Why go visit an ecovillage if I’m not going to live there? It’s great what they’re doing and all, but what relevance does that have to the rest of us that live here in Babylon?
Well, the first question is not settled. I could very well end up moving back to DR at some point if that’s where life and career take me. Regardless, I’ll be back there at some point for some period of time. But those questions, which I tend to get pretty often, have a distinct relevance to academic praxis and what exactly I wanted to get out of this research for myself. DR is not a retreat, nor retreatist, so there would be little point in the community existing if it wasn’t able to export at least some of the good ideas they’ve come up with.
There are a lot of challenges in translating the innovations at DR in to adaptable practices in other areas. As I’ve said before, DR is rural. Very Rural. This limits the materials on hand, and also how easily new materials can be acquired. It limits the services available and the person-power that can be mustered for larger projects. Nonetheless, there are several practices at DR that I think are ripe for use in urban areas of all sizes.
Energy Awareness
First and foremost, rabbits are aware of their consumption patterns and talk openly between each other about them. About 5 years ago, the village established their own utility called BEDR (better electricity for Dancing Rabbit), a micro-grid that services the village but also ties in to the larger grid and allow them to eliminate battery banks without losing power when they weren’t generating. I got an email the other day over the DR listserv from BEDR detailing the total power production, consumption, targets, with an interpretation of what affects those numbers. How many of you can say you’ve ever gotten something like that from your utility? The promise of the utility was that the village would produce two times as much clean energy back to the grid as dirty energy they used. This has never been accomplished, though the village has a surplus of electrical production in general.
That’s not to say there aren’t drawbacks to BEDR. For one, electricity through them costs four times what it does in surrounding Scotland County, in part because the infrastructure was built in loans instead of grants, and upfront costs were quite high compared to the number of users. Additionally, the dozens of solar panels now spread throughout the village were not quite at cost parity in cost per kilowatt-hour with coal or natural gas at the time they were purchased, and so paying for them over time is more expensive than it would be if the same panels were purchased today.
The cost and the amount of effort put in to establishing this infrastructure has led to an ethos of acute awareness of electrical consumption. Very often, activities requiring electricity were delayed until the sun was shining so that solar power could be used rather than drawing from the dreaded larger grid and it’s provision of coal-fired kilowatts. I heard from longer-term residents that the village of 2015 was much looser with electrical consumption than the village of 2010 because of the transition away from battery banks - that since electricity automatically comes out of a socket regardless of the time of day, more rabbits have taken to habits of using it at their convenience than when it is most sustainably produced. On the other hand, many saw it as a boon for the village because it allowed online work occur unabated by cloudy days. Cob, my host, described his first few years there trying to run an online business as quite trying: on cloudy days the family would cook by candlelight in order to reserve battery power for the router and laptop so he could return vital emails.
Almost everybody used laptops. There were perhaps 3 desktop computers that I knew of - one was for gaming, another was for professional A/V production, and the final in disrepair. This is not to say that laptops are necessarily eco-friendlier as a whole since they are far less repairable than desktops, but they do consume far less energy. And people kept their computers far longer than the industry-typical three-year replacement cycle. The Nissan Leaf (discussed below) is set to forego charging, even when plugged in, while the sun is down. The washing machine in the common house is plugged in to a power strip you can turn off when you’re done doing laundry so that the display on the front isn’t drawing power, and the common practice is to unplug the printer in the office when you’re done. And so on, and so on. If it consumes electricity at DR, you better believe that someone is paying attention to how much and when that device draws juice.
Water Conservation
Do you shower every day? Maybe twice a day? Do you know how much water that uses? Where does your water come from?
When I went to turn on the sink in Thistledown, the water that came out had fallen on the roof over my head days prior. It was pumped up from the cistern through a carbon filter, a UV filter, and in to a pressure tank, from where it went to the rest of the house. It tastes different than city water, a fact lamented by Caleb when he left to find seasonal work in Florida. He would miss the unflouridated, rich taste of the stuff that falls from the sky. I tended to agree with him, that it had a fresh, less chemical-ly taste, even though there were times immediately after a rain stirred up sediment below that I didn’t feel quite right swallowing the brackish yellow stuff that would come up.
At DR, most people shower far less than daily, with some people only cleaning their bodies in the pond during warm weather. A big part of this is cost - not necessarily the fact that the $11 per month was too steep, but that it was a line item which one could eliminate from their budget if they so chose. Most people don’t have their showers as a separate expense from water in general. Smelly or clean alike got along fairly well, though, and I took the middle ground of showering weekly. It’s amazing how little scent impacted me after a time - I really expected to hate how I smelled, but hardly noticed it. Until our Bath and Body Works' and our Yankee Candles go by the wayside and people start to become open the odors their own bodies produce, this practice is only marginally adoptable in the wider society.
People still washed their dishes, laundered their clothes, watered their gardens, and did all the normal things one would use water for. Yet, Brooke’s research showed that the average water consumption was somewhere around 81% less than the typical American. Is this all from going stinky, from not having flush toilets, or more from just being more judicious about one’s water use? Though you can fill your with county water from one of the many spigots dotting the village for pennies, rain water is free. Rabbits would make the most of that.
Building
This is a subject I will address in a future post, as there are many varied lessons to be learned from both natural building and high-efficiency conventional building that come from DR. Suffice it to say that when you have a wood stove that must be stoked at night, lack an air conditioner in the hottest parts of summer, are subject to 80 mile and hour winds in tornado alley, and experience flooding in the spring, you want an efficient and solid house. Natural building is not unique to DR, but has certainly found an excellent vantage point from which to disperse. In my time there, two houses were under active construction, with another in the planning stages. Many of the houses there were build as part of extended workshops or demonstration projects that brought in dozens of people from around the world. These are certainly replicable anywhere, as they are replications themselves at DR. At least four people I know back home in Columbia have plans to begin building natural homes this coming year, and there may already be natural structures in the city that I’m unfamiliar with.
The main problem with exporting this that most places don’t have building codes which incorporate natural buildings. A few states, like New Mexico, do. But as far as I know, Missouri does not. So, you can build a structure, but you risk eviction and demolition if an authority discovers you living in it. That’s what makes DR a great testing ground - they live far out in a rural county where there’s no enforcement body for any of those codes. They may or may not be legal, but no one in the county could or would do anything about them if they were. The Milkweed Mercantile even found a specialized company to insure their structure.
In other words, there are distinct limits to the replicability of the housing experiments at DR. However, whenever someone comes to learn about it and get some hands-on practice, two things happen. First, the idea spreads and people explore the option of making it happen in their own home towns, perhaps beginning a movement towards changing those prohibitive codes towards something more inclusive of diverse housing forms. Second, learning how to build a house leads to ideas about how to improve the performance and green-ness of existing houses. Does your house have R-50 (an measurement of energy transfer resistance) of insulation in your attic? If it doesn’t, you could take a cue from building at DR and use woolen or recycled denim batting to fill it in to that point of maximum energy savings return. Have south-facing windows? Those can be tweaked like the ones in Ted and Sara’s house to allow maximum insolation in during winter and block the excess during summer. Build a greenhouse on the the south side of your existing structure to bring in more energy from sunlight in the winter.
Maybe you can’t build an entirely straw bale building where you live, or you already own a house and don’t want to build another. The lessons from DR need not be about what is worth building, but what methods provide sound energy management to any given structure.
Cooking
If you’ve had to cook for yourself (and who hasn’t?), it’s something that you need to do everyday and is often accompanied by a fair amount of waste as fresh vegetables or even canned goods don’t really come in quantities tailored for individual meals. When you cook for a group, you only have to do it once or twice a week, and there’s a lot of room to fudge the quantities so that there’s little waste. There are two aspects here that I think are of particular importance: eating in groups and composting.
Cooking co-ops at DR rely pretty heavily across the board or dried bulk goods like beans and rice, which make more sense when you’re preparing a big pot than when you’re boiling one tiny one for yourself. Buying in bulk saves money, and allows for more creative use of dried ingredients. It also uses the energy in cooking more efficiently and reduces waste. Pressure cookers, a kitchen device I became intimately familiar with in my time there, were in common use. By increasing the pressure of cooking to 15 psi in the sealed pot, the boiling point of water goes up by 40 degrees and shortens the cooking time of beans from hours to minutes.
No food is wasted, even if it’s the inedible parts or spoiled beyond human consumption. It all gets fed to the chickens in Critterville, or lands in personal compost bins. This contributes, in part, to DR’s low trash production, and is perhaps the most exportable aspect of the village. Pretty much anyone and everyone can compost, unless you’re in a high rise apartment in a city that doesn’t collect organic material separately.
Moreover, just as there is an ethos of watching one’s electrical consumption at DR, there is also a general ethos around eating lower on the food chain. Fewer animal products in general are consumed. Part of this restraint is in resistance to industrial agriculture, where cheap meat is seen to be less healthy because it’s assumed to be loaded with artificial hormones and antibiotics, and where organic grains or legumes can be gotten cheaper. Local meat, whether from the very few producers on farm or neighbors with observable and trusted practices, comes at a premium and is therefore reserved for special occasions.
Car Sharing
DR has a co-op called DRVC, which stands eponymously for “Dancing Rabbit Vehicle Co-op.” There are four vehicles: two Volkswagen passenger cars equipped to run on biodiesel in the warm months, a big truck with the same, and a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. Between 40 or so adults, none of whom had to commute regularly for jobs, there was pretty much always a vehicle available to check out. Similarly, with that many people there was seldom a day in which no vehicles were used. Several times a week, and on occasion several times a day, people took a car to neighboring Rutledge or Memphis for errands. Less frequently were trips to Kirksville for specialty items or to pick someone up at the airport, or La Plata to pick someone up from the Amtrak stop there. On occasion, the cars would make longer trips to St. Louis, Ottumwa, Quincy, and a plethora of towns beyond.
Joining the co-op was easy, requiring a $100 deposit and three ride-alongs with existing DRVC members to prove one’s competence in the car. Once you actually take a trip, though, things can get expensive rather quickly as you are charged per mile at a rather steep rate. (Note: I never joined DRVC, so I don’t know the exact rate Maybe a rabbit could provide that in the comments?) But that rate was all-inclusive: maintenance, fuel, insurance, and weekly service checks were all taken care of by the DRVC point cos.
Car sharing is not an innovation of DR, though its existence in such a rural area is certainly unique. These sorts of arrangements have found great homes in cities of most sizes with companies like ZipCar or Greenwheels. Critter Radio at DR recently had an interview with current IC transient, and former member of 4 years, Liat. In it, Kyle asked her what she though the most significant innovation DR had to contribute to the landscape of ICs focused on sustainable living. Her answer, almost immediately, was the car sharing co-op DRVC. (Starts at about 24:00)
What Could You Do?
This list is by no means a comprehensive one, but one which contains what were (to me) the major strands of eco-conscious living at DR. Does any of this look like something that could work where you live? Hopefully, the answer to this has leapt from the screen towards you at some point. If you’re not composting, that’s a good place to start. That’s an urban-friendly practice. Car sharing is probably best if you live in very urban area, or at least some place dense enough to be typically walkable. But beyond that, think of innovative ways to incorporate the ethos of DR in to your own life. Be ok with going stinky for just a little longer than you normally would. Make big meals and share them with groups, or maybe buy a pressure cooker. There’s no one way to do sustainability right, but there’s a wrong way and that’s doing nothing.
Go on. Be a rabbit where you live. Scoot! Do it!
