What Is an “Ecovillage?

The term first came into use by Robert Gilman, in Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities (1991), when he offered the following definition:

“A human-scale, full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.”

Ecovillages typically build on various combinations of three dimensions: social, ecological, and spiritual. These dimensions also describe the reasons why people most often are attracted to ecovillage living, although one of these dimensions may predominate more than others in some ecovillage projects and be completely absent in others.

In 1998, at a sustainability and education conference held in Denmark, attendees affirmed that a community is an ecovillage if it specifies an ecovillage mission, such as in its organizational documents, community agreements, or membership guidelines, and makes progress in that direction.

Standards and criteria must be established that allow the EcoVillage model to be adopted and legally permitted in developed countries and the Lammas EcoVillage in Wales has set a precedent that this community network is committed to building upon.

There may be, among more than 15,000 identified sustainable community experiments, no single example of an “ecovillage” in the sense of a full-featured human community untainted by earlier technologies, or polluting material flows, or which hasn’t engaged in theft of our future natural heritage to some extent. The discrepancy between the dream and the reality of sustainability is an important ongoing topic for all ecovillage activists to explore.

It is the mission of this network to do that exploration and establish solid standards and criteria that is solid in its basic infrastructural requirements and simple in it sociological tenets.