A paradigm is a pattern, which is repeated, like a fractal, from the macro to the micro. The normalized paradigm defines the mainstream culture. Currently, our cultural paradigm imposes separation: separation between individuals, separation between home and work, humans and nature, head and heart. This paradigm presses down across our shared cultural space, replicating itself in the details of our lives.
As a new, harmonious paradigm infiltrates our daily life patterns, this new paradigm will reflect itself outward, replacing the old.
It's worth a try, anyway. We have nothing to lose by radically changing the current course of human momentum. The time is now to create a new human society that remembers and reconnects to our roots in the village. By reconfiguring building, planning, development, community, and land and resource use in our society today, we will identify and implement patterns of reconnection, which lead us back to the village.
We can reconnect work with home by changing zoning laws to allow small businesses, shops, commercial kitchens, etc. to exist in and around homes. Organizing ourselves as communities, we will share common buildings for workspace and gatherings, as many co-housing developments do. Maximizing and preserving affordability frees people to develop their potential to make their living through farming, cottage industries, other small businesses, the arts, music, bioneering careers in permaculture and earth restoration, and community-based services and organizations.
When we reconnect home and work, we reconnect families. Parents are able to spend time with their children and design their own lives to encourage togetherness. It follows that families become connected with other families through their children, allowing for shared childcare and the strengthening of community relationships. Where schooling is provided locally, within the village, parents and elders have the opportunity to become directly involved with children's education and share the deep untapped knowledge available within our communities, demonstrating community self-reliance and connectedness within the learning environment.
Traditionally people tend to cluster dwellings in a pleasant, enriching, productive environment. We can similarly recreate community connections, localizing activity and providing homes for young and old, families, holistic health care providers, home health patients, handicapped people, students, teachers, alternative technology inventors, artists and musicians. If homes are grouped around plazas and gardens, and residents are not commuting to work, but making their work in the village, and if services and goods are available within walking distance from homes, there is potential for spontaneous encounters. Thus, relationships develop, and culture grows. I imagine that villagers will be fulfilled and content, watching the butterflies while wheeling their garden carts, so relationships and culture will grow from seeds of positivity. Indoor common space further strengthens community by providing for gatherings, meetings, music, art and play.
Community gardens and small farms, integrated into the village-scape, connect villagers to their food source and the cycles of life. Water is recycled, waste is composted, and, to a greater and greater extent, cycles are closed.
Use of natural and local building materials, such as rock, clay, and poles from forest thinning, connects us to the earth and to the local area. Orientation toward the sun for passive solar heating connects us to the movements of the earth.
How do we pull away from the current paradigm of separation and move into a sustainable future? In Mendocino County, many consider the General Plan revision process to be an opportunity to institutionalize values, programs, and incentives that favor economically and ecologically affordable housing. The goal is not to initiate communes or permaculture homesteads in the hills, but to utilize the knowledge resulting from many such experiments over the past four decades and infuse the mainstream grid culture with archetypal village consciousness.
In Mendocino County, as elsewhere, the affordable housing crisis looms large. State law demands revision of the Housing Element of the General Plan by the end of this year. This rural county is required to produce almost 1,400 units of affordable housing over the next five years. Here, affordable housing for low and very-low income people by definition cannot exceed $56,000 and $32,000 respectively. Who will build these homes? For-profit developers have little incentive to create homes for low-income people. Even when they are built, low-income housing developments tend to be grim. They cannot be built cheaply enough to meet the parameters of affordability.
We would be better off designing and building our own homes and communities using natural building techniques to keep the cost of materials down, and community work parties, a sweat equity owner-builder program, and educational workshops and classes to keep labor costs down. Car-free space within villages will eliminate the significant costs of building and maintaining roads. Composting toilets and new standards to permit construction of greywater and bioremediation systems for water recycling will allow people to make economic use of ecological resources while negating the need for prohibitively expensive septic systems.
A number of factors are essential to achieving desired results. Developments will be built on Community Land Trusts (CLT)s. If they are on private land, landowners will be bound by legal covenants to honor sweat equity agreements and preserve affordability. Exceptions to zoning laws could be made to allow for subdivision of land for purchase by a CLT when the site is appropriate. Locating villages close to established roads and services or within existing population centers will encourage community and local economy, ease expenses of consumption, and relieve stress to county infrastructure. Consideration of county resources becomes increasingly relevant as funding for counties and social services dries up and blows away in the winds of war. Counties will be increasingly dependent upon internal resources to meet the needs of the community. The village model provides for a holistic means to meet these basic human needs.
A group of people is working to nurture a new natural building and permaculture economy through implementation of building projects and community education and outreach, including a directory for listing natural building and permaculture professionals, job openings, community calendar, classified advertisements and artistic and cultural expressions.
Energy has built around this campaign due partly to two well-attended community events this past winter and spring. They featured speakers, music, poetry and educational displays, with emphasis on local, accessible, earth-friendly solutions to the housing, economics and community-planning puzzle.
A newly formed Citizens' Action Committee, named Affordable and Appropriate Housing Advocates (AAHA), will focus on the General Plan revision process. AAHA may draft new General Plan language that is informed by ongoing advances in the fields of natural building and permaculture. Members of the group are working toward implementing these "new" ideas by establishing "affordability demonstration projects." These projects will provide proving ground for practical applications of concepts and language to be incorporated into the General Plan.
A Bright 21st Living University is forming to gather children and young people in a yet to be constructed permaculture village. The group will sow the seeds for a sustainable future while exploring living skills and wisdom that will be necessary to reach that future.
Potential exists to expand the educational aspect of the campaign to the greater region, with the community as the classroom. Workshops and classes held at Mendocino County homes and gardens will benefit the land and people through applied learning projects, creating improvements in quality of life and establishing efficient, self-reliant and affordable systems that relieve dependency on centralized power grids and government services, and increase emergency preparedness. This educational infrastructure will form the context for designing, planning, building and constructing affordability demonstration projects (villages) and will attract experienced and knowledgeable members of the natural building and permaculture community to participate in this creative process.
Our implementation strategy includes creation of a nomadic, or temporary, village to allow a presence on site during planning and construction of a permanent village. Residents and village builders will trace the patterns of movement and habitation on the land, and will gain the opportunity to observe the land and change the layout if necessary as the village evolves. The nomadic village will also be a forum for educational and cultural happenings. Quick to set up and break down, it may be used in urban settings for special events to offer an experiential taste of "village." Developing, or discovering, designs for inexpensive, simple, safe and comfortable temporary structures made with local and recycled materials may help to provide for the needs of people who become homeless and cannot afford conventional shelter.
As we proceed, we must think ahead to a time when we will be in a position to help other communities establish harmonious patterns of habitation. The goal must be to develop models and templates to spread the wealth that comes with economic and ecological affordability and the reconnection of community. Evolution should be well documented. The project should self-perpetuate indefinitely so that eco-village living becomes not the privilege of the few, but the standard for mainstream development.
Those who have experience, knowledge and ideas about how to meet human needs while improving the health of the land, and therefore the long-term availability of resources, have a responsibility to use this knowledge and insight to create inspirational and educational examples. Our county will grow, but what will growth look like? At this point, to say that we can no longer squander precious resources, such as water, air, topsoil and forests is an obvious statement. Cut-and-run policies practiced by extractive industries leave a wake of destruction that challenges the resources and imaginations of rural county governments. Conventional development brings globalization at the expense of local self-reliance. Forests are plundered, fish are nearly gone, and farms lie fallow under asphalt. What is our future? What is the future of our children and grandchildren?
The only affordable option is to introduce new patterns and relationships founded on life-affirming connections. Where now there are competition and greed, we must substitute individual responsibility, mutual aid, and cooperation. We must recognize and accept the formidable challenges we face today and evolve a new culture that reflects back to our ancient ways as tribal village dwellers. We are the ones we've been waiting for.
To learn more about our work in Mendocino County, to get involved, or to share ideas, insights or resources, please contact us at lifepatterns@care2.com.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2003
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited