Many looking for a commune want one that is sustainable, which they describe as growing your own food, making your electricity and goods, etc. However, history has shown us those communes are not sustainable. They fail 95% of the time because the group can't (or won't) meet it's own needs. They often don't have the knowledge or money to invest in the ten's of thousands of dollars worth of equipment they need to actually do any of those things, like grow crops on a large scale, build buildings, or install solar tech. Clearly, a long-term commune must be a compromise between an unrealistic ideal and modern reality. It seems to me that so many people are closed-minded when it comes to anything but the stereotypical ideal commune. And yet most never go to one. I think it's because they know it means lots of work, living in squalor, no running water, etc. The ones that do go seem to only stay a few years before they get back to "the real world" and wane nostalgic. Why aren't more people looking for a commune that is actually sustainable? One that is structured to last forever, instead of die off in a couple years. With a rudimentary understanding of finances or economics, it's not difficult to figure out whether a commune is going to have a net drain or surplus of resources. A net drain will always lead to failure. Or are people not really serious and just going through a phase? It seems to me people are more interested in fantasizing about a myth, which they may get to live for a few months, instead of focusing on long-lasting, sustainable change.
Most communes die imo, because some people do all the work while others laze about. There are two that I know of that have been successful. One requires each person to work 40 hours a week. The other was a anarchist commune where each person was given 2.5 acres of land and were told to voluntarily give what they could to the community.
Thanks, MonkeyBoy... that sounds like what I have heard too. Surprised to hear that people were OK with the 40/week... I've run some numbers and think it can be done on ~20 hours/week with some compromises.
They got free healthcare. I think 20 might work. It's amazing how little it takes to live especially when you're sharing things with others.
The problem that I see is that even supposedly sustainably minded people want to have huge places to live and want to waste a ton of power. Monocrop ag does use a lot of energy, because it's a dumb way to go about things. The same area planted permaculture food forest style could feed 4 times as many people and require a tenth of the work and energy once it established. Masanobu Fukuoka, Joel Salatin, and many others have developed awesome methods for growing surpluses of food with very little land, resources, and effort. If people were serious about living sustainably, the first thing they'd do is learn how to thrive without consuming so much. 800 sq ft is huge for a living space, yet considered small in most eco communities. My 48sq ft house is totally adequate for me and I'm not a small guy. PV solar is great but it's expensive and making the panels, electronics, and batteries is hard on the environment. Instead of commercially available photovoltaic systems, why not use a lens to concentrate the sun, water to turn into steam to drive a generator, and gravity to collect and recycle the water? The only things needed for this system are two ponds with an elevation change, and about a thousand bucks worth of materials and a person could have water storage, water filtration, electricity, irrigation, and an aquaponics environment. You can't pull that off with photovoltaics! What I'm getting at is that there are sustainable ways to exist that could be implemented today for very little money...if, and only if, people are willing to get realistic about their actual space and energy needs. Not just in sustainability or farming, but in pretty much every other human endeavor, if you're having to spend a lot of money, you're probably doing something wrong. We've evolved with nature and it can provide everything we really need if we just let it.
your alternative to solar panels sounds complicated, but everything else is spot on. i live on a sailboat with 40'X10' space roughly.... we have a water tank we have to fill about every week and a half, a freshwater head toilet that we pump weekly, and running water in the kitchen for washing dishes. as for our solar panels, we had one that we used when we lived in the van, and two came with the boat, so altogether we use 3 with 2 battery banks.... thinking we could use either another solar panel, a generator, or more batteries.
The solar setup is way easier than it sounds, especially when you take into account that you're also setting up several other essential systems in the process. Finding or creating the right location is the tricky part. I set up a system like it before that actually used a tank up high and a stream down below. It worked really well, and is still working, totally maintenance free years later. Power gets made, and plants get watered as long as there's water in the stream and sun in the sky. This type of system would need to be setup on private land. My trike will have 600 watts of pv solar embedded into the top. As for your power needs. If you want to post up a new thread in the appropriate section and post what equipment you have and what you run and how often, I'd be happy to help optimize your system. It's a delicate balance, ie, too much battery's a waste if you don't have enough panel, more panels might require a bigger charge controller, etc. Also, if you get enough solar on there, you could get an atmospheric water generator, or even setup a small solar desalination still. The waste could be pumped into a solar incinerator on the deck....you could stay out until you ran out of fish!....
thanks for offer.... my husband mostly deals with these matters. a wind turbine generator, a water maker, and a solar shower are all on my wishlist! yes, someday i want to life totally self sufficient.
Ernesto, I agree with you about some things, but others just aren't practical. Living in a 48 sq foot house may work in a good climate, but not in one where you need shelter for 1/2 the year and have 3-4 people. As for lensing and water replacing solar... there's only so much power to be gotten from each square meter of sun. It doesn't matter whether you collect and focus with lenses or photovoltaics, they all require large area... and the two pond idea would require multiple large lenses to match a solar panel system. There's a reason why we don't use steam power anymore... it takes massive energy to change water into steam, not just the temperature change.
The PoetSappho, that sail boat sounds like a cool way to live. Do you run into problems trying to fit solar panels on a sail boat? They always look pretty covered. As for the living totally self-sufficienct, that's a myth. Unless you're building the generators, batteries, and panels from your own raw materials, self-sufficiency is an illusion only possible because you got what was needed from the rest of society. Sorry to burst a bubble, but I don't see how buying thousands of dollars of industrially manufactured goods, including the boat itself, is really self-sufficiency. Getting everything you need from the current system so that you can break away for years at a time is kind of like buying enough canned goods for 10 years and then saying you never go grocery shopping IMO.
What does 'sustainable' mean to us? Our intentional community just celebrated our 46th anniversary on July 14, 2014, so I think in certain sense you can say our lifestyle is sustainable. We are not self-contained or off-the-grid. What we are good at is the people part - we put our efforts into researching and experimenting with sustainable friendships, sustainable relationships - that's the "sustainable" we are good at. And sufficiently good at it that we are still here, still thriving. We set out to deliberately figure out how to have enjoyable, pleasurable lives living in a group, and it seems to be working. As far as I know there are only a handful of communities from the sixties and seventies that are still around. We are not so skilled with technology - that hasn't been our focus. But we have make steady (ok, slow, but steady) progress in that area. We are becoming more and more ecological, renewable and sustainable as the years go by, but its been a challenge. We've always been interested in re-using and re-purposing materials - in the 1970s we even made buildings out of paper (and trash) which was an interesting experiment, but it wasn't a long term success. We started with 26 acres of barren, over-grazed, and eroded land and now we have forests, and and have rebuilt the soil in our meadows by sheet composting . Most of our agriculture has been trees - many many fruit trees. We have enough solar photo-voltaics to run our well pump, and we have some solar hot water heaters. Mostly we've focused on conservation, insulation - gone that way. But we have a lot of interest in getting off the grid. We have good "people infra-structure" and ground-work - I see a lot of opportunities for some simple small scale businesses - for example we have ample food waste to feed pigs and chickens and produce methane, and we are really close to the major urban markets around San Francisco and can do something interesting with all our fruit. One of the things I've learned is that groups often move slowly - takes time to reach agreement and make decisions. But we'll get there. Our lifestyle is not for everyone, but it has been 'sustaining'. <smile> http://www.lafayettemorehouse.com/
AlchemistGeorge, thanks for the reply. You guys are definitely doing something right to be around that long. I notice two things in what you said... 1) that the people are most important. Are you extremely selective in who enters or put a lot of pressure for people who don't meet expectations? 2) It takes time for groups. This is something I've noticed too... groups are slow and often make poor decisions when taken as a whole because their is not a cohesive long-term strategy. Do you think group consensus is a must for a long-term community?
Just to respond to the living space/climate/solar/embedded energy thing really quick. In my mind, humans that want to live sustainably should live on/under the water, in trees, underground, or on wheels. This is due to several factors including an increasing chance of inclement weather, natural disasters, economic collapse, voluntary community reorganization, and letting the land and natural ecosystems heal. A typical home has individual rooms so why would having an individual living space on wheels for each family member be any different? You could even make them link together in a modular fashion. To think any "permanent" structure will be long term sustainable is folly. Things on this planet change and settlements need to adapt to be sustainable. I really believe that humans should live in climates that are hospitable to them and that we should leave the other areas of the planet to the animals and plants, stewarding their growth as giant food forests, moving through them and harvesting when the weather allows. Research is showing that's exactly what the natives did, sustainably, for hundreds of thousands of years. It just makes sense to me. If you want to figure out a way to sustainably provide a climate controlled environment, I'm all for it, but I like mobility/nomadic as a solution. Earthships are awesome but they cost a lot, are a lot of work, and tie you to a location, which is inherently unsustainable. The solar system that I'm taking about uses clear plastic attached to a wood frame. All parts are either recyclable, rebuildable, or made from sustainable materials. The lens can be as large as 6ft diameter and 12" thick. This amount of solar focused on a veggie oil filled collector can definitely make enough steam to produce 600-800 watts consistently through an alternator. I've lived quite comfortably for the last few years with 600 watts of PV so while the system may be way less efficient than PV, the lost cost, diy nature, and auxiliary benefits of irrigation, clean water, and water storage, make up for that. I'm sure we can do better but in years of research, I haven't found a sustainable, low cost way to do so yet. There will be no purely sustainable way of providing electricity until we figure out how to use organic/biological materials, which is on the horizon. The best we can do now is shoot for the best efficiency and lowest impact. As far as your comments about boat living and purchasing solar not being self sufficient you're right in the pure semantic sense. I thought we were talking about sustainability though. Living in a small space that uses very little energy will always be more sustainable than the current model. As long as the products purchased make more energy, or replace the need for more energy expense, than it took to create them, they're way closer to sustainability than any of the standard models. So with PV solar, I've read a few papers that show that a well built, well designed PV system will create more power over it's lifetime than it takes to create it. I'm also pretty sure that pv can be made from recycled materials. I don't know if these papers took into account the full cost of producing the PV though. If they didn't factor in subsidization, long term environmental damage, and other things like that, they too might be an overall resource sucker. I've done enough research to write a thesis on that and still don't really know for sure.... so far though, again, with what's out there, PV is definitely a big step in the right direction. To quickly comment on the urban, intentional community models that aren't off grid. I have huge respect for the social experimentation that's happening at places like this and think that the knowledge gained will definitely apply to future sustainable communities. However, if they're grid tied and cooperating with the established control systems, they're as unsustainable as the corrupt systems that they're dependent upon. I love the consensus idea though. Once you've screened out the wingnuts and psychopaths, which should be a priority in any community, consensus slows things down and makes sure no one's disappointed. If a group makes a bad decision,fault lies upon the whole group, making it less likely that tensions will rise between members. Anyway, sorry to type your eyes out. It's just neat stuff to think about....and pretty much all I do.
It is not easy to join our community, and it is very easy to leave. Usually people spend time getting to know us, getting to know our philosophy and learning how we work before they seriously consider moving in. We don't want people to be unhappy, so we'd rather sort that out before anyone re-organizes their life to move in with us. We rarely have ask people to leave, but if you do something that actually endangers our community you could be gone by sunset. About 15 years ago we did have an 'intervention' where after a lot of preparation we had a very frank discussion with one person about their behavior with many very specific examples, it may not sound like it, but the goal was to be as loving as possible - which meant being very honest in the best way we could. it turned out quite well. We are slow. For most topics, progress is not our most important progress, and we'd rather get it right. Having said that, once we agree, stuff happens really really fast here - everyone is "on board", no one is dragging their feet or sabotaging or whining. Long term strategy - well, we have a unifying philosophy that helps us guide our business and the way we treat each other. We've been all over the map on less important topics. Lots of issues reoccur, so when we talk about repaving one of our access roads (for example) there are people in the room who remember what our neighbors said and did 10, 20, 30 years ago - some of that gives consistency to our actions. Sometimes the knowledge of history results in "that's never worked before, let's try something different" sort of approach <smile> Our slow, inclusive decision making process seems to result in us making fewer mistakes. It also means we do miss some opportunities. Do I think group consensus is a must? Yes and no. First, we don't call our system 'consensus' because we don't require everyone agree - we require that no one strongly disagrees. In our experience that is far faster than getting everyone to agree to everything. There is lots of stuff that I just don't care about, and if there is someone I consider to be an "expert" on that topic (grading our roads), then I'm OK with whatever they recommend. But we do want everyone to feel included, and to feel powerful. Hard to feel enthusiastic about living somewhere where your point of view just doesn't count. Majority rule is the best system we know for huge groups, but it does leave you with a disgruntled minority. When you must live with that disgruntled minority in your kitchen, or worse - in your bedroom - well, that's not so great.
the technology for long-term sustainability be it the conventional wind water and solar are just beginning to come down in price and make it possible to use in a common market, but then you also have to look at the emerging markets in green tech as far as geothermal (bioLite) smarter steam engineering (the navy just released news on a salt-water run engine) and even hydro/aquatic energy (using algae and kelp in bio diesel). Even then just one of these sources is not meant for sole sustainability but as a take a few and make them run as a collective source and you could provide enough power for an average house (100-200)amps its not that we can't obtain the power necessary its the ability to store this power normal deep cell batteries cost a lot not only brand new but also scrap prices and even then you need quite a few of them to store that power in both long wave and short wave power. I did read a paper from Harvard about organic free-flow batteries that are able to store far more energy than normal power consumption calls for. The bioLite Fire Pit design they have just released burns regular firewood and turns the heat into 80 amps of store-able power with that heating your house, (they are currently working on a franklin stove and pizza oven designs), a few small solar panels in good areas and instead of the currently popular windmill design, using a vertical fan-bladed prototype and installing a few on a tower structure, it would be possible to produce enough power to sustain a small off-grid community, and a lot of the solar wind and water project can be done just using scrap parts and metal which makes it even cheaper for a lot of people on a budget. Not sure if anyone here watches the show hillbilly blood on travel channel but they do a lot of back-wood designs using everyday things something worth checking out for concepts
when it comes to sustainability people should understand its all about consciousness. sustainability itself means meeting your life needs/goals without compromising the environment/nature. we were the most sustainable before the fist industrial revolution=no easy comfort
In recent years, sustainability has become synonymous with homesteading and survivalists and is one of those things that is literally built up from the ground in stages. For example, the aussies perfected the art of using a bulldozer to produce fifty meter swales all day long that can support plant life all over the place such as fruit where little else might normally grow. Its cheap, its fast, its easy, its almost duh! stupid and is the gift that keeps on giving and the kind of thing you want to do as soon as possible before even moving on the land if you can. Permaculture is the popular focus today because keeping as much water on your land as possible is always going to be more productive where most people want to live. As for solar power, its along the same lines with, for example, a simple solar preheater for every building being the first wise investment for many today. For as little as $1,500.oo a simple water preheater can easily pay for itself within a few years at most and many have remarked that every house in America should already have one. If a community takes care of the basics in sustainability and is organized to produce at least a third of their own food they've already reaped a huge savings from the land with minimal investment in money and time, while the technology for them to cheaply and easily become more sustainable is poised to explode in the near future.
