Community and Resilience

by Michael Würfel of Sieben Linden Ecovillage, Germany

I hereby declare: resilience will be the big buzzword of the coming decade. Everything will have to become resilient: The home, the city, the transportation network, politics. Just as every can of sardines has a label for “sustainability” today (for whatever fake reason), it will soon be labelled “for your resilience “, at the latest when it becomes clear that we will never manage to reach a sustainable lifestyle and advertisement will switch to suggesting that with this or that product you might be able to hold on to that golden past a little longer. And a few boxes of sardines and tinned bread might certainly be helpful then. Moreover, a term can only be misused for so long, and every child has slowly understood that genuine sustainability does not go hand in hand with an unchecked market economy, the preservation of existing wealth and power relations, national borders and the great fear of really changing anything.

Just like sustainability, resilience is actually a great term. Resilience not only means demonstrating resistance and “the ability to maintain essential function, identity and structure, but also the capacity for transformation. (Wikipedia.org)” – in the best-case scenario, sustainability remains the goal of this development. But just because “resilience” may soon be printed on shampoo bottles and TV dinners, that does not mean that the idea of resilience will have permeated our lives and that we will let ourselves be guided by it – as with sustainability. However, the concept is extremely interesting for communities. If society turns its focus on resilience, intentional community living could take on a whole new meaning.

One step back: 2023. Humanity has only just halfway realized that it has got itself into a mess. Polycrisis: species extinction and climate change at the forefront with a confusing series of other problems such as escalating wars, the collapse of democracy, the education and healthcare system crisis, etc. There is still hope of meeting the climate and sustainability targets and thus preventing the worst. Everything is connected: If the climate doesn’t warm up too much and the rainforest isn’t completely cut down, if industrial fishing is curbed and politics doesn’t completely crumble… Then maybe things will continue, maybe there will be prospects for the future again.

Many of the greatest optimists live in intentional communities and demonstrate that a sustainable way of life doesn’t hurt at all. On the contrary: good relationships, stable structures and healthy children show that even in the Anthropocene era, people can live together in such a way that they do not rapidly destroy their livelihoods. They do not play a major role in the cultural canon of the digitalized world, but they are a bit organized and some of them set out to explore what they can do for their resilience – especially since the world around them does not seem ready to change lifestyles massively enough to prevent the crises from worsening.

Representatives of 20 intentional communities or ecovillages from all continents meet regularly via video conference to learn the basics of resilience assessment and then apply/implement that in their respective communities. In other words, in each of the 20 communities they try to examine which future crises could put the respective community system under pressure and how to prepare for them. For once, we are not (only) examining what we in intentional communities can do differently/better/more sustainably than the mainstream and how successful we are in doing so, but are also looking at what it would mean for us as communities if our world and the world around us were increasingly affected by the polycrisis and climate change as a whole. After all, water scarcity and economic crisis also affect us; in other regions of the world, rising sea levels or rural exodus could tip the system over. How can we be prepared for things like this?

I write “system” because that is part of the research: presenting intentional communities as systems, i.e. breaking them down into individual components that are related to each other. For example, “access to water” is related to “vegetable cultivation”, or “economic stability” in Germany is related to the educational operations of a German community. If people have no money left for seminars, they will not travel to a community to attend and pay for them. External influences such as “drought” or “stability of the (inter)national economy” are particularly interesting for resilience research. Where are we “vulnerable” as a community, where could external “crises” transfer to the community or have an impact on it? This abstraction makes it possible to determine what exactly should be monitored and where the system should be strengthened. In every intentional community, other details or connecting factors are relevant. For us as a community in Germany, political and economic uncertainties seem to be major risks in addition to drought. We need water for our gardening, our forests and certainly also for our health and well-being. And then we have many economic relationships with the world outside the community – in addition to our educational venue, many of us also have remote working jobs that are dependent on the outside economy. If they cease to pay, we can spend less money on bought-in food or, for example, on paying off the loans we took on to build the fancy ecological strawbale houses we live in.

In our resilience project, we examine, among other things, which skills are already available in the community in order to be able to react resiliently to possible crises – and which are still lacking. As with the creation of the system model and the other parts of the research, this is done in workshops together with a number of community members. Despite our dependence on the developments around us, we are also able to identify strengths that we have already established as a community. And here the resilience we are striving for suddenly turns into a whole new argument for intentional community living: Because all alone, a person cannot really respond to crises that go beyond the horizon of a private life. In the crises that are looming, everyone will be dependent on mutual support – in a society based on the division of labor like ours, it is a pure illusion to be independent of your fellow human beings, no matter how convenient this illusion may seem (not least to an economy that loves to sell everything to as many single users as possible). Where is food, water, housing and medical care supposed to come from? Of course, intentional communities have not solved this either and there are plenty of weak points, but they have tried and tested decision-making processes and often a more or less independent infrastructure. The community I live in, for example, is not completely dependent on food deliveries. There is a large garden, an almost self-sufficient energy supply and, above all, a wide range of skills and experience.

Groups that already have experience of organizing their daily lives will find it much easier to overcome panic and improvise. This is a realization that gives me goosebumps: we didn’t move into intentional communities to isolate ourselves or to have an advantage over others. On the contrary, many community dwellers have sacrificed a lot of comfort and social recognition out of idealism. Living in an intentional community was and is open to anyone who is ready to accept the sometimes arduous arrangements with close housemates, financial restrictions and risks and sacrifices in terms of comfort. But if we don’t look to the future through rose-tinted spectacles and take the dangers of the polycrisis seriously instead, intentional communities or ecovillages could soon leave a ridiculed social niche and become an envied avant-garde. This is not a desirable position either: which community wants to have to defend their cabbage fields? And how is that supposed to work anyway?

If we don’t paint the future scenario in such extreme terms, we seem somewhat better prepared for the future with life in intentional community. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the image of a group barricaded behind high walls. Even during the pandemic, many communities reported that their lives were hardly restricted, while in non-community settings, cabin fever and even violence occurred.

However. If we go beyond patting our backs for doing better than the mainstream, we find our own limitations. At least I did in our resilience assessment of our intentional community. That was not just about establishing that we as a community are better able than individuals to respond to upcoming crises, but also about improving our systems in the face of all kinds of impending calamity. And that seems almost as hard as to get that stubborn donkey of a society to make that important step of a true paradigm shift.

When we try to imagine a future in our intentional community, we often hope that we will show even more solidarity with each other, trust each other more and share more, especially economically. In our group, everyone has to provide for themselves economically, but there are tendencies towards more mutual support. And the results of our workshops and discussions suggest even more: Since a central component of our functioning community system is to keep social stress low and to stabilize internal administration (with decision-making and management), it might be more sustainable to strive less for achieving goals and more for being satisfied. Less consumption and performance: more monk. This won’t solve the water problem, for example, but it will require less financial inflow from outside. Co-creativity, more connection and commitment, less leadership, less doing. Trust and emotional maturity – that would make it possible to simplify our complex structures, facilitate sharing and communication. Being present, attentive, aware of needs.

These are outcomes that I have been working on in our local workshop and that seem sensible to me. In this way, we could gain more strength from our community and face crises better. It seems possible that we have not yet tapped into the essential resources that a strong community could offer. If we have good connections and trust in each other, we could stick together more easily in the event of economic hardship and expand our self-sufficiency, for example. The Italian spiritual community Damanhur reported in our joint video conferences that they had already switched from an individual to a shared economy in the past and shared their money when it became necessary, as a temporary measure. This was made possible by their strong bond and their shared belief in their joint project.

We haven’t experienced any major crises yet, but so far every small crisis or even the pandemic has quickly led to a stronger sense of community and has been well taken care of. In addition, (social) stress has long been one of the biggest pronounced problems in our community, and it stands to reason that we have not invested enough energy in our actual bonding so far. Social stress can only prosper if we don’t address it; when people feel overburdened with the real or imagined demands made to them in the group. To overcome it, we would probably need to cross a threshold that declares the wellbeing of every individual a collective ambition.

But: Our members value their individuality, their self-realization, their own professions, needs, families and partnerships. There are always initiatives to become more communal and they regularly don’t get established for good. Our individuality seems to be even more important to us than our strong collective: we put up with our occasional complaints about being “overwhelmed” because we generally prefer to “do our own thing”. In the context of trying to become more resilient, this is highly confusing: regardless of our previous community experiences, we have now come to the realization that this is where our development opportunity lies – and find that we have often come to a standstill at precisely this point. We may complain that we, in our community, also have a market economy to some extent, that we pay each other for our services or have our services to the community paid for, that we are not completely equal economically – but in the end, it just works pretty well.

This is reminiscent of the difficult political discussion that identifies capitalism as evil in principle, but notes that the expansion of this system in the context of globalization has “liberated” hundreds of millions of people from the worst poverty (albeit not sustainably). In other words: We (as a country) know about the disadvantages, but appreciate the advantages of this conglomerate of market economy, meritocracy and individualism. Is this also the case in our ecovillage? Is that what we want: community yes, but not without the familiar capitalist ideology?

In our future scenarios, community and solidarity are clearly ahead of individualism and meritocracy. And the scenarios are sound, we have worked them out from existing data and a lot of common sense. I was there myself, I can’t blame it on cranks for whom wreaths of flowers are more important than sound bookkeeping. In our future scenarios, we are striving for a change in awareness “to further develop the balance between individuality and collective capacity to act, to become calmer in the face of challenges” (this was one of the results of our workshop). “Curiosity instead of actionism”, it says. We assume that the “I” will gradually become less and less so that by 2050 we will really have internalized that “we” is simpler and has more power. In one of our workshops on future scenarios, for example, we considered how we can do justice to the potentially increasing complexity of future challenges, and instead of technical solutions or further specialization, we were able to agree that we would benefit most from developing a “co-creative spirit”. It’s more along the lines of “together… listen… appreciate each other” than “implement my next project as successfully as possible”.

When I take a sober look at it, I hardly find myself in the qualities that we are striving for in our community in 2050 according to our resilience research. I love everything about successfully implementing my next project, and the quality of “sitting by the fire together”, which was mentioned in the associated workshop as one of our desirable community goal skills, is not mine at all. I often prefer to spend evenings in bed to read a good book (or let myself be inspired or even just entertained by a movie/series).

If the future calls for it, I can imagine that I could make “surviving in community” my own next great project, but I probably won’t opt for more community without necessity. What does that mean? It means that I am not super prepared for dystopia either. It also means that you could be in my place, that community can not be that hard if guys with such regular mindsets as myself manage to thrive there (you like long campfire conversations? Then you even have a community skill I seem to be lacking). It also means, however, that this regular mindset that keeps me enthroned in the center of my world might have to be overcome, by both you and me. And it confirms to me that the few first steps I have done by accepting the idea of community where steps in the right direction. We’ll take it from here.