The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [69]
Instead of viewing simplicity as a lifestyle of limitation, it is important to recognize it as a path of global opportunity. Gandhi’s principle of “live simply that others may simply live” is profoundly relevant. If the human family chooses a path of moderation and fairness, then hope will grow as billions of people assist one another in building a future of mutually assured development.
Earth-friendly, or green, ways of living are no longer alternative lifestyles for a pioneering few; instead, they are becoming conventional lifestyles for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations. Even with major technological innovations in energy and transportation, we will require dramatic changes in patterns of living and consuming if we are to maintain the integrity of the Earth as a living system. Simplicity is simultaneously a personal choice, a civilizational choice, and a species choice. We will make the choice for a sustainable future with much greater enthusiasm when we recognize that it is a necessary part of a future path that calls forth our species potentials and leads us into ever-greater communion with the living universe.
Creating New Kinds of Community
Our communion with the universe is mirrored in our expressions of community with one another. It is through community that we can most fully realize and celebrate ourselves as citizens of a sacred cosmos. Modern neighborhoods with isolated, single-family dwellings have been compared to tiny, underdeveloped nations where the potential for community and synergy has yet to be realized. A new architecture of life is required. In a shift similar to that which nature makes—for example, in the jump from simple atoms to complex molecules, or from complex molecules to living cells—humanity is being challenged to make a jump to a new level of community.
Because much of the urban infrastructure is already in place around the world, this means that a revolution in green retrofitting lies ahead as we reconfigure our lives to be sustainable in this new era. Rebuilding our cities and neighborhoods into islands of relative self-sufficiency—reducing dependency on distant sources of food, energy, and other material needs—will become the basis for a global economic revolution. A global “green village” movement is a healthy response to a world systems crisis because it will create a strong, resilient foundation for living.
Current patterns and scales of living do not suit emerging needs. The scale of the household is often too small, and a city too large, to realize many of the opportunities for sustainable living. Taking a lesson from humanity’s past, I believe it is important to look at the in-between scale of living—that of a small village of a few hundred people. Whether newly built, or created by retrofitting an existing neighborhood or building, I believe great opportunity exists for the development of small, ecologically integrated villages (“eco-villages”) to be nested within a larger urban area. I will use the term eco-village to describe the diverse expressions of new urban villages where the strength of one person or family meets the combined strength of others and, working together, something is created that was not possible before.
To illustrate