Reversing a Regulatory Trend: Specifying Max. consumption levels instead of minimums

One of the things which Manitou Arbor Ecovillage is doing that goes contrary to the customary trend of planning regulations in order to create a more sustainable way of life, is that we are choosing to specify maximum levels of resource consumption, rather than minimum levels. Many people aren't aware that there are zoning regulations which limit how lightly they can live on this planet. Typical Agricultural and Residential zoning classifications specify minimum lot sizes, lot widths, setbacks from property lines, minimum floor areas, etc. The only maximums specified are lot coverage, building heights, and numbers of unrelated people sharing a dwelling. Together these typical zoning regulations work to ensure rural and suburban areas have very low population densities, which at the time these model zoning codes were propagated, was presumed would protect the environment by making sure there was lots of "nature" around each family so that the humans wouldn't exceed the land's carrying capacity.

In practice, however, this ultra-low density, single-use development model actually causes more consumption of resources in the modern industrial society by lengthening the transportation distances upon which all these families are dependent and dispersing them evenly throughout the landscape so that public transportation can't be effective. Our zoning regulations directly result in rural and suburban "sprawl" requiring almost all family members to commute long distances in over-sized private vehicles each day for schooling, work, and shopping. Very little of the resources that sustain these single-family households actually come from the land where they live (at most some water and food), so there is almost no efficiencies gained in the sprawled planning model to offset the huge imports (and exports) of people and materials required. Country estates of 2 to 10 acres for a single family (typically only 1-4 people) are not uncommon requirements, yet in order to support such acreage, most families must resort to one or two full time jobs outside the home, leaving them little time to actually cultivate the land so that it can support them with food or fiber production rather than needing support. Often such estates grow nothing more than chem-lawns, which not only do not support the human population living there, they actually present a health risk and require huge fossil-fuel inputs in fertilizers and fuel to keep them mown golfing green short. Little land is actually leftover for nature or wildlife in this planning model, and families can be easily bankrupted by even minor increases in fuel costs, as we are seeing today. What is a one person "family" supposed to do with a typical min. 1200 sq.ft. house, and how is she to support it?

Manitou Arbor has chosen a different path by specifying maximum consumption levels rather than minimums, and our maximums are not arbitrary but are based on convergence points of efficiencies that can be acheived scientifically. By opting to utilize a Planned United Development Model for our zoning, we can reduce the transportation and utility inefficiencies inherent in the typical "sprawl" planning layout while not increasing the overall population densities beyond what is typical in the surrounding areas. By clustering our homes as closely as possible (without sacrificing solar access to each building), we are also preserving more land undeveloped around and between our homes so that we can create gardens and orchards that our neighbors will find more pleasing to look at than the tract house w/ chem-lawn that might otherwise have been pressed right up against their property lines in the traditional planning model. In order to create tight clustering while preserving solar access, it was necessary to create maximum building sizes based on typical middle-class home sizes in the United States. This ensures that a large family will not experience hardship living at the ecovillage, because our large house sites can accomodate buildings in excess of 3600 sq.ft. But we've also tried to shape our village deed restrictions to providing incentives for residents to carefully assess their needs and to build as small as they can comfortably manage.

One way that we have provided incentives for building small at the same time as we encourage energy-efficient building construction is by determining energy quotas for each site-condominium parcel which are based on the maximum allowable energy consumption under the Passive House Standard (www.passivehouse.com), multiplied by our maximum house size allotted to the parcel. The maximum energy consumption of a Passive House is limited by the maximum heating/cooling energy which can be delivered solely by the Heat Recovery Ventilator in a home. This voluntary standard for new construction or retrofitting existing buildings was invented in Europe over a decade ago (there are more than 10,000 today and growing exponentially) to create the most efficient buildings possible at the least up-front capital cost. Homes built or retrofit to its standard use so little energy that a 1200 sq.ft. home can be heated with a single electric heating element in the H.R.Ventilator the size of one found in a typical hair blow-dryer. The cost of huge furnace or boiler systems thus eliminated can be invested in the superinsulated building envelope required, thus keeping the overall cost increase as low as possible while protecting the family from rising energy costs for the life of the building.

Thus, if one wants to build a house to the maximum possible size for your lot in Manitou Arbor Ecovillage, you will be building to the Passive House Standard, but if you do not need such a huge house, you are still entitled to use that much energy and so you can choose to use a less-efficient (and less costly) building envelope such as straw-bale construction if you are building tiny at the ecovillage. It does mean that calculations of energy consumption will have to be shown for all new buildings at our ecovillage, but there are several energy modeling programs available for doing this, including free ones like Equest. If you are building to the Passive House Standard, you must use the PHPP spreadsheet for the calculations, available at low cost from the www.passivehouse.us website, and must have your calculations verified by the Passive House Institute. In our ecovillage, homebuyers will know the energy efficiency of the home they are buying just as they do when buying a new car - a simple concept long overdue in America, and essential to the long-term financial security of a family. And it drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions, which is essential for having a habitable planet into the foreseeable future - now we are talking about real family values!

The Manitou Arbor Ecovillage Covenant

Hello Readers,

In addition to the essays and musings of our GreenRain bloggers, we will be taking a look at and writing about different aspects of the Manitou Arbor Ecovillage (MAEV) Covenant.

This Covenant was written by MAEV future residents, who recognized from the beginning that it is difficult to live life, make good decisions, big and small, without some guide to remind us of our better selves and our deepest commitments. Thus, they spent a long time discussing and creating this statement of Covenant. We read it before every general meeting to keep us aware.

The Covenant is our living guide; and the spiritual basis of our group. We hope that it will provide you with a sense of the kind of intentional sustainable community we are building.

The Manitou Arbor Ecovillage Covenant

I, ___________________, desire membership in this community and am aligned with its Mission, Vision and Values and with the following principles, agreements and goals:

Principles: We acknowledge our spiritual bond to each other and all life and aspire to express, in the way we live, the following:

1. A community committed to nourishing ourselves, others, and this planet through a sustainable lifestyle must incorporate a deep sense of the sacred in all things, and demonstrate that sense in its work, play, free inquiry, multicultural expression, spiritual practice, and celebration of life.

2. Such a community will act with respect, honoring the inherent value and dignity of all life and all people.

3. We commit ourselves to co-create with Spirit a wise, just, and sustainable culture in balance with the natural world, and to serve as a living example, manifesting a spiritual ecology, a vision of a new reality in our daily lives; and we commit ourselves to supporting each other in living this vision.

4. Such a community will constantly keep in consciousness the following principles of right action: compassion for one another and all life, kindness, a non-violent way of living, expression of freedom mindful of responsibility, and a thirst for social justice.

5. We see cooperation as the fundamental model for human endeavor. When a proper balance exists between the independence of the individual and the interdependence of the community, each serves to enhance and complement the other. While we choose to live in a cooperative community, caring for and supporting each other's physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, we each take primary responsibility for our own actions and needs.

6. We recognize that active participation in decision-making is essential for the healthy growth and development of individuals as well as the community as a whole.

7. Our community will also be committed to the pursuit of knowledge and its active promulgation to the wider community.

8. As a corollary to our core value of respect, we value diversity in persons, their cultures and all life forms.

9. We recognize the value of harmony in our relationships. In concert with seeking that harmony, we seek to create and maintain beauty in our natural and built surroundings.

Agreements: In order to make our shared values and principles operative in our life in community, I will strive to live in accordance with all of the values and principles previously expressed in our community documents and this covenant, as well as the specific actions listed below:
1. Live in respect to the lands of the ecovillage, their non-human inhabitants, and one another, honoring and nurturing the integrity of all individuals and the whole system of which we are a part.

2. As a way of being respectful, considerate and inclusive; whenever possible we will use consensus as our decision making process.

3. Interact directly, openly and honestly with each other, avoiding physical and emotional abuse in our relationships.

4. Remain as open and conscious as we possibly can to feedback from other community members. If conflict arises, to first seek resolution with the individual involved. If that fails, to seek mediation through the appropriate means provided by the community. If the conflict is not mine, I will not take sides, rather I will support and encourage those involved to proceed with the resolution process.

5. Sustain my individual involvement in the community by contributing my ideas, talents, and energies in the spirit of active commitment and participation.

6. Encourage my own and others fulfillment of this covenant by holding it as a touchstone and living in conscious awareness of the vision and purpose that has brought us together.

Goals: I support these goals:
1. To foster awareness of our connection to Spirit and the Earth and our interdependence with the web of life.

2. To facilitate our transition toward a life of sustainability that leaves the world better than we found it, takes no more than we need, tries not to harm life or the environment that supports us, and makes amends if we do.

3. To foster the lifelong learning and growth of every community member, recognizing that each individual is both teacher and learner.

4. To preserve our land holdings through proper stewardship by means of designated natural areas and ecologically sound use of our resources.

5. To be a center of learning that serves as a living demonstration of our values.

6. To envision a restorative future and labor to bring it forth.

7. To promote personal, social and planetary healing.

8. To serve and reach out to local communities by sharing time, energy, and talents to foster healthier, sustainable living and to promote eco-justice.

9. To encourage creative expression and celebration of communal life and sacred times, seasons and places in ways which respect the spiritual insights and traditions of each member.

10. To encourage the establishment of member-owned and managed ecologically sound businesses, as well as economic activities managed by the ecovillage as a whole and develop economic processes that nurture our values.

11. To actively support the intentional community, permaculture, land reform and organic agriculture movements as we are able.

12. To support any further goals agreed to by the community. I agree to affirm and uphold this covenant.

Peace to you,
Siochana

Talking Trash

To descend from the terrifying heights of national and geo-politics to the confines of the kitchen—why bother? Isn’t it all “just too much?” Perhaps it is. One only leads ones own life. The question remains: which life? There’s something awesome in the way the salmon defy the river on their way to continue the species, isn’t there? A lot just die. Some don’t and we have a Cycle of Salmon. As Jim Hightower says: even a dead fish can go with the flow.

But still… does it do any good at all? Once upon a time Kalamazoo Michigan had no recycling program. But it did have a state-required Solid Waste Management Committee. That committee was composed mostly of turf-protectors, and was (in the majority) happy to go our thoughtless linear way. And so we did. Then the idea came (from out of the economic rather than the environmental “green”) that landfill space was filling up and maybe the county would have to dig its own landfill (rather than dump trash into other counties). Instant public hysteria. Well, suddenly trash was on everybody’s minds. Despite the imagery, it was a good place to be.

With fear on the prowl, there was opportunity to change. The Corporate World, of course, stepped up with The Solution. We’ll just burn all that stuff and make energy out of it—for less waste volume to landfill and a new source of electricity—Win, Win—what could be better?

The “other” green group thought they saw a better way. You know, this “burn the trash” concept is still linear (of course, no one understood nor cared one whit about that). All it does is waste useful resources (“what? trash?”), concentrate dangerous metals in the ash (“uhh… huh?”), and pour out air pollution, (“air pollution? really?”). As usual, it was only a blunt health issue that anyone could understand.

But it was enough to slow the Cadillac-on-the-4-lane-highway-to-a-waste-to-Energy-Burning Machine. In that slow-down, activists had a window to act. They wrote newspaper essays, gave talks, even had a whole symposium of outside experts to not only damn the Burners but extol the virtues of Recycling. Here and there one could even see crazy green-people wearing t-shirts saying “God (in nature) Recycles: The Devil Burns.” The plan to avoid the need for new landfills was not to burn resources to dust, but to turn as many of them as possible back into cycling systems of some sort. That was the promise. Throw the corporate burn-magnates out of the county, and we-the-people will divert the materials.

But people, individual people, have to do it. Rousting even a nice little city like Kalamazoo out of its coma took a lot of human energy. Heroes stepped up—yes, there were (and are) even recycling heroes. Neighborhoods were organized. A single woman in the State legislature (Mary Brown) caught a flickering green moment and passed a law allowing communities to supplement their “collection fees,” so that in those rough transitional times the haulers wouldn’t have to take a loss. People began putting their bright yellow recycling bins on the curbside—and most of them felt a little better about themselves. Slowly, it was the rare house on the street that didn’t participate at all.

Kalamazoo is not perfect, but today it has one of the most comprehensive recycling and yard-waste composting systems in Michigan or anywhere. Almost any kind of paper is accepted, and five types of plastics. Metal cans and glass, of course. All yard waste. If you are “conscious” while purchasing things, you might reduce your landfill load to a few “sacks” a year (I struggle, but do four). We are still not sustainable (either due to my four sacks not being “zero,” or because some of our post-pick-up systems haven’t been refined to truly link up the ends of things to a firm cycle. An example of that would be to save the “liquor” from the wood-pulping process and re-mix it with the short fibers, so called paper mill sludge, and use it on arboriculture fields to grow more trees). And so we haven’t gotten it right yet. But we’re a long way from mindless trash-tossing.

Kalamazoo is the kind of community which could ultimately encourage politicians and entrepreneurs to take the next steps: more plastic types, for instance, leading to new businesses and jobs, supported by a resource flow created by participating citizens. A bioplastics business might even begin to chip away at the oil-plastic dependency if both government and public would cooperate. Each segment of the materials flow through our lives must someday be addressed if we are to achieve the sustainable world of cycles. Producers must be ready to properly produce. Collectors must to ready to properly distribute. But we must be ready to properly use, caretake, and steward the materials of our planet as they pass through our lives. Will we care enough to “even” recycle?

This whole business treads upon one’s feelings about rights and ownership, doesn’t it? Well, here is the news: we have rights only in context. We have no absolute rights. The contest of it all is that what we do does impact others, and the future. It’s not just our own “business.”

Americans don’t like that. Well, lets grow up. Rights are easy. Responsibilities are hard. They are what define our personal growth, our worth as a citizen and a neighbor. Only in the softest sense should we think of ourselves as having Rights over things. We have responsibilities to them. We must act in stewardship towards them. In a world of cycles, there is someone or some thing waiting to receive what has passed through our hands. For m, it is a spiritual matter, a very serious moral matter, to hand the stuff of the world on, so that the future can usefully deal with it. If we don’t care about that, we don’t care about much, do we? Recycle. Make the effort. There’s no future in Waste. There’s no place called “Away.” Rain a little green.