The name of my farm at Earthaven Ecovillage is Imani Farm. Imani, a word borrowed from the Kwanzaa tradition, means “Faith” in Swahili. Specifically, it implies faith in our teachers, faith in our leaders, faith in our movement, faith in the righteousness of our struggles, and faith in our community. It’s a unifying message; one of hope and a reminder that we are all in this together, that we’re pulling for the same thing, and that we need each other.

Little did I know that Imani would be an apt word for my own ongoing process of dismantling my trust in the culture I was raised in, and slowly beginning to believe in the systems the communities’ movement was building to replace them. As with most processes that require faith, there were many moments of doubt and even outright lack of faith.

I inherited the farm with this name and decided to keep it. The Swahili definition of faith seemed richer and more multi-dimensional than how I had always interpreted the word. Coming from a Catholic upbringing, the concept of faith lived in my mind and heart as believing in an unseen and more importantly an “unrelated,” far-away god that I couldn’t feel in my own heart.

In my childhood, Catholicism was central to my existence. For the first four years of my life my mom and I lived with my grandmother, who attended Church every day of the week, carried rosary beads in her pocket, had statues of Jesus and Mary in every room, and was my primary caregiver. When I went to church with her in the early 1970s, women, including girls, were still required to wear head coverings and of course had to be silent through a 40-minute mass. I found the entire process meaningless and disconnected from my life.

Fast forward to my early 20s: my draw to the counterculture and my travelling in other countries brought a much deeper education as well as a shocking awareness that both the Catholic Church and the American empire have wrought untold damage on land-based peoples and intact cultures around the world for centuries. These awakenings were part of what radicalized me and drove me to looking for saner and healthier alternatives to life in the mainstream. I rejected religion and also rejected parasitic capitalism. My exploration of all things alternative, including the intentional communities movement, began in the early 1990s and hasn’t yet stopped. Additionally, my critical analysis of our corporate, industrial, and militarized culture hasn’t let up either.

Because of this analysis, it became clear to me, relatively early on in my life, that every system I had been raised in was not to be trusted. Our culture, I realized, is not for the best interests of the people nor is it focused on long-term health and sustainability. I discovered that things are backwards and upside down. Here are some ways in which some of the fundamental pillars of the US society are structured in less than whole ways:

• Health:The US has the most expensive health care system in the world, spending more than $10,500 per person in 2018¹(compared to an astounding-to-us-now $151 in 1960), with a lower life expectancy than countries that spend half as much.

• Diet:Unfortunately, despite our outspending the world on healthcare, our health outcomes in the US are dismal. About half of all American adults have one or more preventable diet-related chronic illnesses and diet is the leading cause of death.^2,3,4In fact, as a direct result of the decades-long support of the food pyramid, an excess of carbohydrates and sugars has led to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, the latter of which costs the US $245 billion in health care expenses a year.

• Wealth:The US has the most billionaires in the world⁵and yet many Americans live below the poverty line.⁶

• Agriculture:The USDA, backed by industry, government, and reductionist science, created an industrial food system based on intensive tillage, monocropping of commodity crops, synthetic fertilizers and chemical controls, extensive irrigation, genetic modification, and factory farming of animals—all of which we’re now understanding are a dead-end approach. Not only has the industrial food system caused broad-scale environmental problems in the form of devastating water and soil toxicity, it has actually created hunger, health problems, inequality, and loss of local systems, the result of which is likely to be near fatal to our species.

• Medicine:The predominant medical system, focused primarily on pharmaceuticals, views the body as a machine and treats the symptoms instead of the cause of every problem. There have been scientific breakthroughs for sure, and there are some things the system is great at (fixing a broken bone and emergency life-saving in acute situations, to name two), but with regard to complex, chronic, or lifestyle-related illnesses, the system is an abject failure with more people sick than ever before.

• Economics:Free market capitalism and central banking at home, as well as extractive and colonialization-based foreign policies, have had a devastating impact on everyone, everywhere.

• Politics:Our national political system can be aptly described as a gerontocracy, a form of oligarchical rule whereby the leaders are significantly older than the rest of the adult population,⁷which causes all kinds of out-of-touch behavior on the part of our leaders. The two-party system often described as “two wings of the same bird” can also be seen as a corporate dictatorship, prioritizing corporate interests over human interests.

• Social Systems:We have many marginalized people in the US, such as black and brown folks, indigenous peoples, LGBTQIA, and undocumented people. These folks suffer longstanding systemic and institutionalized oppression (racism, sexism, and homophobia, etc.) with very little recourse for rectification.

• Media:Our media tends to run on anxiety, fear, stress, and enemy-making to promote ratings. This has no doubt had a profound effect on how we view our lives, the world around us, and our fellow citizens.

• Religion:Patriarchal religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, play a central role in many Americans’ lives. These institutions feature a male god, male head of the family, and a church controlled by men. Religious structures often emphasize guilt, sin, and blame as a way of controlling their followers and tend to be oppressive to women, children, and anyone who might be following an alternative path.

These are just a few of the main nonholistic features of our culture. One of my dear friends calls these systems “the death culture.” Paul Shepard, an American environmentalist and deep ecology author, suggests that humans are capable of transcending this madness when he says, “It is time to abandon the fantasy that we are above the past and alienated from the rest of life on earth. We truly are a successful species in our own right that lived in harmony with the earth and its other forms for millions of years—a species that has not changed intrinsically.”⁸

If this is indeed true, we have everything we need to create either paradise or destruction right here, right now. In this context, I have faith in any project that is willing to think in complexities, design in systems, and trend toward the holistic. Even after 25 years in community and with a long list of mistakes that my community and I have made (see my article “Village Building Stumbles” in the Shadow Side of Cooperation issue of Communities, #184), I very much still have faith in community. At the very least I still have faith in the experiment of community—in the attempt at community.

In fact, I believe we need tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these experiments in every setting imaginable. In rural, urban, and suburban environments; in developed and developing countries; with all kinds of missions and visions. At a minimum, these projects resist the standard pathological cultural narrative. And at their best, they fill the coffers of the collective knowledge base about how to do better. There’s no one right way to do community, but there are a million ways to live a saner life.

Here’s a look at the same cultural pillars described above but with a sense of how we’re approaching things at Earthaven Ecovillage.

• Health andDiet: Most of us are experimenting with healthy diet and exercise that almost always includes fresh, wholesome, organic foods. These diets range from vegan to carnivore and everything in between. We also value an active lifestyle and one in which physical labor is integrated into everyday life through tasks such as hauling wood, gardening, and walking to our destinations, etc.

We acknowledge that health extends to mental and emotional well-being and positive personal relationships. To those ends we navigate those realms with care, intention, and investment in systems that speak to the whole person.

• Wealth: Earthaven is fairly homogenous in that most of us come from a white, educated, middle class background. When there are differences in economic ease, the folks with more are often generous to the folks with less, offering employment, loans, gifts, and other opportunities. A strong and central value at Earthaven Ecovillage, and other intentional communities, is toward “right livelihood” endeavors or triple-bottom-line companies, where earning a living is of benefit to the person, the community, and the planet.

• Agriculture:There are multiple farms at Earthaven Ecovillage that provide nutrient-dense animal and vegetable products.

Our strategic plan says, “We adopt support structures to enable long-term success for farmers and land stewards in our valley, and in our bioregional network (i.e., cost expectations, incentives, policies, cultural norms, and personal support).”

In addition to food, folks are also growing their own fiber, forestry, and medicine products. All are done in an ecologically regenerative, bioregional culture and network.

• Medicine: While there are certainly folks using conventional medical solutions such as pharmaceuticals and surgery, our medical choices tend to run toward the alternative, with acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal care, naturopathic, homeopathic, and holistic care being the go-to approaches.

• Economics: The economic system of the community is based on independent income with a local exchange trading system (LETS) that is an Earthaven-specific currency used to exchange goods and services.

Many of us depend on outside income, which ranges from retirement funds to telecommuting to travelling elsewhere to work.

Small businesses have existed on the land since Earthaven was formed in 1994 and the gig economy is strong, with people piecing together odd jobs around the village to form a livelihood.

Earthaven’s idea, over the long term, is to develop and support a thriving local economy by supporting local spending of resources, exchanges of goods and services, alternatives to the US dollar, living-wage employment opportunities, and ongoing creation of community infrastructure with local resources.

• Politics: As with many small intentional communities, Earthaven has its own governance system to guide the decisions for the community. Our governance systems are striving toward a fair, participatory, and engaged self-governance. There are numerous guilds, committees, and subgroups guiding the process and there is a strong flavor of consensus-building among members. Collective action is sometimes slow but it embraces intuition and non-rational processes.

• Social Systems: Taking care of each other is a strong ethos at Earthaven and a reason that many of our current members joined. Potlucks, rituals and ceremonies, workshops and classes, as well as small informal gatherings, are a weekly occurrence. In addition, folks are there for each other, fully and regularly. Over the years we have developed incredible support systems for parents, for birth, and for dying (see my article “Community Grief” in the Passing the Torch issue of Communities, #185).

• Media: While we have high-speed internet access almost everywhere in the community and folks do stay up to date, most community members limit their engagement with mainstream media and focus instead on a curated diet of information, mostly tending toward media with a whole-systems way of seeing.

• Religion: Religion and spirituality are viewed through the lens of this core strategic goal: “To encourage diverse spiritual practices and awareness of our interconnection with all beings.” That often translates to respecting land, each other, and self, as well as seeing ourselves in the web of something larger. Practices  often include celebrations of beauty and pleasure, and awareness of the more-than-human and sentient world around us.

In addition to those mentioned above, Earthaven values:

• Change Agency:A goal in our strategic plan is to catalyze local and global change through learning, teaching, and networking. Through educational programming the group has a transformative impact and encourages a dissemination of the skills and knowledge being gained in the process of building the ecovillage.

• Relationality:Intra- (inner) and inter- (other) personal relating is a core tenet of many intentional communities, and Earthaven is no exception. As a group we tend to value empathy, awareness, respect, and accountability as well as dealing directly, openly, and honestly with each other. One of our core goals is “To nurture personal growth, interpersonal understanding, and mutual trust, as the foundation for a deeply connected human community” and emphasizes well-being for all, conflict resolution, and transformative solutions to our endeavors.

• Multi-Generationality:At Earthaven we recognize the need to have interdependence among folks of all ages and stages. Our design systems encourage activities and value strategies for all phases of the life cycle.

• Anti-Oppression Work:Our mostly homogenous group recognizes its privilege and is committed to racial and gender equity and working to end oppression in all its forms. Specifically, the community has pledged to center marginalized voices, illuminate our blind spots, continue growth and learning both individually and collectively, offer both compassion and accountability, and offer ongoing educational strategies. A strong sentiment and a written part of our goals is, “we remember that no one is free until everyone is free.”

While many of these approaches and strategic plans are aspirational, it is certainly true that our hearts, minds, and actions are in the right place and at least we’ve got enough collective, holistic, and systems thinking to point us in the direction of something resembling salvation. We’ve approached these understandings through trial and error mostly—but also through threads of wisdom embodied in leaders and teachers who have come before, our own and each others’ ancestors, longstanding traditions, and our inner guidance.

These beautiful intentions are not everything, but they are a start—and a beacon for many. My faith is not in the finished product; we are a far cry from living in harmony with each other and the natural world. But my faith resides in the attempt and in the threads of intact wisdom that guide us along. As many of my elders have stated, building an ecovillage is a multi-generational project.

Paul Shepard says, “All around us, aspects of the modern world—diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology—have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.”⁹

Imani, my farm, will pass on to others’ hands over time and morph and reshape. So will Earthaven Ecovillage. Time will tell if our creation lasts centuries into the future where it can be honed into a more elegant expression of human settlement or if the death culture will have its way with us. If the outcome is dire, we’ll at least have good company and a much more integrated life. And if the outcome is sanity, we can trust that we’re slowly building the road as we travel.

Lee Warren lives at Earthaven Ecovillage near Asheville, North Carolina in the great southeastern forest. She helped to found, design, and build an off-grid, hand-built cohousing neighborhood and five-acre pasture-based cooperative farm at Earthaven Ecovillage. She is also the founder of SOIL, School of Integrated Living, which teaches organic agriculture, regenerative systems, and community living. She is an educator, herbalist, writer, conscious dying advocate, and food activist with an avid interest in rural wisdom and sustainable economics.

1. www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/08/08/how-us-healthcare-spending-per-capita-compares-with-other-countries-infographic
2. health.gov/our-work/food-nutrition/2015-2020-dietary-guidelines/guidelines/introduction/nutrition-and-health-are-closely-related
3. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/opinion/food-nutrition-health-care.html
4. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2678018
5. www.theguardian.com/inequality/2020/jul/02/us-most-billionaires-in-world-inequality
6. www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.html
7. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontocracy
8. www.sacredlands.org/pleistoparadigm.htm
9. www.goodreads.com/book/show/1640911.The_Others