sometimes Red and Green visions will clash

Social change idealism was flourishing during the mid-1930s because the system had broken down to such an extent that alternatives were readily conceived and considered.

Some of the alternatives were Red: industrial unionism and statist projects like the TVA. The former sometimes clashed with the proto-Green visions of decentralists like Lewis Mumford and Benjamin Brown. When Brown tried to establish a kibbutz-like cooperative community at Jersey Homesteads in Monmouth County, NJ, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in New York opposed the project, arguing that the community-based paradigm would cause industrial unions to lose their power over wages. Similarly, thirty years later, adherents of community control in NYC were opposed by the United Federation of Teachers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_teachers%27_strike_of_1968

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Jersey Homesteads was renamed “Roosevelt” after FDR died in 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt,_New_Jersey

It was a communitarian experiment. The size was good (300 households, 800 people). There was enough critical mass to support a school.

It could still one day become an ecovillage. You’d want to have neighborhood-based Common Houses. There would need to be more in the way of farming and local commerce.

The original experiment failed because it was isolated. It could succeed if it was embedded within a regional economy. That’s the Green direction … but we can see, of course, that the transition in that direction is going to take time. When the current system breaks down the next wave of visionaries should propose a constellation of five or ten interrelated ecovillage communities in western Monmouth County with Roosevelt as the hub.