Rio+20: What Ecovillages Offer

It is the start of Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, and the Global Ecovillage Network has a strong contingent here from all over the world. We have erected a dome at the People’s Summit in Cupala dos Povos (Flamingo Park) and are providing a “Speaker’s Corner” for ecovillages, Transition Towns, Occupy, and others to strut their stuff. So what is it that ecovillages and permaculture bring to this discussion?

The late philosopher Ivan Illich, in his 1974 book, Energy and Equity, observed that conventional wisdom would have it that “the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command.” This conventional wisdom would seem to be now widely shared by both non-governmental organizations and UN intergovernmental agencies working on issues such as education, the rights of women and minorities, and indigenous peoples. Illich challenged it.

“The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves,” he said. “I prefer to ask whether free men need them.”

Illich foresaw the present dilemma: our neocortical appetite for more gadgets and glitter, combined with our prodigious fecundity, coming into conflict with the physical limits of Earth. He said that we would come to equate well-being with high amounts of per capita energy use. He also foresaw the green economy response, which he called “retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift.”

The overlooked problem in this approach, he warned, is human equity. Illich wrote, “What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.”

“Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving,” he said.

The point he made, two decades before the original Rio Earth Summit, was that only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. Finding a way from here to there that is graceful, happy, and fair is the real challenge of Rio+20. Instead of attempting to increase power densities to reach the farthest outposts of humanity or the most underserved; instead of writing laws to protect indigenous cultures being engulfed by hydroelectric projects or desperate oil extractions, or women being kept from full participation as energy slaveowners, we should be focused on doing with far less per-capita energy consumption, but on a sustainable, salable trajectory. That is the role played by ecovillages, transition towns, and permaculture, and that is what we bring to the People’s Summit.

Demonstrating joyful living within a reduced energy budget, showing examples of social equity while also proactively aiding the world’s poorest, drawing carbon from atmosphere and oceans to soil and forest, and providing greater food security even in the midst of a climate crisis are all contributions that ecovillages and permaculture offer. We can do it, we will do it, and we are doing it.

Illich concluded, “While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.”