Ethics and Finance

How well Earthaven succeeds in manifesting our vision of a new village culture will be determined by the quality of the work we do as both social and permaculture designers. Most community failures stem from inadequate design, either social or physical. Design takes time, but upfront investment in good design will more than pay for itself in the long-term health of the community and its members. Design and planning are highly complex disciplines that are most often relegated to professionals. This can be disempowering to those directly affected by the decisions. Community-based design and planning, on the other hand, while a much slower and occasionally frustrating process, has the distinct advantage of investing the participants in an outcome that is more likely to meet their real needs.

The role of the Earthaven design team, led by myself and Peter Bane, is to facilitate and guide the community's co-design process. Our main approach has been to train community members in permaculture principles and practices. We are also providing the community with our accumulated experience in permaculture design and planning, landscape analysis and assessment, and patterning.

Designing human settlements involves all the basic principles of permaculture. These include designing for redundancy, placement for beneficial relationships, multifunctional elements, the use of biological and locally available resources, and zone, sector, and slope analysis for energy conservation. Community design also demands recognition of another very important principle-design for conviviality.

Design for conviviality means optimizing the quality of human interactions. Among other things this involves balancing our need to connect with our need for privacy and personal space. Many of us have been so traumatized by the fast pace of modern life that we feel we need lots of space around us to protect us from a harsh and dangerous world. I find that one of the greatest challenges at Earthaven is to find ways to meet people's privacy needs while keeping our homesites compact and not sprawled all over the landscape. We have not yet reached consensus on how to achieve this most gracefully. However, we are experimenting with compact settlement and cooperative living in our campground and first neighborhood-what we call our neo-tribal village-as a means of extending our experience and transforming our attitudes.

Designing for conviviality also involves placing our access ways and buildings in patterns that allow for, and in fact encourage, quality human interactions as we go about our daily activities. In good design, conviviality happens spontaneously among the inhabitants of the settlement because the physical spaces are "tuned" to the wisdom of our bodies. Buildings create positive outdoor spaces; entrances are prominent and transitions are marked by gateways; paths meander and cross; places to sit or to tarry are frequent, people feel safe to sleep in public or to make love in the woods. Permaculture design should nourish not only the earth and our bodies, but also the individual's soul and the group soul.

I have discovered over the years that good design has a complex and nonlinear nature; it is truly an evolutionary, living process. It helps me to embrace the complexity and nonlinear nature of the process. Once we begin to think ecologically, we discover many similarities between the way ecosystems function and the way the design process works. For example, we can model our energy dynamics after the feedback loops in ecosystems. After a project has been designed, it is inevitably changed during the building process in response to the needs of the moment and the real world (feedback). Upon completion the project is tested, observed, and undergoes redesign to improve its functioning within the environment (adaptation).

We have already experienced this in the building of huts. We set criteria for height of buildings at 12 feet, but then discovered that everyone wanted variances from the rule in order to build a second story on their buildings. Vertical design is of course more cost-efficient, as our members were telling us, so we modified the design of the guidelines to permit taller buildings. Feedback allowed us to improve the design.

Design and planning involve both logical and intuitive processes. There is an order to good planning which can be

taught, and there is an art to the unfolding of landscape potentials which can perhaps only
be suggested or demonstrated. Together the many steps in village planning should serve as tools and methodologies for meeting a community's goals.

Good maps are essential for good planning. Shortly after we purchased the Earthaven
property we contracted for a boundary survey of the land and arranged with an aerial cartography firm to fly the land and generate high resolution aerial photographs for us.
(Aerial photography work needs to be done in the winter or early spring before the trees
leaf out and obscure the ground.) The photos were then digitized and with the help of permaculture friends and professional cartographers we developed a detailed contour
map of the property.

While we were waiting for the map work to be completed, we spent many days walking the land and familiarizing ourselves with its complex terrain. On these land walks we identified springs and stream courses, flood plains, old roadbeds, plant communities, evidence of past land use, erosion gullies, agriculturally suitable lands, sacred or high earth energy sites, usable and accessible slopes, pond sites, south-facing slopes, potential home and business sites, and possible choices for locating the village center. During this time, Peter and I gave several weekend workshops to community members on permaculture and brainstormed
about the location and design of the village center.

Once we had the contour maps in hand, we ground-checked them for accuracy, made the necessary revisions, and got our mapmakers to correct the data. We now had a good quality map that would prove valuable throughout our planning work. With a working map and the experience gained from several seasons of observation on the ground, we were ready for the next phase of site design: identifying and overlaying the key components of the village onto their most suitable locations. On the broad scale, these components were:
* sacred sites
* land to remain in forest due to slope, aspect, or inaccessibility
* agricultural or horticultural fields or terraces
* orchard sites
* roads or access ways
* the village center
* the neo-tribal village and campground
* business sites
* the education center and healing center sites
* pond and hydro sites
* the neighborhoods

We are still refining the design details of many of these locations and determining the
methods and timing of their development.

Based on solar and road access, the design team has identified nine neighborhood clusters and flagged nearly 60 house sites. The community is about to engage in a series of neighborhood design sessions in which members will decide who they want to be neighbors with, where they want to live, and what they want their neighborhood to look and feel like. This co-design process is a radical departure from the usual approach of having the lots laid out by the developer and just picking a site. For co-design to work, it will be incumbent on each member to stretch beyond her/his own self interest, and to make decisions for the benefit of the greater whole.

The First Earthaven Common Kitchen

As we have gone about the work of building Earthaven village from the ground up, mostly with hand labor and simple tools, it has become apparent that we have been following the archetypal flow of human settlement from times past. The first order pattern is a temporary camp. The first year on the land we developed our campground with very primitive facilities and camped in tents. The second order pattern of settlement is to create fixed dwellings: simple huts and gardens in the forest. At the end of our first summer the first hut began to go up, even while its builders lived next to it in a tent. The third order pattern of human settlement is the growth of a hamlet of clustered houses. Our second year on the land has seen the beginning of what we call our neo-tribal village, located on the south facing slope adjacent to our campground. As larger and more permanent dwellings, workshops, and buildings for community functions as well as more refined agricultural processes are built, a village takes shape. This is the fourth order pattern in a sequence which extends through town, city, and metropolis. We expect to see the emergence of the village stage over the next year or two and to spend the next ten years or so elaborating it. We don't know what cities will look like in 21st-century America, but we don't foresee Earthaven reaching that order of magnitude. That's where things seem to be falling apart today. At Earthaven we hope to match the consciously chosen limit of our growth to the optimum carrying capacity of our land.

Tommy's traditional timber framed "tool shed" is seen here with it's rammed slip-straw and mortared aluminum can walls. He's done a beautiful job with the interior wall finish, which is a mud plaster. Tom is our resident earth plaster guru.

As noted above, Earthaven is developing a first cluster of small dwellings. The goal of this neo-tribal village, or hamlet within the village, is to experiment on a small scale with the earth friendly building techniques and compact settlement patterns that we hope will serve us in the development of our permanent homes and neighborhoods. The idea is to try many different systems by building small huts or bungalows with footprints of no more than 300 square feet, so that we can gain proficiency at using locally available and inexpensive natural materials including straw, clay, stone, and timber off our land. We have buildings going up using post-and-beam timber framing, pole beam, rough-cut green wood conventional framing, straw bale, clay/straw slip form, cob, wattle-and-daub, and earth-coupled clay floor construction methods. This summer we built a large capacity composting outhouse and are currently completing a central kitchen/dining and bath building to serve the hut dwellers so that none of the huts will require their own plumbing, kitchens, or bathrooms.

In the same way that permaculture first tested plants and garden systems, we are trying out lots of ideas, making numerous small mistakes, and learning from them so we don't repeat them on a larger and more costly scale.

Another function of the neo-tribal village is to create ways for more community members to get to the land and have some infrastructure support while they build their permanent dwellings. We have established limited occupancy times in huts to encourage people to move on to building permanent dwellings, thus in time freeing up the huts for the next wave of village settlers. Ultimately we expect that the huts will convert to intern housing or lodging for guests or educational program participants, incorporating succession and multifunctionality into the design. The neo-tribal village, like Earthaven itself, is designed with enough flexibility to grow, change and evolve over time to meet the community's changing needs.

Earthaven is very much a work in progress, a constantly evolving attempt to more deeply inoculate permaculture and ecovillage culture into our bioregion. We're working away in the belly of the beast of western "civilization" to find our way home in the company of kindred yet diverse spirits. We welcome your help to further the good work. Consider joining us if you feel called to do so. Come visit and lend a hand if you're traveling our way. Be sure to let us know you're coming well in advance. For more information, you can write us at Earthaven, PO Box 1107, Black Mountain, NC 28711 or send email to:

info@earthaven.org

To link to our site, clip the graphic, paste in your page(s) and add this link:
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
Thanks