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Why an eco-community movement? There is a village. The villagers farm together, produce tofu, make money by selling hammocks which they have woven and share products of the village together although they don’t get paid a salary. They work 6-7 hours a day. For longer hours, they talk with each other, debate, sing, dance, write poems and draw paintings. Sometimes they take time for meditation in a forest. There is no one who presses them to work more quickly and they enjoy their life slowly all the time. They don’t send their children to schools, but they educate their children through homeschooling. In addition, they prepare for their meals in turns, and because they take care of children together, women and men are totally equal in terms of house chores and raising children. Also, the village is always open to sexual minority such as women, gays, lesbians, transgenders and bi-sexuals, and they are not discriminated against due to their choices. As far as not disturbing others physically and mentally, diversity is respected. Buildings in the village use sun rays for their power source, and they recycle through thorough separate collection of garbage. Considering the environmental impact, they restrain from painting houses. Most of them are vegans and they eat vegetables they grow themselves.
This is the description about successful eco-communities written by Mr. Yu Jeong-gil, the environmental activist in the Buddhist field; including Twin Oaks in the US. Community which is a volunteering organization where people who share the same intention gather and share housing, work, play, art and education. The history of community is so long and its types vary. As for religious communities, we can exemplify Buddhist monk’s community in BC 6, the early church community of Christianity, and in 19 century, the Puritans moved to America to form their own community. Also, communists or anarchists once formed co-op and community society as a new model of society. In 1960’s ~ 70’s, those who committed themselves to anti-war and counterculture movements built a community against the culture of the existent generation.
The eco-community was suggested as an alternative for environmental destruction and inhumane city civilization in 20th century; we can say the mainstream of current community movement. It is not that eco-communities pursue changes only in the environmental aspect. Most of eco-communities are pursuing overall change throughout all areas of our lives such as human relationship, occupation, arts, play, education and spirituality. To change the current society, which is worn out by materialism, eco-community activists don’t focus on changing social structure as previous social activists have been doing because they know it is not enough only to change structural change. As we can know from the collapse of communist countries such as the Soviet Union, without awakening and transformation of individual, the structural changes of a society are likely to collapse.
Instead, eco-community activists pursue the “model strategy.” It is “We first have to show a new model of life to people.” That is, they have to show people that it is possible to deeply understand and communicate with one another, and that people can live abundant life even though they don’t compete in extreme tension, people can live a happy life enjoying benefits and blessing from nature even though they don’t indulge in shopping for brand-new products and people can live a life where they can enjoy the delight from growth of their consciousness while meditating on themselves in the middle of Heaven and the Universe. In doing so, they try to inspire the mind that “I also want to live like them in the community.” from people in the world.
They want to pass on hope, inspiration and vision to so many ordinary people who don’t recognize what is wrong in their lives even though they are living a “common life without specific delight or sorrow” and work in the state of battle all day long to sustain such conditions. People who had such impression would feel like living a different way of life they have had up until then. They will finally realize that there has been something wrong in their lives. They will develop their hope to live like the model. In the end, they might join the community or they will try to build their own community. Eco-community activists believe that like a butterfly in the Butterfly Effect, hope from a small community can change the world.
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