As our village grows there are more opportunities for all of you out there to learn from us and at the same time find out more about our ecovillage.  Attend workshops on natural building, dance, food preservation, and sustainable culture leadership, and see first hand how we are creating a model for a more sustainable world. Our workshops are organized by different people at DR, so you’ll have to contact the organizers to find out more about registration,  accommodations, and details about the workshops themselves. See the links below for each workshop category. Hope to see you at Dancing Rabbit this season!

Natural Building

Timber Frame Workshop  June 10-25, 2012

Students will spend 2 full weeks at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage learning the historic craft of timber frame construction using mortise and tenon joinery, as well as experiencing and learning some of the fundamental connections between building structure, design, and sustainable lifestyle alternatives.

Straw Bale Workshops  July 22-August 2, 2012

Students will spend 10 days at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage learning the fundamental craft of straw bale construction, as well as plastering techniques with clay and lime, creating artistic embellishments, and more.

Ecovillage Design

Ecovillage Education US:Sustainable Culture Leadership Training  June 29-August 5, 2012

Ecovillage Education is a 5-week trans-disciplinary, experiential program set within one of the US’ leading ecovillages. Develop your capacity for creating or enhancing communities and projects using social, economic and ecological sustainability lessons learned in the worlds’ most sustainable communities.

Dance

The recently opened Casa de Cultura at Dancing Rabbit is hosting two dance weekend workshops this year.  The first Off-Grid Blues Weekend held last fall was a great way to break in the dance floor at the Casa de Cultura, and it was a blast for participants.  This year there are two dance weekends planned.  Check out the links below for more information on the workshops.

Contra Culture  April 27-29, 2012

“Contra Culture” will be a unique blend of Ecovillage and Contra Dance community cultures.

Off-Grid Blues   September 21-23, 2012

Off Grid Blues is a community-focused dance event. Some of the best dance instructors in the nation will be there to share their knowledge and love of dance with you.

Food Preservation

Putting Up the Harvest – Canning Fruit and Vegetables
Three sessions: July 7th, August 4th, September 15th, 2012

Join us for a food preservation workshop where you’ll get hands-on experience in an atmosphere where questions are encouraged and confidence gained. With a focus on both safety and flavor, we’ll go step by step from beginning to delicious end. Includes six hours of hands-on instruction, lunch, canning tools, recipes and samples to take home and share.

I’ve been wanting to do an article about the many different lifestyle and infrastructure changes we as individuals have made at DR to reduce our impact on the planet.   Fortunately, the Milkweeds wrote just such an article for their blog, Ecovillage Musings.  Like they say in their post, outside of the 6 covenants we live by here at DR,  everyone chooses how far they will go to shrink their footprint.  This is their story, and if I can convince some others to talk about their lives, I will post more stories here.  If you want to find out a little about how Thomas lives, or lived a few years back, check out this video.

Link to the article

Catching up on some reading during low power

Sara Peters contributed this post to the blog in the theme of enriching our lives by living more sustainably. 

It is November 29 and nine days ago I checked the battery voltage for our mini-grid solar power system and AHHHHH!, it was LOW. After running around to the four other houses that are affected when we shut off our system, I switched the inverter off. The weather forecast promised sun in just two short days. We would be back into a voltage range for limited use of lights and computers in no time! Forecasts are educated guesses and no matter how educated the guess, it can still be wrong. 

We had no power the first few days and then turned the inverter on for limited use of computers and internet for two hours a day. Limiting ourselves these ways and a minor input of watts even on gray days helped bring our battery voltage out of the danger zone and keep it out. And on the ninth day the sun is shining! 

One might not think folks at an ecovillage would be very computer reliant. Well you haven’t been to Dancing Rabbit in the last few years. I am guessing here, but likely close to half of our group decisions are made via email. If you want to be in the know about what events are happening, checking email daily or even multiple times a day is the thing to do. Like much of the broader society, folks here connect with friends and family and keep up with current events via email, facebook, twitter, online news sources, etc. In fact, regular facebook users in our midst know far more about what others here are up to than a comparative Luddite like myself can discover from just chatting with folk on the path. 

So when the available power gets low, what do a bunch of internet addicted ecovillagers do? First, we panic. How will we get our work done? (some of us earn our income via the internet.) Committee work can come to a standstill with no way to send out proposals and no one able to  respond to them. And what will some of us do without regular twitter updates on the Occupy Movement?! Then, we light candles, open those books we have been meaning to read, visit with our neighbors, play games and put puzzles together. People host events with acoustic music or gather for low power use events like listening to podcasts and discussion after. We commune with each other. 

Living with an off-grid solar power system can mean some inconveniences at times. It can mean examining, somewhat uncomfortably, how we use technology. It helps open our eyes to unhealthy patterns and gives us renewed appreciation for living in community. It shows us how rich and full life can be without twitter (gasp!). 

NOTE: Change is in our midst. Better Energy for Dancing Rabbit (BEDR), a grid-inter-tie, alternative power cooperative serving Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, has come online. Several buildings including our common house now have far more regularly reliable power. Many buildings still maintain off-grid systems. As our access to regularly available electricity shifts, so too will our culture and our opportunities to re-learn what it is like to be without. I wonder what that will be like?

This is the second of two articles I wrote on sustainable economy at DR about 2 years ago.  Some of the information may be a little outdated, such as the electrical grid references.  We are now hooked up to the power grid (and feeding power back into it), though we are still not on the water or heating grid.  Most information is still relevant though.  If you haven’t read the previous article, look here.  Just a disclaimer–these articles are my thoughts and opinions and do not represent the views of everyone at DR.   My goal is to get people thinking about these things.

While nibbling on some organic crackers recently, I noticed a note on the box stating that the manufacturer buys renewable energy credits. My first thought was “I wonder why they don’t fit their entire production facility to run on renewable energy instead of just buying credits?” Wouldn’t that be a bigger step towards making their business sustainable? Going through the process of planning a sustainable land-based business at DR I’ve been learning the answer to this question.

Nearly every step of every process of production in the global economy is destructive to the planet, and it’s not surprising. The market values profit over sustainability. In our economy, it’s a rare forest that is worth more quietly growing in its ecosystem than cut up into lumber or paved over with a housing development. And often the easiest, most profitable business practices are the most destructive to the environment.

At Dancing Rabbit we follow our covenants and guidelines to reduce our everyday impact on the planet, yet many of us depend on the unsustainable economy outside DR for our income and many of our basic needs. As well, the global economy provides us sustainable technologies that we cannot manufacture ourselves, like solar power systems. Living a sustainable lifestyle as individuals is one step in creating a sustainable society, but building an economy where sustainability comes before profit is vital to our goal of saving the planet. A lot of rabbits, me included, feel that building a sustainable economy means producing our basic necessities locally and if possible within DR. This way we can be certain that the products or goods we are using at least meet our covenants for sustainability. As well, with locally made products the environmental impacts of transportation are eliminated. We can imagine a village much like in the old days with a baker, a cheesemaker, a shoemaker, etc, with our staples produced and traded here. This doesn’t mean we would isolate ourselves from any part of the economy outside our community or that we have to be building our own solar panels, but until the wider economy becomes more sustainable, we should contribute to it as little as possible, unless our contribution is in offering sustainable alternatives.

One major step towards this future is creating viable land-based businesses. Doing this will connect our community and our livelihood to our land, something we should be intimately familiar with if we are to live sustainably. If we build businesses along the same covenants and guidelines that guide our personal lives, we can create a sustainable economy. When we can produce staple products and offer basic services for ourselves using sustainable practices, we will truly be making a difference. By trading or using local currency we can exchange these goods and services independent of the outside, unsustainable economy. We do this now to some degree with Elms, our local currency, but this remains a small trade (in terms of what we consume) in products and services actually produced by those at DR.

In the same way that living sustainably here can be challenging, starting and running a sustainable business at DR presents challenges that businesses in the unsustainable economy do not have to worry about. Running up against these difficulties, I wonder if a truly sustainable production business can be viable here (or anywhere right now in the global economy). For one, building and maintaining simple overhead here is a major investment, even for a very small business. In the unsustainable economy, starting a business might be a matter of renting a space that provides a production area, utilities, customer traffic, etc. It can also involve the purchase of a production facility, but even then, getting power, water, cooking fuel, and climate control is only a matter of plugging into the grid. Here at Dancing Rabbit all these things businesses normally take for granted impart huge start-up costs on the would-be entrepreneur. Granted, after the initial investment businesses would not have to pay a utility bill, only for upkeep of the system, but even over the long term, renewable energy by and large costs much more than energy from fossil fuel. Another factor to consider is that all the things that the larger economy relies on to function, such as electricity and refrigeration, are much more unpredictable at DR. The more predictable you would like them to be, the more it will cost you.

Creating a successful business is hard enough when you have the luxuries of a fossil fuel economy at your disposal. The fact that this kind of overhead is so cheap accounts for the low cost of many products in the global economy. When you invest in sustainable technology and business practices, you have to pass the extra cost on to the consumer. These sustainable practices have to be valued enough by the consumer for them to want to pay extra for them. If that cracker company were to retrofit their production plant to run on renewable energy, it’s possible their products would be priced out of the market, which is why they buy energy credits for a portion of their power needs instead. If its customers were willing to pay more for their product so that the company could run entirely on renewable energy, the company could be more sustainable. In this way sustainability would come before profit. Of course, this outcome is determined by the consumer, not the business.

But creating a sustainable business is not just a matter of replacing unsustainable business practices with sustainable versions of the same practices. There are many things a business just could not do without cheap fossil fuel. Imagine running a facility with several thousand square feet of deep-freeze storage on solar panels. It would simply not be possible. Even running a typical restaurant walk-in cooler would be a major power system investment. An economy adapts to what it has to work with, and ours has adapted to the abundance of fossil fuel. These resources make it possible for the global economy to function on the scale and at the speed at which it functions, but if they were taken away it would crash and burn.

Then there’s the unpredictability factor mentioned earlier, which comes from having your power supply determined by the weather. You can’t just plug into unlimited power or water as you can with the grid. At DR there are times in the year when there is no power left in the village. If you want to be sure you will have a lot of power, you can buy more panels and batteries, or use wind to supplement your solar, but larger capacity means more overhead. And even then, you can run out. One change we have recently decided to make, allowing grid-tie at DR, will pretty much eliminate the unpredictability of power supply (at least outside of the grid going down). Having reliability in water supply, however, is something that can’t be changed if we want to continue to use water in a sustainable manner. Because we try to catch all the water we use from the sky, a drought could limit a business’ ability to produce.

An Example: A tofu business

To give an example of the difficulties in planning a business here, I offer my tofu business idea. Tofu is a vegetable-based protein source a lot of people at DR would like to be able to eat on a regular basis. We don’t have any local source of fresh tofu, though it can be bought at Zimmerman’s for about $2.30 for a pound block in a sealed plastic container. Because tofu is in high demand and short supply and because fresh homemade tofu is far superior to store-bought tofu, I once thought starting a tofu business could be a good idea.

Immediately, I ran up against difficulties. First, making tofu requires a large amount of clean water, not just in the production process, but also in the cleaning of the equipment and production area. Since wells and county water are not as sustainable as rainwater catchment, to get this water I would need a cistern to collect rain, and I would need a roof to direct the rain into the cistern. This roof could be on the top of the production facility, which could be a small structure, but it would have to have a big enough roof to collect enough water to meet the demands of tofu production. I would also need an electric pump.

The tofu making process involves soaking the beans, which obviously requires water. Then the soaked beans are pureed in hot water. Large scale tofu production is made much easier by the use of special equipment that would need a lot of electricity, which would mean investing in a solar or wind power system. Hand grinding that many pounds of soybeans would take all day. The heating of the water and subsequent heating of the soymilk would require some kind of fuel. Here at DR we are allowed to use propane for cooking (but not heating water), but this is a fossil fuel, so ideally I would find another option. Wood cooking is probably the best bet, though I’d have to have a system that would allow me to carefully control the heat since soymilk scorches easily. Wood was likely the fuel used in tofu making for hundreds of years before fossil fuel. It would be possible to build a wood heated steam system such as Sandhill uses for it’s sorghum syrup. And in some countries, people are recapturing methane from landfills or human waste biogas systems. Both of these options would require a major investment in infrastructure. If I wanted to make larger batches at a time, which would be more efficient and reduce labor costs, I could refrigerate the product until it was sold to the consumer, but that would potentially take a major investment in power and refrigeration. I’m sure that by now you get the idea that sustainability offers plenty of challenges. Given the start-up investment I figured I’d have to charge many times more than the going rate.

Other Challenges

There are many other handicaps in establishing a small producer business here, many of them having to do with finding a market. Our location in rural Missouri, far from any metropolis, in many ways limits our market. It’s questionable as to whether we have enough people living at DR to support production businesses right now. Still there are things our small population needs that some new business could be based on. One problem is that many here may see the high price of sustainably produced products as beyond their means. Would people here pay $8 for a pound of tofu? Maybe, if we understood what it means to creating a sustainable economy. I think that by isolating ourselves from the mainstream economy, we will set our own values for products. The value will be based on our need for something, not on the going rate in the unsustainable economy. Why should we be unwilling to pay more for a product that is sustainably produced here just because we can get it cheaper at Wal-mart thanks to fossil fuel and cheap Third World labor? Why shouldn’t we pay $12 for a quart of organic home-canned tomato sauce? On the other hand, products like TVs can be expensive at big box stores, but they have almost no value here at DR. So if our economy values tomato sauce more than TVs people will be more willing to spend the extra money on tomato sauce. The barter economy and local currency would also help establish an alternative system of valuing products and services, by requiring that things be valued by comparison of their necessity here at DR.

Still our population may be too small to support a business and we will have to find customers outside DR. Bringing our products to the larger, unsustainable economy would help make it more sustainable. One way to do this is to bring customers here. Our location has one advantage in that each year people come from all over wanting to find out what we are doing here. This flow of tourists will only increase as we grow and add more attractions, such as a bed and breakfast, a winery, or a natural building school, and will be vital to the building of our economy.

Another option is to distribute our products to the larger market. It’s possible that in the future we could have some cooperative truck for shipping our goods regionally, or we could cooperate with Sandhill, who have a large distribution that carries their products all over the country. Outside of this option we would have to deliver the products ourselves using a DRVC vehicle. To keep the miles off our products it would be ideal to have them travel as little as possible and have our customers travel as little as possible to buy them. But unless we can tap into a larger customer base, our businesses may be limited to a market that is too small to sustain them.

Unfortunately, transportation is not the only difficulty in selling to a larger market. Finding a market outside DR will probably be harder than finding a market within–how can we produce at a price that can compete with products made with unsustainable practices? There is presently a high-end market for organic, sustainably and responsibly produced goods, but products made here would likely be more expensive than these goods because of our added “handicaps”. These “handicaps” could be marketing assets if we can get customers to value them. The question is how far this will get us. Some government grants and tax breaks for sustainable practices could help subsidize new businesses here, but these sources of funding are variable and never something to be counted on. Any way you look at it, high operating expenses are often a reality of sustainable production and if consumers aren’t willing or able to pay them for basic necessities, we won’t be able to build a sustainable economy.

One hope for competing in the global economy is that the rising price of oil will increase food and other product prices such that sustainably-made products can compete. Also likely is that our sustainable economy will adapt to what it has to work with. We will figure out the things we can and can’t do and we will develop new, more efficient and sustainable ways to produce the things we want to produce. One other advantage we have is that we are not as greedy as most entrepreneurs these days who require not just a profitable business, but exorbitant profits for themselves and their stockholders. Though we don’t have the economies of scale, we aren’t greedy so it’s likely we could sell products at more competitive prices than some high-end companies whose products are made with slave labor.

At our retreat this year (two years ago now) it was mentioned that DR will be paying off many of its major debts in the next five years. Besides necessary capital investment in infrastructure such as new common buildings, visitor housing, and roads, we would be wise to invest in our sustainable economy. Offering loans or even grants to DR members to start businesses that provide basic necessary goods and services would be a great way to ease the burden of starting up a business here. Building a business incubator space is another idea for building capacity for small businesses. Another option for reducing the start-up costs of small businesses is to incubate them on the grid in Rutledge and move them to Dancing Rabbit when they have grown enough to afford the capital costs of running the business more sustainably here.

Though often we as environmentalists look askance at the notion of business, our economy provides us the things we need to live. We can’t ignore it. If we don’t embrace it as part of our model for more sustainable living, we will continue to contribute to the unsustainable economy and turn a blind eye to the impact we are having on the planet.

Who thought the concept of combining human feces and water was a good idea?  Since these two were brought together on a mass scale in the flush toilets of the world, our water has never been the same and our waste has just gone to waste. 

 Alline just posted this great article about composting toilets on her blog Ecovillage Musings.  Check it out.

Ted and daughter Aurelia bring home the harvest

Written by Ted Sterling
[Recently printed in Communities Magazine, issue #151, Intimacy]

Since first I met Dancing Rabbit founder Tony Sirna at the Communities Conference in Willits, CA in 1998, I have understood that the “village” part of ecovillage here was meant as more than a euphemism. Dancing Rabbit was intended to be more or less like the village of popular conception– small, rural, surrounded and supported by agriculture and practical arts, and made up of villagers whose lives would doubtless be intertwined in many ways.

When I subsequently arrived at Dancing Rabbit for an internship in July 2001, I found a small (at that time, members numbers perhaps 10, and the village hosted upwards of 20 interns over the warm season) group of people with a lot of commitment to a beautiful vision. It was not a village yet. It did feel intimate, in the ways that we all worked together and relied on each other to feed ourselves, survive in our tents, and share very little sheltered space while trying to build some of the first structures. We were pioneering. Intimacy was born out of necessity, though aided by common purpose.

I met my future partner Sara, another intern at the time, that first morning as I reconnoitered the budding village. I had been deeply missing the intimacy of a close relationship prior to my arrival, and felt deep gratitude to the world and to circumstance when I quickly found that intimacy. Within a few weeks we were sharing a tiny tent in a field of tall grass. Within a couple months, I was beginning to think seriously that I might like to spend the rest of my life with her. This July we’ll celebrate 10 years together alongside our five-year-old daughter Aurelia.

At the time of that 1998 conference, I had already lived five years in the student coops in Berkeley, mostly in the coop known as Lothlorien. The intimacy of that setting was like a drug to me; we cooked beautiful vegetarian food for each other, cleaned for each other, created and took part in elaborately prepared social events, sometimes fell in love with our house mates, and even studied together occasionally. It was the parallel education to my academic pursuits, and turned out to be the more important for me. I was hooked on the intimacy with my community mates that came from living in such close proximity and sharing so many events both routine and unusual in one of the most formative moments of our collective lives.

Sadly I began to see that I was facing an end to that particular intimacy; transience is built into the BSC (Berkeley Student Coops) experience, since you must be a student to live in them and are allowed only one grace semester. Lothlorien (my then home) possesses amazing cultural coherence under the circumstances, but at that time I agonized over the loss of important house members every year as they graduated (or moved into private housing, the wisdom of which I thought dubious at best). The pain of it was visceral. The idea of starting my own community, based on good land that I’d never have to leave, offered salvation for my particular torment, and grew deeply rooted in my dreams.

I worked on organic farms, homesteaded for a year, traveled around the world and across the US in search of community in its many forms as my desire for a more permanent home increased. At first that five-month stay in northeast Missouri seemed just another stepping stone to me. I still pictured mountains and forest and perhaps the ocean or a big river looming not far off in the distance when I dreamed about my own community. Sara was more sanguine than I about Dancing Rabbit, but indulged my fantasies so far as to begin looking for land with me in the Appalachians.

Then one day, home alone at our temporary abode in some quiet (and lonely) woods on the Maine coast while Sara was off visiting friends and family for a few weeks (including at Dancing Rabbit), it hit me: I could spend the next 10 years trying to start my own community, hoping I had enough charisma to attract others and instill dreams of community similar to mine in them; or I could give it a go in an existing community where I knew it was possible to do all or most of what I dreamed of, and spend the next 10 years doing instead of trying. Sara already thought Dancing Rabbit was the way to go, and I realized that if I really wanted community to succeed, I ought to support existing communities instead of splintering the energy still further.

We wrote a fateful letter to Dancing Rabbit, and arrived as members in April 2003. In the intervening years I have learned a great deal of intimacy. To be sure, my understanding and experience of closeness in a partnership with one person dwells in a different realm now than it did then. Alongside Sara I have stretched and molded the rudimentary sense of fulfillment in love I began with into a glittering, jeweled orb of deepest intimacy. We have changed each other, grown individually and together, built a house, birthed a child, and much else.

Without the supporting web of context, however, I cannot imagine having traveled so far or with such meaning. Dancing Rabbit and our neighboring communities Sandhill Farm and Red Earth Farms provide that context, and I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to fully appreciate the fathomless depths of intimacy inherent in building a village in all its lurid detail from scratch with 30-1000 friends and acquaintances. Whether by upbringing or predilection, I did not begin with a deep appreciation of intimacy beyond that of family or lover. I always thought of myself as having friends, but in retrospect I hardly understood what friendship really meant.

Friday night community dinner at Dancing Rabbit

In our village I sooner or later see my community mates in nearly every shade of their existence. I do not have to share a bed or income with most of them to see it. We are building a pedestrian-based village whose human zone is “thickly settled”, to borrow a New England term. Between one dwelling and the next a frog often requires no more than a few leaps. In hot summer weather when the barriers between inside and out fade to nothing, I can hear my neighbors snoring, having sex, arguing, cooking, and just about everything else related to the act of living. It is both startling to my staid American sense of propriety and independence, and at the same time deeply humanizing.

These observations are perhaps nothing remarkable to a city dweller, but there is a certain anonymity to city life; the individual typically leaves those unintentional intimacies of home for work, play, commerce, and so on, losing his- or herself in the multitude.

Here at Dancing Rabbit, I share limited space in often-cooperative facilities with my neighbors, and beyond the village are farm fields and forests. I may dine in an eating coop with them, share shower facilities, build compost piles with buckets of their mixed excrement, dive naked into the pond to cool off alongside them, grow, sell, trade, and eat produce with them, share a ride to town with a handful of them, sit through and participate in every conceivable form of meeting with them, find myself in conflict and its resolution with them, quietly lust after them, build a house with them, cry, laugh, run, scream or die with them. I will also just watch them do many of these things. I share myself and so do they. Some more than others, but you cannot really hide from anyone here.

This is not the first time I’ve felt like I was re-learning and experiencing a life that was commonplace to the vast majority of my ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Yet for all that, I never experienced a tenth of it before deciding to embroil myself in the exquisitely mundane daily realities of this particular place and collection of people.

Before living in community, I found it very easy to play the mental game of comparing myself favorably to the blind, benighted masses of the world who didn’t care or didn’t know better about whatever it was I was concerned with (and whom I didn’t know). Since rooting myself in this intimate setting, I have found that game far harder to play, because I daily observe a much broader range of human behaviour and foibles than just my own or my partner’s or child’s examples. I can plainly see, and cannot readily ignore, that my way is only one among many, and that I have a great deal still to learn.

Each time I see and learn, gratitude grows in me for this shared humanity, the vulnerability we each show each other, the gifts of love, time, and energy we daily give and receive, the example we show to every new person that sets foot here, which subsequently seeps out to help change our collective culture.

Despite this undeniable intimacy, we still struggle sometimes with elements of it, particularly in the more intentional forms like friendship. Without the situational closeness I share with all here, I fear I would rarely grow true friendship. I would be far lonelier. But I’m not. I do have this.

My friend Thomas wrote a poem of sorts to each person in the village one year for Validation Day (our version of Valentine’s Day). Most were typical, brilliant Thomas, with deep meaning likely hidden in apparent nonsense if only I was sharp enough to find it. I read mine many times, and have carried it since as encouragement to pursue as many more opportunities as I can to know him more:

two ants
wished to treat
bones here & there
with pond elixir.
welcome spirit
nurtured being
becoming bee.
friends not far?
true joy

Image credit: photos by Ramin Rahimian

How much can I consume while still being socially and ecologically responsible?

How little can I consume and maintain a high quality of life?

In many ways Dancing Rabbit is an experiment built around these questions. So far I believe we have made significant headway.

In the chart below you can find numbers comparing consumption for the average Rabbit to the average American and the results are interesting. We have managed to find a way to reduce our total footprint by 85% compared to the US average while retaining many comforts of modern life. For instance, I am writing this article in my 200 sq. ft. strawbale cabin, powered by a small solar panel system. I have a 200+ acre backyard I share with my friends and it’s a five minute walk to a luxuriously large natural swimming pool, our pond.

Dancing Rabbit has taken important steps towards demonstrating that a high quality of life is possible at much lower levels of consumption than are commonly seen in the Global Northwest. I like to think about this as an example of what economists call Pareto Optimality (or, for the statistically-minded, a power law distribution). This principle holds that 80% of your benefits come from the first 20% of your efforts. The Italian economist Pareto noticed this pattern in many areas of his life: 20% of his work would get 80% of his attention, 20% of his fellow Italians had 80% of the wealth, and 20% of his pea plants produced 80% of his peas.

In our case, I would argue that we get 80% of the fun and 80% of the utility out of modern life with about 15% of the consumption. This also leaves us room for other fine things in life that our more-consumptive counterparts might miss, like watching fireflies, going for a quick swim before dinner, or taking long walks with friends.

Thoughts and reflections on the data:

• Much of our low electricity use comes from a day-to-day lived experience of finite production. If it is cloudy for two days I am likely to read a book instead of watching a movie, and if it is cloudy for four days I might enjoy a candlelight evening with my sweetheart instead of using electric lighting. It is a very visceral and informative experience to live within limits, with real hour-to-hour feedback. I look forward to smart metering options providing the wider public with information like this in the near future.
• Flying is a huge cost, and while many Rabbits avoid flying (some entirely), airplane usage still looms large in our estimated total village footprint.
• We Rabbits still use more than our global share of the earth’s ecosystem, so, in my view, discussions of consumption targets should be paired with discussions of socially conscious ways to hit population targets.
• As our internal village economy matures, we will publish a followup article on production. This will be a step towards judging our progress in attaining production levels that can support our lower levels of consumption in a sustainable way.

If you have any questions or comments or are interested in our

sources, leave a comment below!

Here’s a brief look at the seasonal aspects of life at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Daily routines are largely influenced by the current season – winter is a time for relaxing, socializing, indoor projects, spring planning, and most importantly, staying warm. And by the end of winter, members are gearing up and itching for spring with new or continuing building projects and gardening plans.

In this video, Alyson describes wintertime maple sap collection, Liat shares her plans to transform a school bus into a house (complete with greenhouse), and Dan talks about seed saving and starting seedlings.

This video is also available on Revver.

Part 1

Part 2

Mushroom hunter, tent dweller, food fermenter, odd jobber and eco-expounder, Thomas has been living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for the past five years. In Life with Thomas, we get the chance to familiarize ourselves with one of the community’s unique denizens. Thomas shares his personal story and how he came to desire a more ecological lifestyle, inspired by life experiences and global environmental issues. He also gives us a cooking lesson, goes mushroom hunting, reflects upon his wigwam, and pursues other exciting daily activities at his home in Dancing Rabbit.

You can also find this video at Revver. Be sure to use our spiffy new social bookmarking features below, and share this video with friends and family!

On October 5-7, Dancing Rabbit celebrated its 10th anniversary and reunion, and rabbits present and past joined to commemorate and reminisce about the community. In this episode of DRTV, Tony and Cecil, two of the six original Dancing Rabbit co-founders reflect on the progress and growth of the ecovillage against the backdrop of the reunion celebrations and festivities.The land on which Dancing Rabbit is situated was originally purchased ten years ago, in October 1997, and since then it has come quite a ways since the days when the community was almost nothing more than a vision.