In-Class Report: Living Well and Living Lightly

Here’s the link for your perusing pleasure: http://www.livingroutes.org/

The very-talkative founder and director is Daniel Greenberg and here’s the contact for the marketing and admissions director: Gregg@livingroutes.org

Ecovillages, with a capital “E”

Living Routes is an educational nonprofit, anchored at Amherst and extending out to upwards to 2000 so-called “Ecovillages” around the globe. There is the “top down” community, which is Western-inspired and already well-to-do, and then there is the “bottom-up” community, which is instead indigenous and already without a carbon footprint. Both communities, it seems, aim at an ecologically-acceptable middle ground ideal sustained by “high quality lifestyles” and a “low ecological impact.”

All things considered, Living Routes is relatively young: it’s been in business since 1999 and has just recently welcomed its 1000^th alumni.

Tracing the Trajectory From “Village” to “Ecovillage”

It’s curious first that these “Ecovillages” are self-identified and next that there is nothing particularly cutting-edge about them. There are more efficient wind farms and better organic agriculture elsewhere, but there is a nonetheless a really attractive pragmatism and simplicity to the actually sustainable practices there, like toilets that compost instead of flush. Of course these places aren’t going to be utopious, but I’d argue that what works is better than what’s cutting edge and from whatever is sustainable and affordable we could surely learn a thing or two.

What we can first learn is that there isn’t a threshold for identifying or disidentifying your own community as a “sustainable” one. What’s “high quality” and what’s also “low impact” for cities in Scotland and likewise for villages in South India is sure to fluctuate about some non-arbitrary continuum that's almost entirely dependent on things that actually play out in terms like freshwater withdrawal rates per capita per year.

Even without any real criteria for identification, however, the bottom line is this: however developed or developing these communities are, within them there must be “enough going on” so that even we--we students and we youth and we future movers and shakers--can come in and help but making sure that in the process we do not “disturb” what’s already there. To me, this is calling for another youth-as-leaders-of-today-for-tomorrow in much the same way that Green Eats week star Pollan called for “food eaters” to unite.

Even if the program has done the world at least some good--and it has--there's still no getting around the very palpable connection to the Bright Green “privileged-consumers-not-wanting-to-feel-like-bad-people" Principle.

It also seems way more bizarre than it does democratic that these "Ecovillages" are located in a substantial number of “developing” places. It is this fact, among others, that to me produces the loudest traffic between technology and nature. If it's developing an infrastructure without disturbing the immediately-surrounding natural habitat that these communities want, then it's the proliferation of all technologies (even if the majority actually function as things like composting toilets) that they get. For me, the claim that more technology is necessary for people to live more lightly is just as absurd as the claim that technology can ever make nature more natural in the first place.

That “A Ha!” Moment

For Living Routes founder and director Daniel Greenberg, thinking up the idea for this program was almost accidental. He was busy pursuing his degree at Cornell in Electrical Engineering and gave up technology when he realized he “liked kids” more than he liked being on the cutting-edge. So in grad school he studied child development and for his research traveled with his then-partner (now wife) to communes across the U.S. It’s not surprising that he admitted to learning more "the day he stepped foot on the soil in a community" than he had in years of surely-painstaking doctoral research.

So here you have it, folks, THE greener way to study abroad as done with Living Routes.