Why EVI?

[our book club will be holding its monthly meeting at the EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) next weekend]

A movement developed during “The Sixties” on the basis of a kind of vague, amorphous feeling that “something is wrong.” There were critiques of and chafing at: militarism, inequality, injustice, exploitation, and an unseemly striving for material acquisition. Because the sensibilities were essentially inchoate, the movement went off in many directions: environmentalism, leftism, New Ageism, etc.

Some, recognizing that the social issues that had been focused on during the Sixties were symptoms of deeper underlying problems, were motivated to try to discern the genesis of what started to be referred to as “the modern crisis.” Several of the books we’ve read have reflected that (like: Ishmael, The Sixth Extinction). Conclusions were that the crisis can be attributed to longstanding civilizational trajectories. What had been thought of positively as “growth and development” has, in fact, been destructive — ecologically and socially. It has destroyed ecological habitat and destroyed human community. And as we’ve been damaging nature we’ve, meanwhile, been losing our bearings.

In 1955 Erich Fromm, in his book The Sane Society, said the modern crisis is manifesting in pervasive psychopathology and sociopathology. After millennia of growth, development, and “conquest of nature” we’ve arrived at a state of generalized hypertrophy in regard to urbanization, population, production, consumption, pollution, depletion, etc. The ecovillage movement emerged in response to a sense that we’re heading rapidly toward a state of civilizational exhaustion. It’s based on the idea that, in order to get back to living in a sane way, one of the most important things must be a re-direction toward restoring the healthy human habitat of local community life.