Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage

Dancing Rabbit is an ecovillage and intentional community set amid the hills and prairies of rural northeastern Missouri. Our goal is to live ecologically sustainable and socially rewarding lives, and to share the skills and ideas behind that lifestyle.

Daily life is dynamic and different for each person who lives here. From the everyday needs of food and shelter to the more complex questions of culture and social change, life here in the village is exciting and ever adapting.

We’re excited to have new members join Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and are interested in individuals, families, or communities who want to live sustainably. Here, you can have the benefits of small town life and intentional community living, in the company of other progressive individuals supporting each other in living an ecological life.

We are housed in a variety of living arrangements, eat a variety of foods, and work on varied projects. Our society is flexible enough to include egalitarian and co-housing communities, and individual households. We may have different approaches to some issues, but the common desire for environmental sustainability underlies all key decisions at Dancing Rabbit.

Although Dancing Rabbit strives for some level of self-sufficiency and economic independence, we do not sequester ourselves from mainstream America. Rather, outreach and education are integral to our goals. We vigorously promote ourselves as a viable example of sustainable living, and spread our ideas and discoveries through visitor programs, workshops, academic and other publications, speaking engagements, and the like.

Residents of Dancing Rabbit agree to follow ecological covenants and sustainability guidelines. We build our homes using alternative techniques such as straw bale and cob, and green building methods, powering them with renewable energy from the sun and wind. Vehicles at DR are owned cooperatively and powered by electricity and biodiesel. Overall, we eat an ever-increasing amount of local, organic, and in-season foods including many home-grown vegetables.

We strive to be good stewards of our land, with much of our acreage reserved as wildlife habitat. In the grasslands we are reintroducing native prairie plants to help revitalize our region’s biodiversity. We’ve planted over 10,000 trees in an effort to restore our land to its precolonial ecology, to stabilize the riparian zone, and to provide a sustainable source of wood for our community in years to come.

Dancing Rabbit is committed to working in the following ways to make itself a sustainable system.
We will look holistically at the issues of sustainability to create a sustainable culture that takes into account all impacts of its actions and acts to preserve the Earth for the future. At Dancing Rabbit we strive to rely only upon renewable resources, and to use them at a rate less than their replacement. We try to understand and minimize our negative impact on global ecological systems. Attempting to preserve and rebuild healthy ecosystems and have a positive impact on biodiversity. At Dancing Rabbit we will try to create a closed resource loop where byproducts are reintegrated as useful resources, thus attempting to minimize waste products, especially those toxic or radioactive. Also we will try to avoid exploiting people and other cultures.