Communities magazine – Life in Cooperative Culture

Green building could be our salvation or hasten our destruction, depending on what we pursue and how. Here are a dozen suggestions to make the former more likely.

At this cooperative ecovillage, the barn is magical, a space that will make a liberating special meeting area, meditation nook, reading loft, and more…once, after nine long years of building, it is done.

Yes, you can build your own house; you don’t have to do it alone; you don’t have to do it all…and 18 more tips from a professional builder who learned his trade at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

Having built the strawbale house of her dreams, a Tolstoy Farm resident encourages others to use natural building and eco-materials to construct durable, nontoxic, low-impact, energy-efficient, and creative structures.

Eco-building in community offers both opportunities and challenges, benefits and potential drawbacks, as compared to doing it alone.

Becoming a general contractor for a project way beyond one’s abilities can be a powerful, humbling, community-building learning adventure, especially when the house is made of horse manure.

For reasons both practical and ideological, intentional community has long been a hotbed of eco-building activity. In Communities’ “Eco-Building” issue (Summer 2018, #179), authors share their eco-building journeys, ranging from nearly-free stick-framed shelters to high-end green developments. They examine how to assess whether a building is actually “eco,” hard choices they’ve needed to make, the benefits and challenges of taking on eco-building projects in community, or of retrofitting vs. building new, and much more. Once again, the issue is available via free/by donation digital download at ic.org/communities.