceived as a lifestyle mecca and its population was projected to double by 2050. Thoughts like these weighed heavily on this well-intentioned citizen, as if he were carrying a 50-pound sack of coal on his back.

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Related Thoughts from Simple Prosperity, The New Normal, and Affluenza

“We live in a time in which every living system is in decline, and the rate of decline is accelerating as our economy grows.” Paul Hawken

Author and change-agent Paul Hawken views our dilemma level-headedly: “Join a diverse group of people in a room—different genders, races, ages, occupations, and levels of education—and ask them to describe a world they want to live in 10 years from now. “Do we want to drive two hours to work? No. Do we want to be healthy? Yes. Do we want to live in places that are safe? Do we want our children to grow up in a world where they are hopeful? Do we want to be able to worship without fear of persecution? Do we want to live in a world where nature is rebounding and not declining? No one disagrees; our vision is the same. What we need to do is identify, together, the design criteria for how we get there.”

Physicist, author and humanist Donnella Meadows asked poignantly, “Since the Earth is finite, and we will have to stop expanding sometime, should we do it before or after nature’s diversity is gone?” Eco-psychologist Terrance O’Connor believes ‘saving the world’ is really about enlightened self-interest. “I act not out of guilt but out of self-love. I break through my denial and see that humankind is facing an absolutely unprecedented crisis. I act not out of obligation or idealism, but because I live in a straw house and I smell smoke.”

Meadows, a co-author of the Club of Rome’s prescient but largely ignored, “The Limits of Growth,” advocated an economy based on meeting needs precisely. After all, if a sustainable culture is built on trust, natural wealth, and fairness, what else do we really need? “People don’t need enormous cars, they need respect,” she wrote. “They don’t need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic equipment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives. People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, and joy.” Her point is that these intrinsic forms of wealth can often be acquired without financial transactions and the various stressors that come with those transactions.

I like the analogy of a backpacker when I think about the emerging American lifestyle. The backpacker doesn’t want a lot of junk in her backpack. She wants only items that are ingeniously designed, like a Whisper Lite cook stove, a warm fleece sweater, a good pair of boots that can go the extra miles, and food that’s full of slow-release energy. The backpacker brings along skills she has learned, the stories she can tell, a well-designed tent, maybe a flute or a great book. On her journey, the world is a splash of light and shadow, with mountain peaks in the distance and bighorn sheep standing guard. If we’re smart, the awakening American lifestyle will deliver clarity, a sense of wonder, and great health, as if life itself was an energizing, mind-bending backpacking trip.

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In a thorough study of twenty-two civilizations throughout history, historian Arnold Toynbee concluded that the most successful among them made graceful transitions (soft landings) from materially-dominated values to spiritual, aesthetic, and artistic values — what he called the path of “progressive simplification.” Essentially, they learned how to meet the most needs with the least amount of resources and effort, developing an ethic that supported and ritualized this approach. They implemented policies that valued cultural traditions; they took care of nature with terraces that minimized erosion from hillside farms; they minimized conflict with other countries and cultures. One example is the Japan culture shift in the 17^th century. Land was in short supply, forest resources were being depleted, and minerals such as gold, silver, and copper were suddenly scarce as well. Japan went from being resource-rich to resource-poor, but its culture adapted by developing a national ethic that centered on moderation and efficiency.

An attachment to the material things in life was seen as demeaning, while the advancement of crafts and human knowledge were seen as lofty goals. The real wealth was more time, relationships, and experiences. Training and education in aesthetics and ritualistic arts flourished, resulting in disciplines like fencing, martial arts, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, literature, art, and skillful use of the abacus. Shoguns established strict policies for reforestation. The three largest cities in Japan had 1500 bookstores among them, and most people had access to basic education, health care, and the necessities of life, further enriching a culture that required very few resources per unit of happiness. (More smiles per hour).

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Social critic John de Graaf refers to current U.S. taxation policies as “you’re on your ownership.” A forty-year trend of income tax rollbacks has decreased quality of life overall in the U.S., reducing levels of trust, family cohesion, literacy, happiness, and pre-school education in tangibly tragic ways.  In contrast, Western European countries invested in their social contracts; their social infrastructure. “Their provision of more public goods like healthcare, education, transportation, and common space, reduced the need and desire of individuals to stressfully maximize their own incomes,” says de Graaf.

Cultural change occurs everywhere: in churches, workplaces, cafes and cyber salons, associations, and discussion groups; in the media, where actors, columnists, and newscasters imprint behavior; in stores, where what we buy often expresses who we are; in the chambers of city councils, state legislatures, and U.S. Congress. But most importantly, cultural changes occur in our minds, and this is where the tide is turning.  (May it turn quickly, like a flock of geese or school of brilliantly colored fish!)

The Shape of an Affordable Economy

* As our collective demand for products falls, so will prices, as we’ve seen repeatedly with gasoline after the recessions hit.

* When we design communities to fit human needs rather than developer or automobile needs, our whole lifestyle requires less money. Public transit will be far less expensive per capita than America’s current, inefficient fleet of cars.

* Protecting and restoring nature delivers free services like water purification, pollination, and recreation that we now pay for. For example, restoring wetlands in New Orleans, along the Mississippi River and elsewhere will potentially save hundreds of billions of dollars by preventing floods.

* Getting rid of packaging, glossy green lawns, and food waste also takes a huge chunk out of the collective cost of our lifestyle. So does advertising; we currently spend $900 per capita to be shelled with unwanted information, which of course is embedded in the cost of products and services. Less consumption means less advertising as well as less debt. And less debt means less interest on the debt.

* Reasonable reductions in meat consumption, air travel, and energy-intensive materials like cement, aluminum, paper, and synthetic chemicals increase personal and national income because producing them uses a lot of expensive energy.

* Green chemistry, which shortens the steps and softens the environmental cost of making chemicals, in turn lowers the cost of everything manufactured.

* Credit unions can lend capital at lower interest rates, and already save borrowers $8 billion a year in interest on loans.

* Preventive health approaches and more empathetic, service-oriented doctors and nurses lower the cost of maintaining our health. Similarly, better industrial design prevents unhealthy pollution.

* Eliminating subsidies that result in the destruction of ecosystems will save the world about $700 billion annually, about a third of that in the U.S. Rather than drawing down aquifers, letting soil erode, clear-cutting forests, and over-fishing the world’s fish species, we will learn how to make best use of each resource, and how to harvest only a sustainable yield.

* In the new economy, recycling will become a ritualized, standard practice, embedded in design and policy, so less costly extraction is required.

* In a world with fewer materialistic goals and priorities, there is less need for crime control, lawsuits, and security systems. An emphasis on social support as well as greater equality nurtures a society that is more trusting, less fearful and has less “status anxiety” – a direct cause of crime.

* When we avoid designing for the “worst case scenario,” we save huge amounts of money. For example, why spend a third more for an office building’s oversized air conditioning system to handle the hottest day of the year? Why not instead let employees work at home on that day?

Source: David Wann, The New Normal, St. Martin’s Press, New York

FLOW

A number of years ago, I found an explanation for the pleasant feelings I often experience when I’m writing, gardening, playing music, or spending time in nature. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try saying that name three times backwards) calls it “flow.” He describes this phenomenon as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Csikszentmihalyi’s research demonstrates that the process of an activity can be more important than the end product. When we are fully in the process, fully focused on a task, we feel alive. The activity becomes its own reward. After a flow experience, we are not only refreshed, but we’ve increased our skills, sensitivity, and self-confidence.

To be genuinely happy, he observes, we need to actively create our experiences and our lives, rather than passively letting media and marketers create it for us. The pathway to greatest happiness goes beyond mindless consuming to the heightened, enlightened realm of mindful challenge, where we are engaged, connected, and alive. Becoming actively engaged in what we’re doing transforms moments of our lives from the routine to the extraordinary.

A friend of mine, Lana Wagner, is in the flow when she’s working in her garden. “I like what it does for my head. Sometimes, when I’m watering a healthy crop, or planting seeds, or cultivating between rows, I’m not thinking about anything at all—a radical switch from my previous life as an overworked bureaucrat.” She came to her senses eight or ten years ago, choosing a pathway to mental clarity in her gardens. “People tell me I should take care of my crops more efficiently—by using store-bought seedlings, toxic fertilizers and pesticides — so I could spend less time out there. But that way of growing disconnects me and diminishes the quality of the garden. The whole point is to spend more time taking care of the plants and less time in front of the TV and at the mall.” She added, “I love the opportunity to take care of one little chunk of the Earth, and to feel like I’m in control of at least one thing in my life.”

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“The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. . . . It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.” Robert Kennedy, 1968

Imagine receiving an annual holiday letter from distant friends, reporting their best year in terms of money spent. It began during the rainy season when the roof sprang leaks and their yard in the East Bay hills started to slide. The many layers of roofing had to be stripped to the rafters before the roof could be reconstructed, and engineers fought to keep the yard from eroding away. Shortly after, Jane suffered a broken leg in a car accident (alas, her fault). A hospital stay, surgery, physical therapy, replacing the car, and a spike in insurance swept away their savings. Then they were robbed and had to replace computers art, and TVs. They also bought a home security system, to keep these new purchases safe – they hoped.

This poor family spent more money than ever and contributed far more to GDP, but were they happier? Not likely, in that year from hell! And what about a nation in which GDP continues to grow and grow? Are its citizens happier? Not necessarily, because if all the dysfunctional aspects of the U.S. economy were subtracted from the Gross Domestic Product — cancer from cigarette smoking; oil spills; forest fires from climate change; deaths from mis-prescribed drugs, and poorly designed products that last only a single use, would economists still be able to say our economy is growing, qualitatively? Probably not.

In contrast to GDP—which lumps all monetary transactions together and calls it macaroni—a measurement of success called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) evaluates the expenses, adding in “invisible” assets such as housework, parenting, and volunteer work, but subtracting “bads” like these:

Cost of crime

Cost of family breakdown

Loss of Leisure Time

Cost of Underemployment

Cost of commuting

Cost of Household Pollution

Cost of Automobile Accidents

Cost of Water Pollution

Cost of Air Pollution

Cost of Noise Pollution

Depletion of Natural Resources

Cost of Climate change

Loss of Old-Growth forest

Wouldn’t the GPI be a far more accurate diagnostic for how we are actually doing than GDP?

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Though a million dollars in lifetime returns might seem far-fetched to some readers, blogger and self-made millionaire Jen Smith can easily substantiate that estimate with transportation savings alone. She told me, “Twenty-two years ago, my husband and I sold one of our cars to pay for our wedding and honeymoon. We intended to replace the sold vehicle eventually — after we built up our credit score so we could get a car loan — but as time went by, we discovered that sharing one car between the two of us was no big deal. They never bought the second car, and for several years she invested the roughly $10,000 saved annually from just having one car (fuel, routine maintenance, tires, insurance, license and registration, loan finance charges and depreciation costs) which in the next twenty- odd years yielded a million dollars.

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 We may assume it’s the iPad we want when really we’re after the social recognition that comes with it. There are more direct ways to connect socially, and to meet other basic needs, too. Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef identifies nine categories of essential needs: subsistence, protection, participation, affection, identity, understanding, creativity, leisure, and freedom. Though it’s a bit painful to think about, the average American works and commutes up to 100,000 hours per lifetime in an attempt to meet these basic needs – constant throughout human history, on all corners of the globe. The household decisions we make should be based on security, safety, meaning, and ways of expressing ourselves rather than on the dusty smell of stuff.

In household spending, identity is near the top of the list. The way we decorate, the way we use space, and the activities we do in our houses all reflect how we want the world to see us. Identity can be a key leverage point in shifting the culture in a more sensible direction. What if we intentionally alter our identities to reflect changing realities in the world? All of a sudden, solar panels – which we once considered ugly – might begin to look quite beautiful. They signify a new way of meeting essential needs like freedom (from mainstream rules of aesthetics); protection (a secure source of energy); participation (in a cultural revolution). Installing solar panels is like hoisting your new identity up a flagpole.

Now that you are expressing different values, the household budget begins to change. There are no bigger-screen TVs on your wish list. Having a new outfit every month seems much less important, so trips to the mall become less frequent. Much of your free time is devoted to remodeling the basement so you can set up a loom, a ping-pong table, and a cool space (literally) to make homemade wine and store produce from the garden.

All these activities bring down your expenses for entertainment. You’re watching life less and living it more.  You invite neighbors over more, which reduces transportation expenses, because you used to travel across town to see friends. Maybe you form a food co-op with some of your neighbors, buying produce directly from a local farmer, who soon becomes a friend himself. You arrange to work a few days a week from home, and convert one end of the living room to a home office, further reducing your transportation expenses without sacrifice or deprivation.

 The point is not to “give up” the good life to save money, but rather to redefine the meaning of “good life.” A musician friend of mine calls it “Waking Up from the American Dream.” Many Europeans woke up long ago and have six weeks of vacation and national healthcare to prove it.  (Hmmm… why do countries like Denmark and France always out-rank the U.S. in happiness polls? For tangible, measurable reasons: the U.S. is at the top in per capita GDP, average house size, obesity, and defense spending; but at the bottom in things like health care expenses, infant mortality, child poverty, murder rate, government corruption, air pollution, water use per capita and paid family sick leave.)      

THREE-STEP PROGRAM FOR NEW WAY OF LIFE

Admit, together, that we have a MAJOR problem.

Seek support, build alliances; invent new technical and social tools

Create a new, less destructive identity, converting shame to pride.

Do humans have the guts to become a joyfully moderate civilization? Of course we do. (The Roman Empire became Italy, the British Empire became the UK). We’ve always loved the idea of rising to the occasion, of being heroes in the last minutes of a game. We’ve revered heroism for many thousand years in our myths and scriptures. We’re ready, in these most critical times, to continue the transition — individually and culturally — from the demand for consumer goods to the demand for a more moderate, humble, and sustainable way of living.

The post WHERE DO THESE MUDDY FOOTPRINTS LEAD? appeared first on Dave Wann.

Too often, we respond to urgent reports about natural decline with a powerless shrug. Since many impacts are embedded in gigantic industrial systems, we don’t feel there’s much we can do. We forget that we collectively create the culture that chooses the technologies and policies. We’re in charge!   In various aspects of our lives, individual actions can help put the brakes on climate change and let nature regenerate.

Internet user: It’s true the digital universe can mesmerize and distract us, but if we choose reliable information sources it also strengthens political participation and informed citizens. In less time than it takes to microwave a dish of potatoes, we can each be one of half a million signers of a climate change petition; plant a tree with an online contribution, or research options for green personal care products.

Meal Planner: A household’s meal planner can be a hero in helping nature bounce back. The average American diet, heavy on the meat (more than 200 pounds a year) requires twice as much water – and three times land area per person – as an equally nutritious vegetarian diet.

Vacationer: Vacations can be great fun for travelers (up to 800 million of us a year) but sometimes not so much fun for nature. Excessive air travel is one of humanity’s most troublesome habits, as is tourism-related development that can destroy world-class natural areas. Taking vacations closer to home is a start, and combining that approach with purpose-driven time off, for example volunteer agritourism is even better.

Employee: Choosing a nature-friendly job can be one of the most satisfying ways to make a difference. Ask Steve Golden, an ex-senior manager with the National Park Service. “Every day I partnered with people from the South Bronx to the wilds of Maine, working to save their rivers, trails, and open spaces. I think I may have had the best job there is.”

Shopper: According to a Natural Marketing Institute survey, green certification labels have a major effect on consumer decisions.  Among the early adopters of green products, 75 percent are more likely to buy products with green labels such as Energy Star, Recycled, USDA Organic, and Fair Trade. And they will pay more for the quality assurance these labels offer: things like efficiency, good stewardship of the land, and monetary support for workers.

Recycler: Individuals don’t recycle, cultures do. Paying by the bag or trashcan for everything we don’t recycle (the Pay as You Throw policy) turns recycling into a consumer sport. If we want to pay less for trash collection, we can generate less trash, which means buying products with packaging we can recycle, and products that are concentrated, repairable, durable, designed to resist fashion swings.

House and landscape maintainer:  Entomologist Douglas Tallamy looks at the protection of nature through the eyes of an insect. Throughout his career he’s observed that native insects don’t thrive on non-native plants and that a land without insects is a land without much “higher” life. He’s reclaimed his own property in Pennsylvania, replacing most alien botanic species with natives. He gets more insects, birds, and mammals and fewer allergies.

Educator and student: In a great little book called Beyond Ecophobia, elementary school teacher David Sobel writes, “Children are disconnected from the world outside their own doors and but virtually connected with endangered animals and ecosystems around the globe through electronic media.” To teach children about birds, he likes to craft wings out of cardboard boxes and let his fledgling students become the birds, build nests, and only then bring out the bird books.

The post To Save Nature, We Need to Get a Life appeared first on Dave Wann.

Renowned physicist and systems thinker, the late Donella Meadows, believed that brand-new paradigms (dominant ways of thinking) can pop up in an instant, as if effortlessly. “There’s nothing physical or expensive about paradigm change,” she wrote. “It can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing. In the space of mastery over paradigms  people throw off addictions, bring down empires and have impacts that last for millennia.”

At this turning point, many know instinctively that the time has come for a civilization-scale shift.  We have worn nature out and ourselves, too trying to comply with mandates for constantly increasing profits, productivity, speed and mobility.  It’s time for a restorative era, rich in nature-friendly, ingenious design and ways of enriching and redirecting our most valuable achievement of all, human culture. It is time for a Renaissance of human values.

 While human core needs have remained much the same over the millennia (self-esteem, security, social support, nutrition…) the way we meet these needs has changed radically in the industrial age.  In a new era – more conscious of living things and less focused on products – our habits and practices will shift once again.

Really, what must change first are the symbols of success. It’s not large, expensive, hard-to-maintain houses we truly want, but large lives that contain enough discretionary time and generosity to share.  In an era less obsessed with status through consumption, it’s not exotic vacations we’ll cherish but rather a contentedness that makes life an adventure no matter where we are. In the near future, there will be less energy-intensive travel and more focus on creating great communities where we want to be rather than flee. Instead of accumulating just monetary wealth, we will accumulate calmness and wellness as our lifestyle becomes less confusing and more affordable.

Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef classifies human needs into nine essential categories, arguing that the most valuable choices are those that meet the most needs at a time:

• Subsistence
• Protection
• Affection
• Understanding
• Participation
• Leisure
• Creation
• Identity
• Freedom

In his view, time spent in an organic garden is a ‘jackpot’ activity because it provides subsistence, leisure, creation, understanding, participation, protection and even affection.

Similarly, a great neighborhood can be more satisfying than an isolated house. It not only provides shelter  but protection, affection, leisure, identity and participation.  This matrix of needs can be applied to just about any decision: Which essential needs is the object or action meeting? Who benefits from this choice?  Is it good for other people and the environment, or just me?

The post Changing the Symbols of Success: the pathway to a new way of living appeared first on Dave Wann.

David Wann: What were your earliest, in-person impressions of cohousing as practiced in Denmark since 1972?

Chuck Durrett: In 1980, when Kate and I went to architectural school in Denmark for a year, the cohousing neighborhoods we visited were part of our overall study of that country’s architecture. But across the board, whenever we walked into one of Denmark’s several hundred cohousing communities, there was such a life there—unlike most suburban or multifamily developments—such a joy and sense of interaction, that we began to comment, “This is unique. This is working.” It made other housing seem more like warehousing. The original Danish term for cohousing, bofaellesskaber, means “living together,” or “living community.” In other words, you have living communities, and then you have, what, dead communities? That is the way it seemed.

When we came back to the United States, got married, and began to think about how to raise a family, we kept asking ourselves, “Why wouldn’t we want to live in a place that feels more like a small town, more like a community? Where neighbors know each other and agree, to some extent, when they move in to cooperate with each other, or at least to give cooperation the benefit of the doubt? It just made sense.”

Wann: What specifically were the Danish residents in living communities doing that seemed unique?

Durrett: I lived near a cohousing community in Denmark. As I walked by every day to catch the train, I noticed that people were standing between the buildings talking to each other, you know, holding a basket of laundry, and what we would normally think would be a quick salutation often grew into a fifteen-minute conversation: “What are you doing this afternoon? I’m thinking about going to the concert in the park,” or “I’m thinking about going to an orchard to pick fruit, do you want to come?”

There were picnic tables between the houses where neighbors could gather. Some would chat for a minute, others would be there for longer, talking, laughing, sometimes eating, engaged. People were coming and going. What struck me in particular was how these households related to each other in what seemed to be a healthy fashion. And then, of course, there was this common building that didn’t look like anybody lived in, but people spent a lot of time there. The lights were on late at night and you could look through the windows and see people talking over a cup of coffee, or playing music together, or sewing together. I could see that these people were doing things in the common building that made sense for them to do in common—things that are more fun, more entertaining, often more economical, more practical to do together.

Then, of course, they also had their own houses, which we also saw people sitting in, reading the newspaper or whatever—it felt like when you walked into a cohousing community, people had a choice between as much community as they wanted or as much privacy as they wanted. And in other housing projects, you could see that people had as much privacy as they wanted, or as much privacy as they wanted—in other words, no choice. And that’s one of the things that has made cohousing translate well into this country. Americans like to have lots of choices.

Kathryn McCamant: It was very evident how advanced the Danes are in the art of housing themselves, with lots of clustered housing based on sociological research about what people need. What we saw there seemed very applicable to the American lifestyle, especially the idea of balance between privacy and community. Privacy is very important, but in America, we’ve come to an extreme point on it, losing community along the way. Sure, you can get in a car and drive to find community, but that gets really old after awhile. The idea of spontaneously finding community just walking out your door, running into neighbors, and being able to go to a movie with them, or sitting down with them and talking about what a tough day you had at work—that’s hard to find these days. People interested in cohousing are trying to find a balance between privacy and community again. Without losing their sense of autonomy, they want to come home to something bigger than an empty house.

Wann: What are some of the other dysfunctional elements of American culture that cohousing can help fix?

Durrett: Just like in Denmark, the demographics in America changed drastically after World War II, especially in the early 1960s, when women started working outside the home. More frequently, families were having fewer children, working longer hours. ­There’s quite an array of demographic changes that began to alienate people, or at least isolate them.

A great number of people in the United States consume to feel satisfied, at some basic level: “Maybe if I just get another sports  car… ” or “Maybe if I just go on another vacation or buy something else, I’ll be happy.” Cohousing reduces the need to consume, both physically and psychologically. Physically, we don’t need a lawnmower for each house when much of our lawn is a common lawn. Each household doesn’t need its own washer and dryer when there’s a laundry room in the common house. Houses can be slightly smaller, and therefore have less stuff in them, when a guest room is available in the common house for everyone’s use. After all, guests don’t all arrive at the same time. At Doyle Street Cohousing, we’ve shared many of the things Americans would typically spend a lot of money on, from cars to magazines to gourmet kitchen equipment.

In cohousing, it begins to become clear that there’s nothing quite like relationships to satisfy basic human needs for identity, belonging, and even accountability. In this regard, cohousing can be psychologically grounding. You feel like, “Now I’m part of a society that makes sense.” If you look at the typical choices, you’re an individual in a 2.3-person household and you are part of a national culture that spends years of its life watching television. You wonder, “What am I really a part of?” You may join clubs and interest groups to help feel a sense of identity, but those people aren’t necessarily there for you day in and day out like cohousing neighbors are. In a world where the extended family tends to be spread all over the country, there’s nothing like having neighbors that you can ask about children’s earaches and other daily dilemmas that you would traditionally look to your family for.

Wann: What were your greatest motivations for getting cohousing started?

Durrett: When we came back from our first trip to Denmark, we were very interested in the values this kind of housing could offer, for ourselves as well as others. I grew up in a small town—so small that I couldn’t get Kate interested in moving back there. So I had to figure out how to get small-town relationships in an urban environment. We always intended to write a book about our observations, and when we became serious about creating a village we would live in, we got busy and wrote it—Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves—partly to see if there were others as interested in it as we were.

McCamant: After our second self-funded, thirteen-month trip to Denmark in 1984-85, we visited about 185 cohousing projects and studied forty-six cohousing projects in depth. We really believed, “Okay, now we know how to go about this.” We came back with 5,000 slides and we were ready to write our cohousing book.

Durrett: We originally meant to stay six months, but it turned out to be a much more complex issue than it looked like on the surface, so we stayed and learned as much as we could, especially about cooperation and the balance between privacy and community. We wanted to bring the idea back in its widest context and let people make conscious choices about how to implement it. After thirteen months, we said to ourselves, “Okay, we have this figured out from the design to the development, to the financial scenarios, to the group process.”

In our book, we discuss how the physical aspects of a neighborhood enhance and reinforce the social aspects. If you believe, like I do, that our second priority as a species (after procreation, which we seem to have mastered) is to build a viable, healthy society, then we have to consciously format a world that allows that to happen. Along the way, maybe we will figure out how to make it as much fun as fulfilling our first responsibilities.

Wann: How specifically do well-designed physical features help create community?

McCamant: The relationship between community building and community buildings is a subject a person could devote a whole lifetime of study to. We strongly believe in the participatory-design process, in which members of a community decide together what their priorities are and what sort of space they’ll live in. It’s important that residents feel a sense of ownership in the design of their neighborhood, and it’s also important that certain principles are carefully considered, because after the honeymoon of building and moving in is over, good design is what will sustain a neighborhood’s sense of community.

If you look around at existing neighborhoods that are not cohousing, you see that we’ve actually designed community right out of our lives. There are very specific reasons why people don’t run into each other and therefore don’t relate. There are no large porches; instead you have large barriers in the form of garage doors. And there’s no place in the typical neighborhood where people can gather and get to know each other.

Cohousing, on the other hand, is designed to make it easy for busy people to transition from the privacy of their own homes into the common areas, where they can interact with their neighbors. The kitchen is typically in the front of the home—you can look out and see your kids in the play area; you can see who’s coming and going­ to pick up their mail or recycle their glass containers; you can holler at a passing neighbor who has a recipe you want.

The area right in front of the house is still your private realm, but it’s directly adjacent to the common area, so it’s a semiprivate space, which the Danes refer to as the soft edge. In many ways it’s analogous to the old-fashioned front porch. By sitting in this space instead of in the back of your house or on a private balcony, you indicate that you’re open to visit. People will stop and join you for coffee or just chat there in front of the house.

Another link from the private realm to the community realm is what we refer to as gathering nodes. Often as simple as a picnic table that five to eight houses share, it might be next to the children’s sandbox. From there you can look up the walkway or street to the common terrace directly in front of the common house, where it’s typical to see people lingering with glasses of wine on a late afternoon before they go up for dinner. On Saturday mornings, somebody brings out coffee and somebody else brings over something from the bakery. By having transition spaces, you create choices. The idea is to make it easy to flow from your kitchen to the common kitchen without giving it a lot of thought.

Durrett: The fundamental responsibility of the architecture is to keep people relating to each other. There’s nothing like a common house as a place to meet in neutral territory and discuss issues of the day, like the school district, the city council or national politics, or child rearing. You can have the kind of great discussions in the common house that are sometimes difficult to have in someone’s private house. It’s hard to tell somebody you think they’re full of it at their house, and you’d be a pretty bad host to do it in your house, so in the common house, you have incredibly genuine conversations that are much deeper, partially because you have this physical venue that is so unique. In our common house, we explore the subtleties of any issue at the ecological level, at the gender level, at the political level, the social-justice level. It makes for a very rich experience, much less of a sound-bite or a bumper-sticker level in which a person says, “I’ve got my opinion and that’s all there is to it.” In cohousing, significant strains of conversations go on for years.

McCamant: But a common house has to feel comfortable and inviting, or people won’t use it.

Durrett: That’s right. Take the common house kitchen, for example. I would say the key factor in the overall success of a kitchen design is its social success. If you’re working in a back room somewhere helping with a common meal, you end up feeling like the slave for the day. But if the kitchen is designed to be open, you can see people come and go. They see you too, and you’re the center of attention, you’re the hero for the day. People come in and say, “How’s it going? Hey, this smells great.” It’s a subtle thing, but it makes you look forward to cooking dinner.

We’ve observed that how you design the spaces between buildings is also a key factor in creating community. In cohousing, which is typically clustered housing, the distance between front doors is typically twenty-five to thirty feet, while the average American house is running about 100 to 110 feet—no wonder Americans feel so estranged at a basic level. When people join the cohousing process, they are used to the 110-feet distance, but after they start to know and get more comfortable with each other, they start to believe that there’s something in it for them. The trust level begins to build, and the closer distances feel right. When you come out of your house on a Monday morning, you can relate to the mood of your neighbor and you can ask your neighbor if he got the report done that’s due today, or if his mother is feeling better after chemotherapy. That is how you stitch a society together.

The design of private spaces is also very important, because if cohousing residents really, really like their homes, they will also be more comfortable outside their homes, interacting with their neighbors. We help groups become communities, and our customers always want their houses to be as energy efficient as possible, with natural lighting, good sound insulation, an open, spacious feeling. The fact they’ve had a say in their homes’ design makes them feel integrated with their physical surroundings, which in turn helps them feel comfortable socially.

Wann: Is it easier for people in cohousing to get know each other because they are working on things together, things that they have in common?

Durrett: The process of designing and operating a cohousing community does give neighbors lots to talk about. Rather than being a stranger to your next-door neighbor, you’re the person who planted a tree with them last weekend and worked on the budget with them last month at the annual budget meeting.

When people ask me what my community has in common as an organizing principle, I can’t tell them it’s spiritual, because we have people of various beliefs. It’s not political, because we have Democrats, Republicans, and others. We have Asians in the community, Caucasians, African Americans,­ so it is not really cultural. But the great thing is, when you have diversity, you learn about others. When you begin to see a face with these points of view, you begin to respect these people as people. What our common denominator comes down to is cooperation. We believe that to the extent that it makes each life better—easier, more fun, more economical—we’ll always give cooperation the benefit of the doubt first. You begin to hear everyone’s point of view, and that’s the first step in building a healthy society.

Wann: Does cohousing teach people to be better citizens in the larger community?

Durrett: Without a doubt. In the process of putting a cohousing community together, you learn how local decisions are made. Out there in the big, bad world, developers, bankers, and bureaucrats are deciding, “We’ll make the boulevard this wide, we’ll put another 200 houses where the oak grove is now.” What impresses me about cohousers is that after their cohousing projects are built, they often become active in their city council and school districts. A couple residents in our community ran for school board, got elected, and are making a big difference for our kids.

Cohousers are not intimidated by decision making. They’re used to working with people, they’re used to ferreting out the issues, and they’re typically much more aware of the issues, because they sit around the common house and ask things like, “What about that new bridge that’s going in? Doesn’t it block a driver’s panoramic view of the city?”

Cohousers often have very positive, creative solutions, because they’re used to forging consensus. Instead of shouting about what they don’t want, they come up with great suggestions about what they do want—suggestions that are in everybody’s best interest. So nationwide, cohousers are becoming city council representatives and planning commissioners, and making very positive changes.

Dave: What about kids? Does cohousing make them better students and better citizens?

McCamant: We hear stories all the time about teachers seeing a difference between cohousing students and their peers. For one thing, whenever a dispute comes up, the cohousing kids are always on the front line of problem solvers because they’ve been exposed to it. They know how to get along with other kids of all ages because that’s what they do in their own neighborhoods.

One of my favorite stories is that when we moved into cohousing, our daughter, Jessie, was one and there was a twelve-year old in the community who treated Jessie like a younger sister. Now, years later, what Michele gave to Jessie as a child, Jessie passes on to the two-year-olds in our community. That’s a really powerful thing to see.

Durrett: Jessie is a good example of another benefit of cohousing. She’s an only child, but in effect, she has eight cousins, because the kids in the neighborhood are so close. Instead of feeling like we had to have a second child to keep Jessie company—a typical reason to have more than one child—we knew that she’d find all the companionship she needed right in the community.

Wann: Can you speculate on the future of cohousing?

McCamant: The future of cohousing seems very bright, because it meets many of the needs that are not currently being met. The first cohousing residents were real pioneers, people who’d never even seen a cohousing community. They set off on a journey believing in an idea without ever sitting in a common house. Now, increasing numbers of people can visit a friend in cohousing and see firsthand how it works. For every resident of cohousing, there are hundreds more who are interested and intrigued. We’ve observed that every time a cohousing community is built in an area, it tends to spawn other communities nearby. The truth is, cohousing is now an American housing option—no book or seminar on American housing would be complete without mentioning it.

We’re actively working with other professionals to refine a streamlined model for developing communities. The exchange of ideas on what’s worked and what hasn’t, on how to make the development process smoother next time, is tremendously exciting. There’s a level of refinement we couldn’t have dreamt of a decade ago. In areas like sustainable building practices, creative use of existing buildings, and resident participation in location selection and design, cohousing will continue to be a model, and we’re excited to be part of this growing movement.

Durrett: The key challenge for Americans will be to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We Americans are hell-bent on making things efficient to the point of gutting the original intention; spaghetti sauce from a jar will never compete with homemade. But with the streamlined approach, we are figuring out how to keep the good and move past the stuff that just takes more time and more money with very little value added. (And when it comes to unnecessary acrimony, even value lost.) The communities today are taking a quarter of the people-hours to create as the early projects did with better value, more sustainable design, and with more time for just being friends.

The post Interview With the American Pioneers of Cohousing, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett appeared first on Dave Wann.

Adapted from material In Reinventing Community, Edited by David Wann

Our neighborhood seems to get better over the years, but you know what? Like most other things, Cohousing isn’t perfect. The process of co-designing a neighborhood involves many, many meetings, some of them emotional. Children begin to role-play going to meetings as a way of life, and outside friends of cohousing participants begin to question sanity. But the dividends begin to accrue as  members start to know and rely on each other, learning how to create and maintain a neighborhood design that will work for all. By the time houses begin to rise up from construction sites, Cohousers are ripe and ready for life in cohousing.

Then of course other challenges—lots of them—pop up like Jack-in-the-box puppets. What happens if the community won’t let your free-range cat roam the neighborhood? What if one of the neighbors is “difficult,” a carrier of stress? What if nobody wants to do the work required for the maintenance of commonly held property? That’s where the curtain of this essay opens—on the walkways, common greens, and in  common house meeting rooms, where people are joking, debating, borrowing tools, setting policy, and trying new recipes—where the neighborhood is alive and interconnected.

It’s a crisp autumn Sunday outside: bright-blue sky, leaves turning, the sound of the high school band playing at the football game across town. A few of us wish we could escape to watch the television for just a few minutes to see how the Broncos are doing against their archrivals, the Raiders. But instead, we sit in our familiar circle of chairs with twenty-five or thirty other neighbors, hashing out a system to ensure the community work gets done. Why do we do it? Why do we swim upstream like 10,000 salmon, when hitching a ride down the mainstream currents of suburban or apartment life might require so much less exertion?

For all appearances, cohousers want their lives to feel secure, stimulating, and productive. We want to feel good about getting out of bed in the morning. It’s that simple—and that complex.  We’ve built and maintained do-it-ourselves communities because we believe there’s much more to a neighborhood than rows of houses and lawns. As a self-selecting band of social and environmental activists, we decided that if the market wouldn’t supply “neighborhoods on purpose,” we’d do it ourselves.  In some cases, groups have spent up to ten years designing and building communities, tired of feeling like strangers on their own streets. We wanted to come home to something more significant than “reality” television. We literally wanted to think outside the boxes of our homes to create neighborhood networks that bring clarity and purpose to our lives—along with uncomplicated fun.

                                     “Sort of Like Being in College”

As any resident of cohousing can tell you, there’s no lack of curiosity and discussion about our compact, living neighborhoods. For some reason, people are not only curious, but sometimes feel uncomfortable about groups of people who want to know and support each other, as if it’s somehow un-American and not… normal. On a nationally aired edition of Dateline, NBC did a pretty good job of explaining the benefits and challenges of living in my neighborhood, Harmony Village, but they couldn’t resist digging into their archives to include footage of 1960s-style communes whose face-painted dropouts were skinny-dipping and passing joints.

I co-wrote a book with Dan Chiras titled “Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods.” Our research revealed a universal hunger for a sense of belonging and connection, maybe best supplied by a friendly, secure neighborhood. What’s currently happening in cohousing, new urbanism, ecovillages, intentional communities, and transit-oriented developments is simply the mainstream rerouting itself, giving itself more options. Try thinking of the word “collaborative” if the word “cooperative” bothers you. When people collaborate, they are often business partners—as are cohousing residents, in a sense. Cohousing residents own their own houses (or rent in private houses), but they also own shares of open space, buildings, and other property that belongs to the community at large. The advantage is that each resident actively participates in the neighborhood. To manage these common interests, cohousing residents collaborate with each other, building bonds of trust in the process.

Still, in my years of experience, cohousing neighborhoods are not dramatically different than conventional neighborhoods—certainly not different enough to be intimidating. They’re simply friendly, sustainable neighborhoods-by-design. Says Judy Baxter of Monterey Cohousing near Minneapolis, “I tell people it’s like a condo complex—though it may be single-family homes, town-homes, apartments, whatever—with a lot more common facilities and the intention to be involved with your neighbors.”  Whenever I show college students my slide show about Cohousing, they comment, “It’s sort of like being in college.” In a way, it is, with the open spaces, certain shared facilities, lifelong learning, and lots of activities going on – except that in college, there’s probably more beer consumed per capita and less organic produce).

In Cohousing, you know who lives six houses down because you eat common meals with them once or more a week, decide how to allocate homeowners’ dues, and gratefully accept a ride from them when your car’s in the shop. As the years go by, you come to trust them because you’ve seen them move through life’s ups and downs. You trust them enough to let them take care of your four-year-old, or to lend them a thousand bucks for a month or two. You listen to what they have to say, even if you don’t agree with them at first, because you’ve learned (the truth hurts) that you’re not always right, especially regarding the greatest good for the whole group.

Because people have different skills and aptitudes, some of your neighbors will be better at carpentry, cooking, or speaking a foreign language than you are—this all makes for great learning opportunities, rather than cause for feeling insecure. Any given neighborhood also includes various personality types: extroverts and introverts; rational thinkers and intuitive thinkers; neatness nuts and those whose priorities are elsewhere. I believe it was our ability to tap into these many styles and skills that made Harmony Village a reality. We had the full mix of personalities, and step-by-step, we grew from a vacant parcel of land into a vibrant, colorful, living neighborhood.

Along the way I learned that a person doesn’t have to be wildly social to live in cohousing. I get questions from readers and podcast listeners about the loss of privacy and individuality. I believe that privacy remains at the level a person chooses, and that individuality actually increases because the support of a group enhances personal growth.  In the neighborhood, when I’m not feeling especially sociable, I just keep walking past a lingering group of chatters with a wave and a smile, often into the community garden. But on the other hand, a person is typically welcome to join most casual conversations in common areas, a luxury and comfort not available in many fenced-off and dog-guarded neighborhoods.

Often, the front side of a cohousing home faces a common courtyard or green, while the back is more private, with a sitting area or small garden. At the Tierra Nueva community in central California, some residents use reversible signs that say “Welcome” on one side and “Go Away” on the other. Everyone there gets the humor and the intent of those signs.

                                           Is Cohousing for You?

For some people, cohousing seems like too much work. The meetings, socializing, and shared-work responsibilities seem like extras that can never fit into lifestyles already jam-packed with appointments, overtime, shopping, and commuting. But for other people, jam-packed lives are the very reason that cohousing is valuable—because it offers an alternative. Sociologist and author Paul Ray, a veteran poll taker and trend watcher, estimates that at least 70 million Americans are “cultural creatives.” Says Ray, “If you hunger for a deep change in your life that moves you in the direction of less stress, more health, lower consumption, more spirituality, more respect for the Earth and the diversity of species, you are a cultural creative.”

”In a survey conducted for the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, Ray and his colleagues documented that 77 percent of Americans want an ecologically more sustainable world, which would include things such as healthy food, less driving, energy-efficient homes, and lifestyles that don’t pollute the environment. Two-thirds of Americans specify a small town or village as the ideal place to live and “at least half of the U.S. population would take a serious look at cohousing, with its clustered housing, common greens, and sense of neighbourliness,” concludes Ray.

                                     The Miracle of Consensus

“How many cohousing residents does it take to clean the bathroom rug in the common house?” asks Sandy Thompson of Heartwood Cohousing in an e-mail. “Let’s see. … Four to decide what needs to be done before it is considered clean. The whole community to decide who should do it (Should we hire someone? Ask for volunteers? Or just assign the job?). Another two or three to make sure the cleaning supplies are on hand. One more to make a chart or check-off sheet to record that it was done. And one to do it!”

Joining the dialog, Diane Margolis of Cambridge Cohousing in Massachusetts calculates a slightly larger effort, adding, “A dozen to discuss whether it’s dirty enough to need cleaning. One to put a notice on the white board to set up a meeting. Fifty to reach consensus on how the rug got dirty and ways to keep it from getting dirty again.”

Diane mentions the “C” word in her note, dredging up a topic—consensus—that is sometimes provides silent curses. In order to reach consensus—in which decisions have the support (or at least lack of opposition) of the whole group—cohousing residents have learned to think collectively under the awesome guidance of facilitators whose abilities often seem superhuman. Among the prerequisites for successful use of consensus are that people be willing to express what they think and feel without fear of reprisal and that participants agree that the good of the group is the most important factor. Not exactly a slam dunk, yet these bionic discussion leaders somehow download, defuse, analyze, and verbally summarize the essential content of each viewpoint and how it interconnects with others. They also suggest ways to sail beyond the choppy waters of A and B to arrive peacefully on the shores of C, a solution that everyone in the group can live with. The process of reaching consensus is a miracle to me, and I sometimes walk out of meetings thinking “Wasn’t it cool the way we came up with a newly-invented way of doing it?”

Just to set the record straight on the number of people needed to clean the bathroom rug, I’d have to add at least one more—a neighborhood expert on environmentally friendly products, because surely the group wouldn’t want to use anything toxic. Not only do cohousers typically choose green-building materials in their homes, even the tools they use in meetings are often carefully evaluated. “White boards don’t use up paper, but most of the wipe-off markers give off really bad vapors,” writes RoseWind resident Lynn Nadeau. “We tried wipe-off markers that were less fume-y, but enough of us are sensitive to what we breathe that white boards just haven’t been an option. We use butcher-paper flip charts, though they are fairly expensive and consume paper—not ideal either…

The Cohousing Template

If there’s an official shorthand description of cohousing, it might be a list of six elements compiled by the American pioneers of cohousing, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, who imported the concept from Denmark in the late 1980s.

1. The participatory process. Residents-to-be participate in the planning and design of the community so it directly responds to their needs.
2. Neighborhood design. The physical design encourages a sense of community as well as maintaining the option for privacy.
3. Private homes supplemented by common facilities. Common facilities are designed for daily use; they are an integral part of the community and typically include a dining area, sitting area, children’s playroom, guest room, as well as garden and other amenities. Each household owns a private residence—complete with kitchen—but also shares extensive common facilities with the larger group.
4. Resident management. After move-in, residents participate in decision making about common facilities, social activities, and financial expenditures related to commonly held property.
5. Nonhierarchical structure and decision making. There are leadership roles, but not leaders. The community is not dependent on any one person, even though there is often a “burning soul” that gets the community off the ground, and another that pulls together the financing, still another that makes sure the group has babysitters for meetings, and another who …
6. The community is not a primary income source for residents. There is no shared community economy. If the community provides residents with their primary income, this is a significant change to the dynamic between neighbors and defines another level of community beyond the scope of cohousing.

Certain features are typically found in a cohousing neighborhood, such as parking at the edges of the neighborhood so the interior remains as living space—an “outdoor room” where neighbors can meet each other casually. The average number of homes is between twenty-five and thirty, because studies have demonstrated that at this scale, neighbors can get to know one another and can share common facilities without conflict. The fact that community members need to take care of common property literally gives them something in common—something to talk about and work together on.

       If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Million People in Cohousing?

It’s easy enough to find out what the goals of cohousing are: Look up some of the mission statements posted on community home pages. At Sunward Cohousing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the big-picture goal is to create a place “where lives are simplified, the Earth is respected, diversity is welcomed, children play together in safety, and living in community with neighbors comes naturally.” At Winslow Cohousing near Seattle, Washington, the aim is to have “a minimal impact on the Earth and create a place in which all residents are equally valued as part of the community.”

Cohousing is a natural training ground for citizenship, both in the neighborhood itself and the world at large. It can also be a model of ecological stewardship. Vashon Cohousing, which is also near Seattle, blends sustainability with enlightened self-interest: “We see the need to coordinate resources and services as a means of reducing expenses, lessening our collective toll on the land, and having greater control of our consumer intake.”

The mission statement of Songaia Cohousing in Bothell, Washington, spells out key social goals:

“We create ways and appropriate spaces for people to give clear communication without fear of rejection. We seek to create an atmosphere of cooperation and willingness to help, especially in times of need. Everyone in the community, from infant to elder, is a lifelong learner as well as a teacher. We all have experiences, ideas, and insights that are worthy of sharing with each other. Each of us brings particular skills, whether in gardening, cooking, computer, construction, or interpersonal skills that are essential to making community happen as we work together.” Can you imagine how many hours it took to draft all these mission statements? First compiling lists, then wordsmithing, polishing, and presenting a draft to the group; adding and deleting phrases; presenting it to the group again … Cohouser David Heimann compares efforts such as these to the labors of the American founders. “As I see it,” he writes, “the Declaration of Independence had to be a cohousing moment. After all, it took about a year to decide on it; the draft was written by committee; and it was adopted by consensus after virtually an infinite number of meetings and discussions.

Sometimes you put many hours into a certain product or decision and it still comes out misshapen and ugly, like an out-of-control mug in a pottery class.  But rather than dwell on the imperfections of group process cohousers are learning to think about the mundane, like laundry: you left a load of clean socks and towels in the common house dryer, and when you came back for them the next day, they were neatly folded and stacked. An anonymous neighbor went the extra mile.

The post THE POWER OF NEIGHBORHOODS Part 2 appeared first on Dave Wann.

There’s not a single neighborhood in the world that’s perfect, but the place my neighbors and I built 26 years ago (with a member architect and a contracted developer) dampens my desire to move away. As a group of six households-to-be, we bought a ten-acre parcel at the edge of Golden, Colorado, and began imagining the kind of place we’d want to live in. In those early days, my old Volvo had a bumper sticker that read “Cohousing: creating a better society one neighborhood at a time.” That’s an ambitious goal, but the world urgently needs social change and neighborhoods of all descriptions are the perfect place to cook it up.

Within the last several decades, Cohousing has become a mini-movement in North America. After being imported from Denmark in the 1990s by architects Chuck Durrett and Katie McCamant, growth has been steady: there are already more than 170 cohousing neighborhoods built, with many more in process. People gravitate toward do-it-ourselves communities because they sense they can be better heard and understood in a place that strives for cooperation and support. They can be neighbors with others who want to help put the pieces of a splintering culture back together. I’m convinced that the reinvention of community bring individual empowerment as well as cooperative action. Why not deliberately create neighborhoods that are safer, friendlier, and healthier? Why shouldn’t the places we live in become the places we love?

Many of Cohousing’s experiments are extremely valuable to a society so shell-shocked by the frantic American lifestyle. In general, residents of cohousing are living actively rather than passively. An underlying intent of cohousing might be seen as the deliberate substitution of real experiences for canned ones. Cohousing at its best provides a structure for meeting needs directly, with strategies like consensus decision-making, participatory design, alternative sources of energy and information; shared resources and designs that reduce each person’s ecological footprint, neighborhood activism in surrounding towns and communities, and collaborative management of neighborhood resources.

Wonderland Development Company in Boulder, Colorado was very active in building Cohousing neighborhoods, which they defined as “Small-scale neighborhoods created with resident participation which provide a balance between personal privacy and life in a close-knit community of neighbors.  Individual homes enjoy convenient access to shared space, including a “common house” with facilities such as a kitchen, dining room, play room for children, workshops, guest rooms, office space, a sitting area and laundry.  Each home is self- sufficient with a complete kitchen, but typically, optional resident-cooked meals in the common house are offered several times a week.”

 That concept sounded pretty good to us. Like many Americans we were feeling a loss of trust, a precipitous decline of nature, and a troubling national story. We each wanted to create something more grounded, supportive, and sensible. We didn’t realize in the early months how challenging the project would be. But looking back, I can easily refer to the work and play as my life’s greatest adventure.

                                      “Are we Crazy?” A Dream Sloowly Becomes Reality

The neighborhood began as a dream of architect Matt Worswick and his wife Linda, in the early 1990s. By the time I joined the group, lots of ideas as well as prospective members had come and gone, but seven core households continued to meet every month, even though we hadn’t yet found the perfect piece of land. The community existed only in our imaginations.  What enabled our eventual success was a diversity of aptitudes: some were big-picture dreamers and others focused expertly on the construction, financial and legal details. Many of the early meetings in members’ living rooms were visioning sessions. We got to know each other with exercises like describing what we each liked to do and imagining how the new neighborhood could accommodate our passions, skills, and physical needs. One member wanted an open field big enough to throw an ultimate Frisbee and another wanted the common house kitchen to be equipped with built-in recycling bins. I couldn’t stop thinking and talking about a garden where we could work together growing healthy food.

At one brainstorming retreat, we imagined how the pieces would fit together: pedestrian walkways, community garden, playgrounds, and various rooms in the future common house. Since we had already agreed the architecture would be southwestern, we imagined the tolling of a mission bell in a Santa Fe-style bell tower. One member excitedly reported that her parents had such a bell on the floor of their barn, and several years later, that imaginary bell had a very real clang. Kids love to pull the long rope to ring it to call neighbors together for meals, meetings, and celebrations.

Cohousing creates a sense of community because residents have many things in common. My neighbor Linda Worswick comments, “You can have all the architects, planners, and engineers to the world try to design the buildings and landscape but how do you engineer the social fabric? It’s the underlying intent and shared experience that does it.”

Creating a social network meets human needs as a precious, intentional by-product. Elder neighbors may look out the door after a snowstorm and discover that a bundled-up neighbor has shoveled and sanded their walks. An emailed request for a ride to the airport reduces stress and saves money. Cooked meals arrive at front doors in support of an ailing neighbor, and kids have an appreciative audience for a puppet show or spontaneous flute recital. Not long ago a friend called to tell me he’d seen a short video about our neighborhood on the evening news. (The news crew had lingered after the filming, we knew that). Maybe the best indicator of cohousing’s hard-won legitimacy was when my mother began telling her bridge and church buddies what was going on at Harmony Village – a hard-won departure from my early years in the community, when she was afraid to ask how many wives I had.

Harmony Design Criteria

Quality Construction/Low Maintenance

Energy Efficiency/Passive Solar Architecture

Affordability

Open, Spacious Feel to Houses

Southwestern Architecture

Public/Private Balance

Marketability, or resale value

Flexibility of functions for Different Spaces

Quality Daylighting

Expandability

Environmentally Responsible Materials

Simplicity

Production Construction

Warmth

Good Views

Landscapes

Looks great

Integrates/unifies physical and social aspects of the community

Provides interface with the natural environment

Affordability

Low maintenance

Environmentally conscious

We listed “production construction” as a criterion because we realized that our members could not afford customized suburban castles or even cottages. However, that term also ruled out houses built from adobe, because they would take too long to build and cost too much. We focused instead on designs and approaches that pushed the envelope of conventional construction. We used energy efficient “low-E” windows, efficient appliances, cellulose insulation made from recycled newspaper, compact fluorescent bulbs, water-conserving plumbing fixtures, non-toxic paints and carpets, tiles made from recycled materials, and other readily available products. We brought the plumbing for solar hot water heating to the roofs, so it would be easy to install panels later.

Before we moved in, we formed a “tiling cooperative” in the spirit of an old-fashioned barn raising to help each other lay floor tiles. Dressed in kneepads and mortar-covered clothing, we were often still up at midnight, washing out a grout bucket.  But we laid thousands of heat-retaining, southwestern tiles before we hung up our trowels. Partly to honor our hard work, a community custom was born in those early days– removing one’s shoes when entering a neighbor’s house or the common house.

With chainsaws in our hands, a small band of future neighbors carried out another cooperative project, thinning the private forest of the project’s superintendent to harvest logs for the rustic front porch pillars. While we were out having fun, we were also saving the project at least $6,000.

We saved the project another $6,000 by doing the landscaping plan in-house, which provided a sense of co-ownership in the living landscape. We formed a landscaping team to design water-conservative turf and flower beds, and specify trees and shrubs that were hardy enough to survive Colorado’s unpredictable weather.

We deliberated for many hours about the design of the pedestrian walkway. We wanted it to look and feel quainter than poured concrete, but building codes required that the materials be able to accommodate fire equipment and other emergency vehicles.  We formed subgroups to research road base and paving alternatives, and finally reached a workable decision: to lay concrete walkways at first but later lay ornamental bricks on top. Six years after that decision, we worked together for 10 or 12 very hot summer weekends to lay 50,000 bricks – literally sweat equity!)

Typically, developers approach a project with a “clean-slate” mentality that leaves few natural features on site, but we took extra care to preserve a row of large cottonwoods along a creek, which reduced air conditioning demand and provided habitat.

In the style of cohousing, we kept cars out of the village center, instead parking them in common parking lots, carports and garages. Although it’s a radical departure from the suburban norm, this has been one of the most pleasant features of all. There’s a sense of calmness in the center of the neighborhood, kind of like a courtyard in a college campus – except, of course, when a soccer game or a wedding reception is in progress. We quickly got used to carrying groceries to the houses, and purchased several durable carts to help that process. We often cross paths with each other walking from the car to the house; spontaneous conversations lead to baby-sitting arrangements or agreements to cook a common meal together the following week. In addition to a very noticeable reduction in car noise and in land required for individual parking, we’ve also improved the air quality in our houses, because we’re not living above or next to vehicle-related fumes.

When guests come from out of town, they can stay in the co-owned guest room in the Common House, which makes better use of the space  in each of our homes. We also have a hot tub on the flat common house roof, a large-screen TV in the basement, and a few rooms for kids. If you want to have a business meeting or a party in the common house, you just schedule it on the calendar. An active email listserve keeps community members up to date with activities, convictions, and aspirations. I still remember the methodical findings of senior citizen and founding member Macon Cowles, who’d spent a lifetime advocating for positive changes. Macon carefully made note of the amount of electricity consumed when his interior lights were not dimmed, consulting the meter on his front porch.  Then he went inside, dimmed the lights that had rheostats on them, and observed a significant difference in un-wasted watts.  After presenting the potential savings in money, fuel and CO2 emissions, Macon urged his neighbors to “Dim it, damn it.”

We may be earnest, often nerdy, but we’re reaching for things the world needs, like trust, hope, and connection, which give us an embedded sense of purpose. It wasn’t the market or a government telling us what to do, we did it ourselves.

Adapted from the Book Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods, By David Wann and Dan Chiras

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What am I doing in this beautiful little town, nestled in a wide Irish-green valley custom-made for grazers? Honestly, I’m on the run. Not from the law but the world itself. I’m on a self-imposed, solitary writing retreat/mind wash. When I first drove into the majestic Wet Mountain Valley a few days ago, filling my lungs with soft, humid air, I observed how slow the cars were moving on Main Street, and I thought, “I can feel good here, immune from pandemics, war, mass shootings, mass distraction and the climate crisis at least until Wednesday when I have to go back.”

I followed Main Street to the edge of town where more than fifteen snow-capped peaks commanded miles of wide-open landscape. In the distance pastures were dotted with ecstatic, tail-swishing cows and horses, and in the park kids ran and parents walked dogs. Everyone seemed grateful that Sangre de Cristo mountains seemed to have our backs. Grander than we are, the mountains mentor us about patience.  We are collectively ill at ease, buried under fake news, climate change, pandemic and bills. The truth is, every one of us – even the dogs – was knocked off-balance in the last few years. Ready or not, there’s hard evidence  that the entire global civilization is shifting. We should be so lucky, right?

I checked into my Airbnb walled-off wing of a house, discovering it was far darker and less well-supplied than the photos had shown. I’d planned to do my own cooking and had brought a large cooler of good ingredients. The idea was to recapture momentum, hunker down, and finally get some work done. But there was no stove, only microwave and hotplate, and very little tableware. As I unpacked, my sense of resolve burned like a trusty little candle, yet I could feel the world trying to blow it out. Remember why you came. Outline three writing projects you want to focus on this summer in addition to working the one-acre garden. Free-flow ideas onto a writing tablet: A lengthy essay about three life-long passions, a science fiction short story about a settlement on the moon, and an essay about saving a million dollars by living a moderate, joyful lifestyle.

I scribble a few ideas, but it’s not exactly Old Faithful, not yet. Maybe I’m tired from the drive. Maybe take a nap, go for a walk. Outside a loud garbage truck beeps and groans. I start feeling hungry. The world is leaking in again, I can feel it. All of a sudden I trip and fall off a cliff of futility. I was the Obsolescent Man, wasn’t I, my best writing behind me? Who was going to publish my work now, fifteen years after the radio interviews and plump royalty checks? Then there’s climate change, dismantling our ecological niche, a cozy location where we’ve thrived for ten thousand years? Were we really going to snooze while our fellow species – our cousins – were making a last, desperate stand, no place to go?

The world delivered another low blow: isn’t everyone a writer these days, a blogger, or poster? Who would take time to tune in my signal in such a noisy way of life?

I called Anne, telling her about the pretty drive, the amazing way it felt in Westcliffe, the steps the town had taken to be certified as a dark sky location where stars and galaxies are at arm’s length. Then I confessed to her that I still felt like a punching bag. Typically buoyant, I was having hard time shaking the blues. She reminded me I was taking a prescription drug that might alter my mood and also that I’d accomplished so much in my life. Maybe I should just go for a refreshing hike in the mountains. I was grateful to have such a level-headed wife, realizing that many are not so lucky. Still I felt wounded, like I could cry if I remembered how. Really, shouldn’t we all dissolve the anger and anxiety we are feeling with a humbling, global, cathartic cry? Shouldn’t we pull the plug on our collective confusion – a sink full of soiled rinse water – and let it all drain out? Admit that the castle we’ve built is just gaudy papier Mache, then pass emergency laws, make instinctual changes in personal behavior, and for some, ask forgiveness for our sins? Isn’t this the right time for taking off our masks, laying down our guns, cancelling our vacations and making “home” a sacred word again?  Isn’t this the right time for new insights about what we value, and for fundamental changes in the way we think?

After a decent night’s sleep I decided my first priority should be this piece you’re now reading. I want you to know that I care and that it hurts sometimes to care, but we have to do it anyway. On the upside, maybe we each are carrying little puzzle pieces of a future that makes far more sense than the present. Maybe we’re acknowledging as a species that we can do the work that needs to be done, to save ourselves. Not in the next election cycle, not after we retire, not after we find a better job or finish our back patio, but now.

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The things I love the best are “unprofessional.” For example, I’m a fanatical gardener who grows produce for 27 neighboring households for the love of it. And I’m an earnest, nerdy singer (?) songwriter who doodles every single morning just because it grounds me and challenges me. After 50 years of messing around, I’m starting to make some progress.

I am a professional essay and book writer who’s apparently been reclassified as amateur, based on recent income. But I can still access the Zone when I’m finally sitting in the silent, static-free coolness of my patiently waiting, slightly dusty desk. Really, isn’t the process as valuable as the product?

Anyway, these amateur songs (links below) go out SPECIFICALLY to my high school and college peers and their peers: proud boomers, travelers, hippies, yuppies, passion masters, and (admit it) GEEZERS, every one. The enclosed Geezer song is still a work in progress but a few others on my Youtube playlist are a little further along. Personally, I think somebody should pay me for The Monkey song or Batman and the Devil, but then they wouldn’t be amateur, so forget that.

Yours in amazement that although it’s all whizzed past us and now our elbows are wrinkled, at least we’ve finally become grown-ups. (Or is that groan-ups?) Cheers!

The Geezer Song (WIP)
https://youtu.be/sSCl6PNJ5Oo

Batman and the Devil (about the climate crisis)

https://youtu.be/P0NZ-Vyv1x8!

Playlist: songs I Kept
https://youtu.be/YB6bjtX_9T8

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Our beloved, beleaguered home planet needs humans who are either smarter or dumber. We’re bumbling somewhere in between, peering at the primordial birth of the universe with ingenious telescopes yet failing to take care of our homes, forests, and fellow species.

Throughout history, eras have come and gone, and ours, clearly, is on the way out. The good news? It will be more satisfying to create a new way of life than suffer the continuing decline of an obsolete one. I propose that as a species we embrace the inevitable: since exponential growth is not possible on a finite planet, let’s meet essential needs directly by restoring nature and enriching global cultures; converting shame and confusion into pride and clarity. This will be a return to who we are in our guts, psyches, hearts and hands. We’re adventurers and risk takers, not meek, obedient consumers. We’re story-tellers, yet look at the shameful story we are telling, of a dystopia in which industrialism devours the planet while we watch. Since the story line foolishly places the natural world inside the economy, apocalypse begins to feel unavoidable. To save the biological niche we share with other species, we first need a healthier vision, not about deadlines and dying species, but lifelines and living wealth.

Are we equipped to make changes this sweeping? Of course. Across all continents and throughout all of history, we’ve shared the same aspirations: Safe places to live, where we have solid connections with people we trust. Less anxiety and more laughter. An abundance of leisure time to be creative. A sense of meaning, and compassion. We all just want to feel alive!

By working on our shared, nature-centered mission we’ll develop brilliant ways of farming, producing power, and sheltering, wisely emulating the strategies of other species. (How exactly does the bee produce honey without harming the flower?) But our first priority is to define the mission, with inspired input from citizens, scientists, and spiritual leaders.

We need to dethrone and discard destructive assumptions and addictions that favor some but crush others. A three-step recovery program can make change feel achievable: 1. Acknowledge that we truly face an urgent, existential crisis; 2. Silence weapons of mass distraction and work together, nothing left to lose; 3. Spontaneously change our collective identity, our way of being, which can happen almost overnight, as did our entry into WWII. New ways of rewarding useful work will redefine the very meaning of “success.” We’ll turn our backs on the cheaters, once again conferring status for generosity, service, and courage rather than money and power. Individually, we’ll create our lives rather than passively letting them be created. Collectively, we’ll guide our inventions ethically, rather than following lifeless footsteps. With an unstoppable civic momentum as at Normandy Beach we’ll strategically calm an industrial metabolism that has scrambled the planetary flows and natural cycles that enable life on Earth.

There are many examples of cultures that have gone down this last-chance trail. Take the Japanese Tokugawa period (17th-19th centuries), when resources like wood, clean water, and various minerals were in short supply. The shogun rulers acknowledged that their nation was in crisis and, because of resource constraints, the Japanese culture adapted a new ethic of moderation, respect, and efficiency. An attachment to material things was seen as demeaning, while the advancement of crafts, rituals, and knowledge were lauded. Strict policies for reforesting and protecting water supplies were established. Improvements in social infrastructure yielded truth-based education and nature-based healthcare. Rituals and disciplines like fencing, martial arts, literature, and the tea ceremony were elevated as a new form of wealth – one which didn’t rely on the markets. This enriched culture agreed that it wasn’t large, hard-to-maintain houses they wanted, but large lives rich in discretionary time. Simply put, they changed their identity. In fact, the Japanese retain cultural wisdom born in that era. The practice of mottainai expresses disdain for anything wasted, while bonsai is an expression of respect for the beauty of nature.

Western cultures can easily follow a similar path. More than a third of the American population can be labelled “cultural creatives” who value the luxuries of time, nature and relationships more than monetary symbols of success. If we follow their grounded lead we’ll stop producing more than we need to be happy. “Compare and despair” will be socially banished while cooperation, empathy, and ecological design become defining characteristics of a newborn civilization.

Think of a backpacker on a forest trail alive with bird calls and a thundering waterfall. She doesn’t want excess junk in her backpack, just well designed, lightweight items like binoculars, flute, and cook stove. The value and wealth she seeks is in the experience itself. She’s not doing without, but deliberatively doing within. If we simply change the symbols of our lives this ageless way of being will deliver a sense of wonder, a gladness to be alive, as if life itself was a mind-opening, spirit-lifting hike in the mountains.

David Wann has authored or coauthored ten books about sustainable designs and lifestyles including the industry best-seller Affluenza, and has produced five award-winning documentaries on similar themes. He is a founder of a Cohousing neighborhood where he’s lived for 26 years, growing organic produce for 27 households.

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