If Liz were Queen

The Los Angeles Eco-Village shown in the video below is only two miles from downtown LA. It functions as a sustainable community within the city.

The L.A. Eco-Village Demonstration is part of an international network of sustainable neighborhood groups which seek to model healthier ways of living based on environmental sustainability and social and economic justice.  If you are interested in ecovillages,  you can search for them at ecovillage.org.

According to my research on the Global Eco Village Network, there are 95 eco villages, such as the one in LA, in the USA.  There are rural and urban eco-villages. The one in LA is, of course, an example of an urban eco-village.

UFA - Fabrik, located in the heart of Berlin is one of the oldest original alternative communities in Germany.  ufaFabrik now features a theater, a dance studio, natural food store, a bakery ,a cafe, a guesthouse,  the largest solar installation in Berlin, 4,000 square meters of green roofs, rainwater harvesting systems, smart lighting that turns itself off when no one’s around, bike racks and foot paths, a 90% solid-waste composting and recycling rate, extensive gardens, a children’s farm (with horses, pigs, chickens and geese), a community center offering a variety of classes and programs, a Free School, even a circus.

This eco-village has been in existence for 30 years. While, as Alex Steffen once pointed out in a piece that he did on ufaFabrik,  it is easy for some of us, including the Queen, to poke fun at these people as “hippies”, we should refrain and remember that these people through years of hard work and sweat equity have hammered out some models and even the rudiments of technology that is being applied world wide today. They represent, in part, what Jean Huston once referred to as “the possible human.” In fact, she even wrote a book by that title.

We only use a fraction of our capabilities as humans, and I think that people who live in eco-villages have stretched their potential a bit further than most of us and deserve our respect and thank you.  Instead of merely experimenting, they became the experiment.  They are living the intentional life.