I had decided that I would form a raw foodist only community in Hawaii. Then I was trying to decide whether animal products should be allowed. Then I wondered whether macrobiotic foods would be okay. I couldn't decide any of these things. And I realized that I didn't want to invest my time in a community only to end up changing my views on some integral part of the philosophy.
The only thing I have made my mind up on is this: I want to live in Hawaii, on the Big Island, in a very large ecovillage, on a very large piece of land, with the flexibility to form, leave, and join different philosophical and social groups without leaving the community.
So I had a breakthrough: why not just try to form as large an ecovillage as possible, allowing many different types of people to join? So I decided to create a community that allows anyone to join who is willing to follow the basic guidelines of an ecovillage, and can invest some of their time and money. By appealing to a very large segment of people, we have the best chance of raising significant funds to buy a huge piece of land and form a huge ecovillage. I have seen it done splendidly at Harbin Hot Springs in California and The Farm in Tennessee.
Then I realized that while it would be beneficial to buy land with a large group, I don't have to committ to socializing with all of them. I decided that there could be neighborhoods within the ecovillage. Each neighborhood could have its own philosophies, rules, and even legal structure. In essence, each neighborhood would be its own seperate community. People within it could choose to interact with the other neighborhoods at their will. But since the land will be bought in bulk with the other neighborhoods, they will be adjacent to each other and share a very large common area. This is preferable to simply starting small communities seperately on small tracts of land, and being surrounded by regular neighbors who you have absolutely no intention of ever visiting.
The people in the "neighborhoods" wouldn't necessarily have to relate to the people in the other neighborhoods, however. This is something that we can decide on ahead of time. Are we going to buy land together and then form totally independent communities? Or will the communities be independent yet share a large undeveloped common greenspace parcel? Or will the communities actually be neighborhoods within one large Ecovillage? To what degree will the central board of the ecovillage manage the neighborhoods, if at all?
So we have the following questions:
1. Do we want to live near each other? Are you willing for your community to be adjacent to a community with a different belief system than yours? Would you feel better knowing that your neighbors are just regular Americans who are at least are just living the way they are told. Would that be better than living next to an intentional community that actually has conciously chosen to follow some systems that may be in opposition to yours?
If you are willing to live next to a group with a different belief system, great! Then if we get enough people like you we can proceed with the project. If, however, we have to try to agree to a pretty strict belief system, then we may not get enough people to create a large ecovillage. We would have to create much smaller communities, perhaps. There is nothing wrong with this. It can be nice to have an isolated small community that believes what you do. But my goal here is to see if there are people with a desire to form a larger group of communities.
2. We also have to decide to what degree the communities will have a shared legal structure. Will there be a central ecovillage board that has power to enforce such agreements as noise control, ecology, etc. Or will each community be entirely self regulating? Will there be shared greenspace between communities?