The eco-village movement: Divorced from reality

Further to my article "Leaving Utopia" and in response to Ted Trainer's contribution in this issue, a clarification of the history of the Eco-village movement is needed. Eco-villages are not synonymous with either alternative communities or what Ted calls the "Simpler Way". The so-called Global Eco-village Movement (GEN) had its beginnings in the early 1990s. Ross and Hildur Jackson, the founders of Gaia Trust (an ecologically focused charitable entity based in Denmark), concluded that to further the "movement towards sustainability" the world needed "good examples of what it means to live in harmony with nature in a sustainable and spiritually-satisfying way in a technologically-advanced society". These good examples they decided would be called "eco-villages".[1]. Adapted from the source document.