on incrementalism

For our ecovillage project to be financially viable the homes will have to be sold at or near current market-rate prices. That’s well over $300K! Larger houses in the community will be over $400K.

We hear a critique: “$400K is affluenza-scale and surely doesn’t represent living lightly.”

The critique is understandable. But the project should not be disdained. It should be appreciated that, as much as we’d like to, we can’t leap “from here to there.”

Maybe we can manage to leap pretty far individually, but when it comes to social endeavors we need to think in terms of incrementalism. There are current technological-institutional realities and there are common mindsets. There is that famous Overton Window. An ecovillage project should endeavor to move in the direction of living more lightly in whatever ways possible … without risking financial unviability.

Move the standard a notch or two with each successive project and each successive generation. Hold out a vision of full “ecovillage-ness” … of ultimate true ecological and social sustainability. But don’t let an insistence upon the perfect prevent an immediate realization of a better-though-far-from-ideal implementation.