Big change in consciousness to consider that we’ve lost more than we’ve gained
A cultural turn toward enlightened (green) consciousness will historically be dated to the period when Earth Day started to become celebrated. It’s a bigger deal than is generally acknowledged.
There were antecedents with rogue thinkers like Thoreau and Borsodi, but a significant new cultural current only took hold two generations ago as a part of the Sixties counterculture. Slowly, since then, a deep questioning of the idea of progress has started to foster a realization that we’ve lost more than we’ve gained from the civilizational developmental process that has given us gadgets and stuff but decimated stability and community.
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Toward accelerating the greening movement we should highlight the tiny fissures in the edifice of hypermodernity that are popping up in all kinds of ways: transition towns, sharing networks, ecovillages, permaculture groups, etc.
Cohousing as a communitarian alternative to atomized home ownership . . .
Maria Claver, director of California State University Long Beach’s Gerontology program, teaches a course called Women & Aging: Lessons from the Golden Girls. “More than any other lifestyle factor (including smoking, diet and exercise) we know that having social support is the most important predictor of morbidity (or illness) and mortality,” she notes. A quarter of older Americans live alone, she says, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness.
The first part of that article is about co-living, which does address the issue of loneliness but does not result in the establishment of permanent eco-communitarian residential alternatives. The second part of the article is about cohousing.
