'Ecovillage' lifestyle drawing new interest

By KIM MCGUIRE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

DANCING RABBIT, Mo. (AP) — In the late 1990s, Alline Anderson was a customer service manager for Clif Bar, a California company that makes all-natural and organic energy bars.

It was a good fit for Anderson, a longtime environmentalist who led backpacking trips for the Sierra Club and was a dedicated recycler.

Still, Anderson and her husband, Kurt Kessner, wanted a simpler life. They wanted to live away from the hustle and bustle of a major city but not isolated from friends. And they wanted to go even “greener” — to live in a solar-powered house and grow their own food.

“Quite simply, we wanted to start walking the talk we had talked for years,” Anderson said.

While searching the Internet, the couple ran across Dancing Rabbit, a small community in northern Missouri.

There, the couple would join a handful of like-minded individuals, all committed to living sustainably on 180 acres in the countryside.

Today, Anderson and Kessner are among 50 people living at Dancing Rabbit, Missouri’s oldest and most established “ecovillage.”

Drawn by cheap land prices and a lack of repressive zoning restrictions, Missouri is home to more than 50 “intentional communities,” a broad term that includes communes, co-housing, and student co-ops.

Ecovillages also fall under that umbrella, but what sets them apart is residents’ dedication to an intensely green lifestyle. At Dancing Rabbit, for example, residents grow their own food, shun private vehicle ownership and live off the grid in homes powered by solar and wind energy generated on site.

Even though ecovillages have been around for decades, the idea of living an environmentally friendly lifestyle seems to be luring more and more people.

Most ecovillages in the United States are at or nearing self-imposed capacity. And in some cases, new ecovillages are forming. In Missouri, for example, an ecovillage called Plan B is taking shape near Fulton, and there is talk that another is in the planning stages in the Missouri Ozarks.

Diana Leafe Christian, an ecovillage activist and author based in North Carolina, said the ongoing financial struggles, climate change and concerns about fossil fuel consumption are recent factors steering people toward ecovillages.

“Those three things have acted as a carrot and a stick, both luring and pushing people to a small-scale, sustainable, low-consumption lifestyle,” said Leafe Christian, author of “Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community.”

To live at Dancing Rabbit, residents must pay a lease fee, a percentage of income for dues, contribute a set number of hours of labor, and agree to follow the ecovillage’s sustainability guidelines.

In general, those guidelines address the group’s objectives, such as minimizing waste, relying solely on renewable energy and reducing members’ carbon footprint by buying only local goods and services.

Residents also reduce their consumption by sharing resources. For example, some homes don’t have running water or electrical appliances, so some residents take showers, do laundry and use computers at a common house.

It’s a place commonly frequented by Brian Liloia — called Ziggy at Dancing Rabbit —who lives in a house made of cob, which is a mixture of straw, sand and clay.

Liloia is one of the newer “rabbits” who moved to the ecovillage in 2007 after a relatively unsatisfying college career in New Jersey. This summer, he completed construction on “Gobcobatron,” which looks a little like an adobe home with a plant-covered roof.

“Fortunately, there are a lot of knowledgeable people here who helped me build my home,” said Liloia. “Had I done it on my own, it would have been a real struggle.”

Homes at Dancing Rabbit range from the modest — one resident lives in a renovated school bus named Aubergine — to more ornate straw bale homes complete with full kitchens.

The homes are clustered together off a U-shaped dirt road. The common house is near the heart of the community, though there’s a new “neighborhood” forming farther from the main entrance.

The most elaborate structure at Dancing Rabbit is the Milkweed Mercantile and Eco-Inn. Set to open this winter, the Eco-Inn is a an environmentally friendly bed and breakfast owned by Anderson.

She has hired an out-of-state chef to cook locally grown meals for visitors who will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly seminars at the inn. Some of those seminars are set to cover topics such as organic gardening, quilting and yoga.

Anderson said one of the reasons she decided to build the mercantile and inn was to provide jobs for Dancing Rabbit residents.

She said the most challenging aspect of living at Dancing Rabbit is providing enough income to cover the fees and dues associated with living there. It’s particularly difficult when residents live in a very rural setting and try to use vehicles as little as possible.

Nonetheless, some residents are able to support themselves by working in computer programming and Web design, offering Spanish lessons over the phone and even working at a cacao farm in Ecuador for part of the year.

At Plan B in Fulton, founders Tao Weilundemo and Elizabeth Stanfill are contemplating starting a gourmet mushroom business there to help offset residents’ costs.

Weilundemo said he’s gotten a number of inquiries about Plan B, some from as far away as Hawaii and Georgia.

“At this point, we’re still trying to figure our speciality. We’re still looking to find our age and core group,” he said. “Sometimes we’ll get photos of people who say they want to live here standing next to monster trucks, and we’re kind of like, ’No.”’

Ecovillage residents say they realize that some might view their lifestyle as outside the norm or stereotype them as “hippies” or “tree-huggers.” Some have even mistakenly cast ecovillages as cults. (Most ecovillage residents do not share a common religious view.)

But Leafe Christian said ecovillages tend to draw people who are focused, hard-working and highly skilled. “It’s certainly not for sissies or the faint of heart,” she said. “And it’s not for completely laid-back, floaty types.”

That’s because ecovillage residents have to be self-sufficient to lead such ecologically centered lives.

At Dancing Rabbit, some residents make their own clothes and bedding material, build their own houses and produce most of their food.

At a recent open house, members of the neighboring Mennonite community swapped do-it-yourself stories with Dancing Rabbit residents.

Anderson said she hopes the mercantile and Eco-Inn can be a bridge to the outside community, which isn’t connected to Dancing Rabbit by any kind of public transportation.

While the business is occupying much of her time these days, it’s being part of Dancing Rabbit — her family — that brings her the most satisfaction, she said.

“Even though we’ve been here almost 10 years, it’s still hard for me to believe that we’ve been able to carve out these fantastic, fulfilling lives here,” Anderson said. “We’re so lucky.”

 

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