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Donald E. Pitzer’s chapter for Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yakov Oved, and Menahem Topel, editors, The Communal Idea in the 21st Century, Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013.Developmental Communalism into the Twenty-first CenturybyDonald E. PitzerProfessor Emeritus of HistoryDirector Emeritus, Center for Communal StudiesUniversity of Southern IndianaEvansville, Indiana, USAThe early twenty-first century is witnessing an ultimate stage of developmental communalism — a time when progressive ideas, ideals, and innovations from the small, voluntary communal social laboratories of a preceding era become integrated into the general society. The nineteenth century experiments in universal education, democratic governance, and equal rights attempted communally by utopians like the Owenites, Fourierists, and Icarians helped realize these reforms in the twentieth century. Today, it is increasingly apparent that experiments from two waves of intentional communities in the second half of the twentieth century are helping to shape major features of world culture in the twenty-first century. The first wave arose from the counterculture and other reform movements of the 1960s. It produced youth and hippie communes, some of which went well beyond their popular image of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to make solid contributions to society. Together with Jesus communes and ashrams, they pioneered changes in eating habits and health care and made commitments to tolerance and spirituality, equality and justice, peace and love that have helped move the world toward multiculturalism, gender equality, interfaith dialogue, and peace initiatives. The second communal wave came in the 1980s and 1990s. It was produced by the desire for economical and neighborly housing in the expensive and impersonal urban age and from concern for the natural environment because of global warming and the need for alternative sources of energy as fossil fuels inevitably are exhausted. Cohousing projects began offering a communal housing solution for people from the general public and college students to retirees and the elderly. Ecovillages arose to employ and demonstrate eco-responsible communities and new forms of energy. These communal efforts are helping to make friendly and safe neighborhoods, sustainable lifestyles, green technology, and alternative energy systems the norm in our time. The theory of developmental communalism was proposed in the 1980s from my study and on-site observation of the process by which reform movements often adopt the communal method of social organization in an early stage for security, solidarity, and survival. Developmental communalism considers communal living a generic social mechanism available to all peoples, governments, and movements. But it focuses mainly on social, religious, and political movements, the communal societies they found, and the process through which they and their communities develop, adjust, and endure or disappear. Communal societies have gone by many names depending on their time, place, and economic arrangements — from ashrams, monasteries, convents, and kibbutzim to communes, cooperatives, collectives, intentional communities, cohousing, and ecovillages, All can be broadly defined as small, voluntary social units partly isolated and insolated from the general society. Their members usually share an ideology, an economic union, and a lifestyle. Most attempt to create living models of their ideal social, economic, governmental, religious, philosophical, ecological, and sustainable systems. The utopians among them hope that their dreams will come true worldwide by human endeavor or divine intervention.Thus, developmental communalism sees communal living mostly as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, although it recognizes that many movements view the merits of living communally as essential to their organizations, lives, and relationships, or even the principle focus of their existence. Regardless of whether they practice their communalism as a means or an end, the theory suggests that to remain vital movements must adjust their communal method of organization and often other early practices to meet changing realities and reach old and new objectives. This may include developing beyond a communal stage altogether. First century Jewish Christians in Jerusalem saw the practices not only of their community of goods, but also circumcision and blood sacrifice, abandoned or spiritualized in order for the movement to expand into the Gentile world. Developmental communalism also finds that movements’ communal societies face a disturbing “double-jeopardy threat” to their longevity — whether or not the founding movements adjust their practices and organizational structure. Movements flexible enough may develop beyond their communal stage, a stage that involves the complex difficulties and disciplines required to build and maintain entire communities. In that case, the movement may thrive but lose its communes like the Owenites of Robert Owen. On the other hand, movements may fossilize in their communal form and practices. In this case, they often kill the movement itself as well as its communes like the celibate Harmony Society of George Rapp. Communal societies that defy the double-jeopardy threat to endure, even flourish, over extended periods of time usually evidence recognizable characteristics. Like the Shakers, they may require members to commit to the beliefs and disciplines of a religious or spiritual ideology. If celibate, like Catholic orders, the group must acquire new members from the outside society, often the children of adherents to their larger religious faith. Or, like the Hutterites, they may encourage members themselves to have large families. Some movements that employ communal societies to reach an objective other than living communally for its own sake find their communes extraneous once they have reached that goal. This may come in an ultimate stage of developmental communalism when the outside world has adopted enough of the reform characteristics of the movement’s communal utopias to make their separate existence seem unnecessary. Or it may come when the founding movement achieves a single prime objective. As the Zionist Movement reached its goal of an independent Jewish state when Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the kibbutzim, Jewish settlements Zionists had supported in Palestine for decades, fell into jeopardy. That they have endured for more than six decades since that date is testimony to the kibbutzniks’ commitment to their socialistic ideals and communitarian lifestyle with and without government assistance and despite economic downturns. Developmental Communalism: Contributions of the 20th Century Counterculture Movement Integrate into 21st Century World CulturePerhaps at no time in history before the 1960s had such an array of reform movements and earth-shaking events converged to induce the formation of communes, both to escape the ills of the world and to build model utopias. Frustration with the Vietnam War prompted young people to insist: “Make love not war.” Racial, gender, age prejudice, and injustice produced countering movements for civil rights, feminism, and egalitarianism. Before being shot down in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of creating “the beloved community” of racial equality. Feminist Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine. Lesbians, as well as gay men, were emboldened to found exclusive intentional communities. As the world careened toward a seemingly inevitable atomic Armageddon during the Cold War, the Jesus Movement offered the hope of the millennium, the imminent second coming of Christ which would usher in a utopian kingdom of God on earth. The Shiloh Youth Revival movement that originated in Eugene, Oregon in 1969 set up dozens of communal centers for “Jesus freaks” in cities across America. Young idealists formed a network of North American communal groups called The Federation of Egalitarian Communities that still promotes equality around the globe. John Lennon penned the radical lyrics for his song “Imagine” that became the utopian theme song for the secular youth movement. Tom Hayden stirred the blood of activist protesters in his Students for a Democratic Society to fight for campus rights, agitate for a volunteer army, and demand votes for eighteen-year-olds. While the birth control pill created a revolution of sexual freedom, marijuana and LSD guru Timothy Leary called on would-be utopians to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” The age-old communal method of immediate escape and reform by creating small, partly isolated communities stood ready for an unexpected but massive revival that took not only the general public but communal scholars by surprise. Timothy Miller, the leading scholar of the communes of the 1960s and 1970s, discovered that hundreds of thousands of young people responded almost instinctively to the challenges of their time by creating tens of thousands of youth, hippy, Jesus and other communes. They were members of a rising youth class of the best educated generation in history. Miller noted: American communal history turned a major corner on May 3, 1965, when three persons recently out of college purchased six acres of scraggly goat pasture outside Trinidad, Colorado, and proclaimed the establishment of Drop City. Drop City brought together most of the themes that had been developing in other recent communities — anarchy, pacifism, sexual freedom, rural isolation, interest in drugs, art — and wrapped them flamboyantly into a commune not quite like any that had gone before.Inspired by a lecture of Buckminster Fuller on his revolutionary “geodesic domes,” the Droppers led the way into the architecture of the new age by building colorful dome dwellings from junk car hoods. When they sent him dome pictures, Bucky proclaimed Drop City the winner of his 1966 Dymaxion Award for “poetically economic architecture” and sent them a check for five hundred dollars. Now Bucky’s domes are seen everywhere, gracing EPCOT at Disney World and protecting people at the South Pole. The Beatles’s George Harrison espoused the transcendental meditation panacea of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who set up his ideal communal settlement at Fairfield, Iowa. Ashrams of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISHCON) offered the Asian spirituality of the Hare Krishna movement to countries of the western world. American-born Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati established the interfaith Kashi Ashram at Sebastian, Florida to care for HIV/AIDS victims and to promote peace and healing worldwide. In 1971, San Francisco State College faculty member and spiritual teacher Stephen Gaskin led hundreds of his hippy students and disciples in school buses to settle The Farm community near Summertown, Tennessee. There they became famous for their humanitarian charity projects, midwifery program, ecovillage training center, and vegetarian and peace initiatives. Others joined communal houses and farms of the radical Catholic Worker movement to assist the poor, resist war, and call for social justice. Young spiritual zealots also spun off innovative communes from established Protestant denominations like the pacifistic Mennonite Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois. This unexpected sunburst of intentional communities totally eclipsed previous communal societies in numbers of groups and adherents, especially if we add in the second communal wave of cohousing projects and ecovillages that were founded in the later twentieth century.It is increasingly clear that pioneering concepts and practices from this explosion of communal social laboratories have been integrated into world culture. A developmental process has occurred in which the truly valid innovations from the counterculture and its communes have been adopted by the larger society. This is what marks the early twenty-first century unmistakably as the age of an ultimate stage of developmental communalism. Evidence from Timothy Miller’s 60s Communes Project conducted from the University of Kansas is particularly revealing. From interviews with individuals who lived communally in that era, Miller found that many believe their way of life made a lasting impact on society. These communal utopians were eating natural foods, practicing alternative medical treatments, and seeking the high ideals of peace and love.Miller found that one of the most obvious areas of communal influence is in eating habits. Whole and natural foods were hardly known in modern nations in 1960. Now natural food stores abound and supermarkets offer what was once the fare of hippies — yogurt, tofu, whole-grain bread, and high-fiber vegetables. The Puget Sound Co-Op, once the largest natural food cooperative in the Seattle area, was founded by John Affolter at his intentional community, the May Valley Cooperative. The observations of Omni Mountainskyrainbow, a communitarian (not a part of Miller’s study) now living in the communal Mothership Sanctuary near Eugene, Oregon, are germane on eating habits and other influences that confirm and expand Miller’s examples. On natural foods, Omni comments:Examples of how communities led the way . . . include the whole ‘natural’ aesthetic. ‘Back to the land’ we went, to try organic farming. Now there is a massive network of og (organically grown) farms, farmers’ markets and og products. Even the Walmarts and Safeways are pretending to be green. Natural food is the ONLY growth sector of the food industry for the last 20 years. Even very unnatural products shout ‘green’ and ‘natural’ on their labels. Natural medicine now gets one of every two out of pocket dollars spent on health care in the US. Natural is how we all want to look, act, and feel. This theme pervades our whole culture now.Vedic City, Iowa, the town Maharishis Mahish Yogi incorporated in 2001, banned the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers in 2005, making it the first all-organic city in America. But well before this, the communal Shiloh Family, founded on Christian principles in 1942 in Sherman, New York, pioneered organic agriculture and the marketing of natural foods across the United States. A basic tenant of this community was a diet of unrefined foods grown in fertile soil without synthetic fertilizers. This philosophy was incorporated into their main industry, a bakery that produced organic breads and other baked products. As the demand for their bread increased nationwide, the community eventually produced over a million loaves a year. As explained by Donald Janzen who researched Shiloh Family history:One of the early problems that existed in the organic food industry was linking the producers with the customers. The public was demanding more organically grown foods while the organic farmers were reluctant to produce more without guaranteed markets. To resolve this problem, Shiloh purchased two semi-tractors (one refrigerated) and began hauling organic foods nationwide. Under their specifications, outside companies produced organic foods that were sold under the name Shiloh Farms. To insure their high standards, all food was tested in the Shiloh laboratory so it could be certified as organic. By 1967, the two Shiloh trucks were logging 9,000 miles a month shipping such products as fish from the North Atlantic, honey from Israel, maple syrup from Vermont, potatoes from Ohio, cheese from Wisconsin, and pinto beans from Colorado. As the demand for Shiloh Farms products increased, the community moved to Sulphur Springs, Arkansas to give them a more central shipping location. Eventually the community sold the name Shiloh Farms, and as the number of members decreased it closed the bakery. There is no doubt that Shiloh is among the pioneers to introduce organic foods to the general public and deserves some credit for the popularity it enjoys today.Taking advantage of that popularity, the town of Hardwick, Vermont literally resurrected itself during the last decade by turning to organic farming. Because of its emphasis on local food production, Hardwick now claims to have more organic farms per capita within ten miles of the town than anywhere else in the world. This has produced a thriving local grocery co-op, busy farmers’ market, and a restaurant where almost everything served either grew or grazed on nearby land. Health care is another example of the community movement’s influence cited by Timothy Miller. He points out that the public has largely embraced holistic health and the alternative therapies of chiropractic, naturopathy and aromatherapy. Ina May Gaskin, who has become widely known and respected as the innovative leader of the midwifery program at The Farm, told Miller that interest in home birth in the counterculture, and especially in its communes, has led to much more humane hospital birthing centers. It is not unusual now to experience a home-like atmosphere in hospitals for the birthing process. The People’s Free Clinic in Vermont grew out of a health collective that traveled from commune to commune. Many young people joined communities of the Camphill movement that practices the spiritual anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner and now assists people with mental illnesses and learning disabilities at more than one hundred sites around the world. In 1971, Patch Adams and a group of twenty friends, including two other medical doctors, began the Gesundheit! Institute, a free hospital operating 24 hours a day seven days a week in a six-bedroom house in rural West Virginia. After the Robin Williams film “Patch Adams” appeared in 1998, Gesundheit! became famous. Using humor as a universal medium, Patch has lectured at medical and nursing schools in over sixty-five countries on five continents. Gesundheit! now draws more than 1300 people each year as health-care volunteers or to attend health care system design intensives and health justice gatherings. Its dream is to build a model forty-bed communal hospital with more than sixty beds for its staff and their families and to operate at ten percent of the expense of commercial hospitals. More than a decade into the twenty-first century, health care can be counted as one of the reforms from 60s era communes that gained a foothold in the larger society but for which the ultimate developmental stage is far from complete. Free clinics and affordable health treatment are still desperately needed in both inner city and rural areas. Education is another area in which communal societies have anticipated later trends in the general society. Communal groups have been early adopters of progressive teaching methods, including those of Joseph Lancaster, Johann Pestalozzi, and Maria Montessori. At New Harmony, Indiana alone two communal groups in the early nineteenth century preceded state tax-supported public education by decades. The Harmonists of George Rapp educated both boys and girls in basic academic subjects, music, and the arts, and gave them an apprenticeship, while their parents had access to a library and museum. The children of Robert Owen’s community of equality attended America’s first infant school, Pestalozzian classes of learning by doing, and one of the first schools of industry for learning a trade. Teachers and natural scientists from Philadelphia, who came to New Harmony on a famous “boatload of knowledge,” taught children and adults alike in an atmosphere of free inquiry and open munitarians who set up their own internal academic systems also fully understand the advantages of indoctrinating their children in their social, religious, and political values. In the 1960s, counterculture communal education appeared radical and inadequate and sometimes drew punitive action from the state. When Cold War fear of Communism led Johnny Bob Harrell to found a community near Louisville, Illinois in the early 60s — removing the children on the Harrell estate from public schools was strongly condemned by Louisville authorities. . . . In true communal spirit, [Harrell] believed that he could provide a better education — one that allowed the students to honor the Bible, the flag, and great patriots like ‘George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the late Senator Joseph McCarthy.’ . . . This private school became a test case for the new state compulsory education law which stated that children under age sixteen must attend a public school or one of equal standards. . . . The case attracted national attention when interviews were taped for airing on NBC’s Dave Garroway Show.Whether the compound school would have been adequate cannot be determined because of the immediate and persistent legal challenges leveled against it. [But] the criticism of their methods must be examined within the context of the time. Techniques related to homeschooling that might be called innovative now were called irresponsible then. What was criticized then — none of the teachers were certified, and only Dr. Curtis [a Grayville, Illinois dentist] had a college degree — might be accepted now in cases where the parent is not formally trained as a teacher. One of the teachers was a seventeen-year-old resident of the compound. Her work with the younger students could be compared to the interaction found among siblings in homeschooling. This is also like British educator Joseph Lancaster's Monitoral System used by the Shakers in which older students teach younger students — “Each one teach one.” Modern communalists have been in the vanguard of home schooling. Omni observes that “Alternative schooling methods pioneered in the 70s experiments are now in wide use and no longer considered ‘alternative;’ charter schools are popping up everywhere to push beyond those.” She notes that when her own children grew to school age their town “already had a public school that was organized around all of the learning styles and techniques we saw only in the most radical ‘free’ schools in the 70s.” Education and communication are being influenced by another element from the counterculture communes — networking. Omni reminds us, “In the old days, when a number of our cohorts began calling themselves ‘networkers,’ we shared news and ideas in periodicals called underground newspapers.” She concludes, “This is now known as ‘the internet.’ With the explosion of the information revolution, like-minded people can find each other, coordinate, and perhaps most importantly, just know that they are not alone. ‘We are everywhere.’”Indeed, social-networking and communities of interest in cyberspace are now taken for granted, products of the revolution in electronic technology. Providers like Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Gropon, Twitter, Zillow, and Pandora connect people for every purpose from matchmaking to terrorism. America Online (AOL) welcomes new members into its “community.” We may need to expand the very definition of intentional community itself to recognize that actually meeting in or occupying a physical place can be partly replaced by meeting and dwelling online. However, we must be wary not to mistake communities of interest online with traditional communal societies with their commitment to face-to-face personal fellowship and support based on a lifestyle, ideology, and economic union. Like healthcare and education, other reforms suggest an urgent need for further development. The expression of tolerance, openness, and inclusiveness exhibited in counterculture communes is paramount in the present struggle to achieve multiculturalism, gender equality, and religious toleration. These reforms are more about attitudes and prejudices, and the most important is the need to pursue peace. In a world of nearly constant warfare, communal societies have attempted exemplary models of peace and harmony. From ancient times, they have shown the human spirit in the difficult search for peace and harmony at all levels — individual, community, nation, and world. Many religious and secular communalists have demonstrated the possibility of finding non-violent means of resolving disputes and have urged governments to employ diplomatic solutions in place of bloodshed. Christian communitarian pacifists from the first-century to the Shakers, Quakers, Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites of today have attempted conflict management by means of a formula in Matthew 18:15-17, 21-22. Any offended member is to first take the issue kindly to the offender, then take a third party, and finally to lay it before the community for resolution. Non-sectarian communitarians in the late twentieth century evolved “consensus decision-making” as a process for avoiding conflicts and authoritarian control. Alpha Farm, founded in 1972 in Deadwood, Oregon, was one of the first communes to use and teach this method. All issues of moment are brought before the assembled membership and ideally discussed by everyone until consensus is reached. For Alpha Farm:Consensus, our decision-making process, is also a metaphor for the ideal world we seek to create here—and so help to create in the larger world. We seek to honor and respect the spirit in all people and in nature; to nurture harmony within ourselves, among people, and with the Earth; and to integrate all of life into a balanced whole.Laird Schaub, the executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, has made a career of consensus facilitation since 1987. Dispute management has become a popular topic in businesses and university business schools worldwide. Oriana Noel Lewis, a descendant of Robert Owen who lives in a cohousing community, is a dispute resolution professional. The twentieth century displayed humanity at its best and worst. The bright side of human ingenuity made it a time of marvelous scientific and technological advance while the dark side of human nature made it the bloodiest time ever, wars killing 120,000,000 people, about half civilians. Global nuclear disaster still hangs over civilization as a threatening legacy. Yet major initiatives for peace were launched for which communal societies’ nonviolent witness may claim a measure of influence, although empirical evidence of direct communal influence on the wider world is seldom easy to indentify. With the blessing of the government of India and UNESCO, Auroville was founded in 1968 in southern India as a semi-communal city to promote international peace and goodwill. Based on the vision of Yogi Sri Aurobindo and his close spiritual advisor Mirra Richard (born Alfassa, known as The Mother) its charter declared: “Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.” Its website announces: “Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities.” The Peace Corps celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2011, with more than 200,000 young American volunteers having served as helpers and healers in 139 countries. In 1984, the United States Institute of Peace, an idea first proposed by George Washington, became a reality as an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress with a mandate to help prevent, manage, and resolve international conflict without violence. Koinonia Farm near Americus, Georgia, provides some of the best evidence of a communal society whose pacifism has impacted world culture. Founded amid World War II in 1942 by Southern Baptist preacher Clarence Jordan, its commitment to nonviolence, racial equality, and poverty relief have been felt around the globe. After surviving drive-by shootings by the Ku Klux Klan, Koinonia began building houses for members on the basis of interest-free loans and volunteer labor at the initiative of former millionaire member Millard Fuller. His Habitat for Humanity International grew from this communal start. More than 400,000 homes in over 90 countries have been built or rehabilitated for deserving low-income people by volunteers and donations of money and materials. Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, who live in nearby Plains, Georgia and have long admired the Koinonians’ Christian pursuit of peace and equality, have given the hours and prestige of their labor to many Habitat home-building projects. In 2005, Habitat ranked tenth in income among United States’ charities with almost one and one half billion dollars ($1,500,000,000). Since the projected cost of the Iraq War alone is three trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000), it is instructive to note how many houses Habitat could have built with that inconceivable sum. If the Iraqi population was divided into families of four, Habitat could have built a $422,000 home for each family in Iraq — or a $200,000 home for each such family in Iraq and Afghanistan! Peace-minded communitarians may well ask, “What will it take for humanity to awaken to the power of peace, beat their swords into plowshares, and use their hearts, minds, and resources for construction rather than destruction?” Developmental Communalism: Innovations of the Cohousing and Ecovillage Movements Contribute to 21st Century World CultureAs the communes of the counterculture movement began to see some of their contributions implemented in society, a second communal wave produced full-fledged cohousing and ecovillage movements by the mid-1990s. Cohousing had begun during the 1960s from the “living community” concept in Denmark. Promising to replace the often solitary and alienated life of modern urban centers with the security, sharing, and caring of communal neighborhoods, cohousing was introduced into the United States by architects Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant in 1988. The Cohousing Association of the United States has fostered the growth of the cohousing movement since 1997. Now hundreds of cohousing communities are active in the United States and Denmark and far beyond — from Australia, New Zealand and Canada to Sweden, Germany, France, and Austria. Following the Association’s collaborative housing format, residents are consciously committed to living as a community, most now containing twenty to forty households. They actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods, nearly all of which use consensus for group decision-making. The physical environment encourages social contact while preserving privacy. Residents meet in courtyards, playgrounds, and a common house with a large dining room, kitchen, laundry, lounge, and recreational facilities. Students have adopted forms of cohousing on many college campuses. One of my former students recently volunteered her positive memories of living communally with fifteen to twenty fellow students in a house in Bloomington, Indiana while attending Indiana University. She remembered:We shared everything, food, cleaning up after ourselves. We never argued, we never fought. We took each other to class, we carted one another to locations where one or all needed to get to. We lived happily and successfully in a communal environ. And we benefitted enormously! We were so happy to be together, we had numerous conversations, and with all pitching in on tedious house chores, which I hate, we were able to live this way, take care of each other and share in every joyous aspect of life. So it is proof it can work, it can be done, and there is no doubt about its wonders for all. No one argued, everyone participated. It was the most satisfying time of [my] life before or since. I was 19/20/21. It can work and work fantastically. Both multigenerational and exclusively senior-oriented cohousing are on the increase. Senior citizens are seeking the fellowship and safety of this type of communal living, and not-for-profit and commercial retirement centers now offer facilities that provide the basic benefits of cohousing. The age-specific cohousing model for active elders originated in Denmark and is just now emerging significantly in the United States. Accommodating design features include easy access for all levels of physical ability and possibly studio residences in the common house to provide living quarters for home health aides whose services could be shared by several residents. In 2009, Charles Durrett wrote a justification for senior cohousing. He noted:Last year Americans drove 5 billion miles caring for seniors in their homes (Meals on Wheels, Whistle Stop Nurses, and so on). In our small, semi-rural county in the Sierra foothills, Telecare made 60,000 trips in massive, lumbering, polluting vans-buses — usually carrying only one senior at a time — schlepping a couple thousand seniors total over hill and dale to doctor’s appointments, to pick up medicine, or to see friends. In our cohousing community of 21 seniors, I have never seen a single Telecare bus in the driveway. In cohousing it happens organically by caring neighbors: ‘Can I catch a ride with you?’ . . . ‘Are you headed to the drug store?’ . . . And this alternative is much more fun and inexpensive for all involved, and much less damaging to the environment.Robert Owen was a visionary when he made environmentalism prominent in communal socialism in the early nineteenth century. He placed “pure air” just second to “Kind treatment from birth” in his list of requirements for the good health and happiness of the human race. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Communities magazine devoted ten issues to environmentalism. Its editor, Chris Roth, wrote “ecology is the air we breathe. We can remain unconscious about that only for a while.” The ecovillage movement emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to find comfortable and sustainable living responses to global warming and to replace rapidly diminishing fossil fuels with alternative energy systems. Robert Gilman and his wife Diane helped popularize ecovillages with their 1991 book Eco-villages and Sustainable Communities. The same year, Robert published a definition that became standard: Ecovillages are “human-scale, full-featured settlements in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development, and which can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.” The Farm in Tennessee became an early responder to environmental issues and an early leader in the ecovillage movement. Its now-famous Ecovillage Training Center teaches sustainable methods from strawbale construction to solar panel installation. Its director, Albert Bates, has published books on ecology and is secretary of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, one of several such networks. Thousands of ecovillages in at least seventy countries have joined in pioneering experiments in recycling, composing, conservation, rain water collection and wastewater treatment. They have brought new terms into common usage: “permaculture” (PERMAnant agriCULTURE — the design of human living spaces around environmental principles) and “relocalization” (the revival of local production and local consumption). Permaculture is on the increase in sustainable lifestyles that include solar, wind, and geothermal energy, low-cost natural building materials, organic gardening, and vegetarian diets. Relocalizing is appearing as street-corner farmers’ markets selling seasonal fruits and vegetables and as advertisements from grocery stores that proudly link their produce to local family farms. The solutions of the ecovillage movement to the urgent environmental problems facing today’s world are impressive. Yet these solutions can only be globally effective if they are made increasingly more attractive — less primitive than early ecovillage models — and more available — less expensive than offered by industry thus far. Influential individuals, corporations, and governments must be convinced that ecovillage achievements are practical and economical. J. T. Ross Jackson has used his Gaia Trust to support ecovillages and green enterprises around the world. As a member of the International Advisory Council of the Global Ecovillage Network, he believes that these initiatives are the foundation of a viable twenty-first century civilization. Karen Svensson, co-editor with Hildur Jackson of Ecovillage Living: Restoring the Earth and Her People believes, “Ecovillages embody a way of living. They are grounded in the deep understanding that all things and all creatures are interconnected, and that our thoughts and actions have an impact on our environment.”In a view akin to the idea of an ultimate stage of developmental communalism for the ecovillage movement, Svensson feels that “a good way of restoring the Earth, ourselves and other living beings is to integrate the principles of Ecovillage Living in daily life.” It is undeniable that founders of ecovillages were among the first to arrive at a consciousness of the impending environmental crises and to take decisive action to ameliorate them. Also, it is true that we are no longer startled to see the solar panels, wind turbines, and geothermal energy systems of the green revolution that were once largely confined to experimental ecovillages. Although it is difficult to trace the origin of these influences upon world culture, if the ecovillagers can someday be credited with effecting these changes in the wider world, they will have performed a service worthy of their own utopian dreams. Ted Trainer of the University of New South Wales, Australia has ventured the question “Would it be an exaggeration to claim that the emergence of the ecovillage movement is the most significant event in the 20th century?” And he answers bluntly, “I don’t think so.” Developmental Communalism: Goals of the Late 20th Century Community Movement Merge with 21st Century World CultureIs it possible that the values and innovations of intentional communities from the last several decades are now being integrated so thoroughly into society that the communities no longer need to be thought of as separate or even different from much of today’s culture? This novel idea implies that in a broader dimension of the developmental process we are witnessing the merger of both waves of the communal movement of the late twentieth century into the world culture of the twenty-first century — as the last flourish of an ultimate stage of developmental communalism. Omni Mountainskyrainbow may not have been the first to express this interpretation, but, if not, she has certainly expressed it well. Therefore, this treatment of the concept deserves to carry the impact of her own words and phrases. As she sees it: The goal of the communities of the 70s was to demonstrate prototyped models of living and relating that were different and better than the mainstream culture we grew up in. To do that, we had to separate to some extent from the systems in place at the time. . . . Like little Petrie dishes, we incubated various strains of new lifestyle. Many of the little seed-batches did very well, some didn’t. We never thought of ourselves as separating from each other when we went off to start communities in the country because we grew up with a sense of being part of a huge cohort. It was a strategic withdrawal, temporary and dictated by necessity. We were just trying to get some breathing room. We needed space from the oppressive atmosphere of the then dominant paradigm, not from others of our generation. At the time of the formation of those Petrie dishes, the emergence of a worldwide community was well underway, facilitated by real time media, necessitated by global threats like the atomic bomb, and represented by the iconic image of the whole earth from space. Ours was the first generation in history to grow up with these factors shaping the inborn tendency to imprint the culture of tribe or group. So we grew up with, and imprinted, the whole planet as our home and all people as our tribe. We wanted to do everything different and better. We had, and still have, a clear overall vision. It is a completely alternative paradigm from the mainstream world view of the 50s USA. It is a vision of cooperation instead of competitive social structures, partnership instead of dominator decision making, and sustainable grassroots rather than depletive food and energy systems. But hey, wow, the 50s USA was over 60 years ago! A LOT has changed! And humanity has demonstrated that anything we can conceive of, and decide to do, can be accomplished. Some of those Petri dishes produced such attractive ideas that they were adopted widely and are now mainstream. Most of them, actually. WE ARE THE MAINSTREAM CULTURE OF THE FUTURE! And the future is here. All of the needs that required going off and starting alternative systems are now established in the greater world and available to anyone who searches.The Petrie dishes have all burst, the purpose of their seed developing mechanism having been fulfilled. They have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The good ideas are proliferating and being refined by being shared in real time across all cultural and national boundaries. It is about individual empowerment, freedom, communication and voluntary cooperation, and local innovation and adaptation. It is about peaceful change. It is deeply and profoundly about love. And in many areas, these values and ideas have definitely taken over and flourish today, to the growing benefit of generations that take them for granted, regarding the old ways as barbaric. For example, women’s empowerment, the younger generation’s acceptance of gay relationships, and the huge growth of self actualization techniques. Concern about the environment is no longer a theoretical issue. Electric cars zip around, rooftops are decorated with solar panels, the garbage collectors all take recycling. What was a controversial struggle when I was in grade school, the civil rights movement, is settled policy. We have a black president!Omni suggests that the communal outposts for incubating new ideas have grown into lampposts to illuminate the cultural conversation. “The lampposts now line the routes, the connected networks of communication. The image is like the nighttime view of the whole earth from space with glowing spider webs connecting cities; the whole thing is lighting up!” . . . the 70s communes did not fail and disappear, they became so successful that they merged, and now the values they embodied are blooming worldwide. The need for this is so urgent at this time of ecological crisis that it comes just in time, if that. Not only is there no longer a need to go off and separate from mainstream society, indeed just the opposite is the case now! . . . all of the functions of the isolated alternative community are now being fulfilled in the greater global community. It is time to consolidate and fill in the network that had been forming lo these many decades. That is exactly what is happening. WE ARE NOW CONSCIOUSLY TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WHOLE PLANET.Developmental Communalism: Communal Living Promises Security, Solidarity, and Survival for the 21st Century and BeyondFrank Zappa, the iconic American rock and jazz musician and songwriter whose lyrics reflected his radical views against established social and political processes, structures, and movements, graphically expressed the doubt that effective humanitarian reform could be possible by any means. In May 1993, a few months before his death, he wrote pessimistically:You can sit down and write a prescription for a utopia but then what the hell? You can’t legislate humanism. You can’t make people be nice to each other. You can’t even hardly trick them into it. They’ll do it voluntarily if you take the pressure off them but that costs money. And who’s got the money? People who don’t give a damn. How can you hope? You’re na?ve if you hope. Many shared Zappa’s doubt, yet hope springs eternal in the voluntary, nonviolent communal method of social change. Zappa’s quotation was bravely selected to head the preface of the 1994/1995 issue of The Guide to Communal Living, a publication of the Communes Network in Britain. That preface posed the question directly: “How can we hope?” Then it asserted:Widespread disillusion with conventional politics, and political parties, as a source of hope is leading more and more people to turn to small scale community initiatives . . . . These initiatives are building on the successes (and learning from the failures) of the various experiments in community politics that started in the 1970s. Of those experiments intentional communities – or communes as they were called then – were perhaps some of the higher profile experiments offering prescriptions of utopia, due mainly to media interest in sex, drugs and wholemeal rolls. Can the communes of the seventies (and before) . . . be seen as harbingers of hope?With faith in developmental communalism as theoretical evidence for this hope, the editors reprinted in this issue my 1988 address to the International Communal Studies Association titled “Developmental Communalism: an Alternative Approach to Communal Studies.” In retrospect, the editors showed an uncanny anticipation of the adoption of 1970s communal reforms into the worldwide culture of the twenty-first century—the ultimate, integrative stage of developmental communalism now so evident. In fact, communal living and developmental communalism in all their facets are still very much alive. In the broadest sense, humanity has proven cooperation an essential element in life and civilization from early tribes to modern nations. During times of crises — hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes — we respond instinctively with relief. It is all too easy to forget in good times that none of the roads, public schools, waste disposal, or fire and police protection, could be possible without collective action. We are by nature cooperative and collective as well as contrary and competitive. The small, voluntary social units that individuals and movements periodically form serve as catalysts for change within this larger social fabric. These become experimental laboratories for testing different and perhaps better ways of relating, believing and doing. If they work, the larger society may adopt the most relevant and promising of their reforms as is happening now from the communal experimentation done in the late twentieth century. All the security, solidarity, and survival benefits, which have been the great appeal of communal living for millennia, are just as viable and vitally needed in the twenty-first century. Whether it be security from loneliness or a depressed economy, solidarity in the fellowship of trusted and like-minded friends, or survival from the threats from a warming planet or the pollution and exhaustion of energy sources, communal living in a multitude of forms is relevant to today’s world. In an article in the 2010 Communities Directory titled “Good News in Hard Times,” Laird Schaub, executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, writes that:the promise and hope of community stands out all the brighter in bleak times. In hard times it becomes more readily apparent how a strong social web can also become an economic safety net. When the normal job market is disrupted, many people need to scramble to make ends meet. While some of this may be accomplished with belt tightening (or perhaps buying a new belt), there are more creative options—all of which intentional communities are excellent at fostering: Barter (and non-monetary local economics), Sharing (instead of owning), Economics of scale (buying together), Meeting more of your needs within walking (or biking) distance, [and] Do-It-Yourself (with a little help from your friends). . . . The ultimate security is not a fat bank account (just ask those whose house equity or retirement accounts have dropped precipitously; its relationships. Security is the people who will be there for you when you need help. Like right now. . . . And the beauty of this approach is that it applies just as well when times get better. It turns out that sharing—and figuring out how [to] get along better with one’s neighbors—is always a good idea.BibliographyAuroville. (2011) .Adams, P. (2011) Gesundheit! Institute, phases.Bang, J. (2005) Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities, Edinburgh: Floris Books.Bates, A. (2006) The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers. Carter Center. (2011) about/accomplishments/index.html.Charles, D. (2010) “Vermont Town’s Food Focus Still A Growing Concept.” Association of the United States. (2011) . Communities Directory. (2010) Rutledge, Missouri: The Fellowship for Intentional Community.Gaia Trust. (accessed August 7. 2011). Garrett, D. (2004) “The Johnny Bob Harrell Compound: Church, Commune, or Cult?” Master’s thesis, California State University Dominguez Hills, Dominguez Hills, California.Gilman, R. (Summer 1991) “The Eco-village Challenge,” in IN CONTEXT, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture. Quoted in Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers. Jackson, H. and Svensson, K., eds. (2002) Ecovillage Living: Restoring the Earth and Her People, Foxhole, Dartington, Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom: Green Books Ltd., 3. Jackson, R. (2000) And We ARE Doing It!: Building an Ecovillage Future, San Francisco: Robert D. Reed Publishers. Lockyer, J. (2009) “From Developmental Communalism to Transformative Utopianism: An Imagined Conversation with Donald Pitzer,” in Communal Societies: Journal of the Communal Studies Association, vol. 29/1: 1-14.Meltzer, G. (2005) Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing.Miller, T. (2010) “A Matter of Definition: Just What is an Intentional Community,” in Communal Societies: Journal of the Communal Studies Association, vol. 30/1:1-15.------. (1999) The 60s Commune: Hippies and Beyond, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.Mountainskyrainbow, O. (2011) “From the Personal to the Planetary: How the 70s Communities Set Out to Save the World,” unpublished essay. Copy in the Communal Studies Collection, Special Collections Department, Rice Library, University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, Indiana.Owen, R. (1842) The Book of the New Moral World, New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1970 reprint.Peace Corps. (2011) index.cfm?shell=about.“Permaculture Page.” (2011) The Farm. permaculture. Pitzer, D., ed. (1997) America’s Communal Utopias, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.------. (1978) “Education in Utopia: The New Harmony Experience,” in The History of Education in the Middle West, Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana Historical Society, 74-101. ------. (2009) “Response to Lockyer’s ‘From Developmental Communalism to Transformative Utopianism,’” in Communal Societies: Journal of the Communal Studies Association, vol. 29/1: 15-21.------. (1987) “Patterns in Education in American Communal Societies,” in Communal Life: An International Perspective, eds. Gorni, Y., Oved, Y., and Paz, I., New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 276-277.------. (2009) “Signal Communities in Witness of Peace,” in Restoration Studies: Theology and Culture in the Community of Christ and the Latter Day Saint Movement, vol. 10: 121-134.Pitzer, D. and Tang, J. (October 8, 1994) “The Emergence and Changing Architecture of Community in Cyberspace,” paper presented to the Communal Studies Association Conference, Oneida, New York. Copy in the Special Collections Department, Rice Library, University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, Indiana.Roth, C. (Summer 2009) “Note from the Editor: Ecology and Community,” in Communties, 15.Shafer, C. & Anundsen, K. (1993) “Electronic Communities,” in Creating Community Anywhere: Finding Support and Connection in a Fragmented World. New York: Perigee Books, 131-149.The Guide to Communal Living: Diggers & Dreamers 94/95, Redfield Community, Winslow, Buckinghamshire, UK: Communes Network Publication.United States Institute of Peace. (2011) about-us/our-history. Wann, D., ed. (2005) Reinventing Community: Stories from the Walkways of Cohousing. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing. ................
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