230 people living communally on 175 acre eco village [video]
I live in an eco village in Australia and I could probably share some insight I guess.<p>(((( EDIT: in case it&#x27;s not clear; I totally love the idea behind it, but I&#x27;m trying to paint the picture that it&#x27;s not as glorious as it seems on paper; I personally think it needs a lot more of a structure (I lean conservatively), and I&#x27;m currently building an internal website&#x2F;platform to try and unify many of the free-spirits that live here; otherwise people just do whatever they want and step all over each other. People move here because it&#x27;s nice to be here, but they have their own version of ideals. )))))<p>My wife&#x27;s family started it a number of years ago. Very green&#x2F;eco-conscience values, and so made an eco-village of 5-6 acres housing 22 houses (and about 65 residents afaik).<p>We&#x27;re a little oasis in the middle of suburbia, surrounded by trees, native plants and habitats, and a growing vegetable garden; it&#x27;s very lovely to live and work in.<p>Unfortunately, people have moved in who are more fundamental than the ones who actually went through the trouble of building it, so they have totally unrealistic expectations or ideas, and that&#x27;s ALL they have. -- It&#x27;s entirely down to my wife&#x27;s family (and me by extension) to maintain it. People love to keep saying how human societies are &quot;naturally altuistic&quot; and will &quot;naturally co-operate&quot; but it&#x27;s entirely not the case.<p>- The people who are more likely to move here are the fundamentalist types, leading to strong opinions and personalities. A lot of them like to drink and throw random parties &#x2F; fire-pits.<p>- A lot of normal people move here because they have families and full jobs. They have NO INTEREST in digging holes or putting up fences &#x2F; other structures, over weekends. They are just here because it&#x27;s a lovely place to be. fully supportive though, just not interested in helping out.<p>- Some are free spirited and so won&#x27;t follow rules. One recently got a dog (not allowed because it endangers the natural wildlife we try and re-habituate on the property) - Another will buy a massive air-con system (against principles because we were trying to be an &quot;eco-village&quot; so there&#x27;s certain efficiency requirements and etc). - people will just break the rules and not really care. (The one who got a dog, just last year got a cat, but didn&#x27;t like the cat anymore, so they just let the cat run wild. Guess what happened to the lovely wagtail birds and other native&#x2F;rare wildlife we spent so long in making a suitable home for.)<p>- We don&#x27;t have any repercussions for breaking rules. &quot;consensus&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean anything if random people move here.<p>- Not everyone gets along. Currently there&#x27;s explosions of arguments because of different gardening styles that leads to tears and destroyed garden beds.<p>- One of the fundamentalists who moved here is really hung up on the idea that the original brochure for the place suggested that we could potentially grow 30% of our food usage in the community gardens - despite not helping to produce food, at all, and being one of the ones who argues the most about differing gardening styles (and potentially sabotaging).<p>- Currently my wife is one of the few people who actually works in the garden. We&#x27;ve planted garlic because we get a good 2-300kg of garlic a year and it&#x27;s relatively low maintenance for the number of hands in the garden we have (3-4 people spend 2 hours, once a month,  wife and her family are the only ones that work every other day in the community gardens because it&#x27;s part of the original vision).<p>- instead of gratitude for the (legitimately delicious) fresh garlic, it&#x27;s rather &quot;wtf I can&#x27;t eat a dinner plate full of garlic&quot;. - We also grow bananas, cherries, strawberries, zuchini, eggplant, tomato, host of other food. most of it spoils because no one eats it. (previous fundie won&#x27;t eat it because it might admit she&#x27;s wrong in whatever argument she&#x27;s currently having with my wife).<p>- a few don&#x27;t believe in &quot;hierarchy&quot; so (in their mind) we&#x27;re not allowed to have a maintenance team, garden team, etc. We regularly get massive repair bills to fix up pools and other things because any attempt of organising preventative maintenance is something they&#x27;re fundamentally against because it implies XYZ maintenance efforts are more important than making sure everyone is the same level.<p>- One of them keeps asking everyone to go skinny dipping in the pool. &quot;bring your kids!&quot; etc.<p>I only came into the picture recently and I&#x27;m a lot more conservative leaning politically, I think my wife sees it as a bit of a fresh air; and I seem to have a knack for talking to everyone; so at the moment I&#x27;m doing a lot of refereeing and crisis management to make sure that people can get along. I&#x27;m also aiming to build a bit of an organisation platform so that there&#x27;s no more &quot;NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO LEAD&quot; arguments;<p>It will forever be &quot;a great idea&quot; and &quot;totally going to work this time&quot; &#x2F;s