From the Guest Editor

Lois Arkin

A S MY WORK ON THIS ISSUE WAS NEARING COMPLETION, three Los Angeles Eco-Village youngsters came to my door with handfuls of freshly picked loquats. Amber, age eight, planted the loquat tree three years ago with the help of other L.A. Eco-Villagers. Since then she has been caring for the tree, which she calls Pinocchio. She waters, mulches, feeds it regularly, loves, and protects it.

Now she's formed this three-person co-op with Claudia, eight, and Monica, 10. They're selling loquats for three cents each. Their efforts are a milestone in our ecovillage. Without any coaching from adults, these youngsters are manifesting the emerging ecovillage culture of being a "cooperative ecological neighborhood in which the social, ecological, and economic systems are effectively integrated for long-term sustainability." It ain't just academic anymore!

While working on this issue I was also in the middle of the chaos known as "closing" on a real estate acquisition--our first in L.A. Eco-Village. It's the 40-unit apartment building that Amber and her mom have lived in for the past five years, located on the intersection of our two streets. I abhor debt, so I've been wondering why I don't have negative feelings about the $500,000 in loan money I've been raising the past four months for the building purchase.

When I realize that the loans we've been generating are part of a cooperative partnership among those providing strong leadership to the ecovillage movement, the word "debt" takes on the positive aspect of the word "commitment"! The dozens of individuals and organizations who have loaned money for the building acquisition are making a public statement about our mutual commitment to the sustainable communities movement. We are celebrating!

Today, two other milestones occurred with respect to the public interest purposes of ecovillages. The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) Advisory Committee unanimously approved a $25,000 grant toward the building acquisition. During the meeting, from where I sat as a member of the Agency's Advisory Committee, I could see proud smiles on the faces of L.A. Eco-Villagers in the audience.

And another local agency, the Los Angeles Housing Department, has approved a substantial low-interest loan to L.A. Eco-Village for the building acquisition. This public partnership with L.A. Eco-Village puts the mega-city of Los Angeles squarely in the vanguard of the ecovillage movement!

The public monies we will receive were substantially motivated by loans which had already been committed from the sustainable communities movement, including those from Gaia Trust and the Fellowship for Intentional Community. These financial commitments show our strength as a movement, our ability to come together from many distant locations to further the development of a sustainable community demonstration.

In just five years, ecovillages or sustainable neighborhoods have come to exist as a viable form of community development in other cities as well, including Ithaca, Cincinnati, Seattle, Portland, Missoula, and Chattanooga. But, as one of my L.A. Eco-Village neighbors pointed out this morning while we were spreading mulch on our spring vegetable garden, "The City of Los Angeles still hasn't made a conscious decision to `go sustainable.'" My neighbor feels that our proposal simply happened to be in the right place at the right time, with an interesting innovation for affordable housing. "Let's not mislead anyone," she added, knowing my penchant for hyping good news.

Aha! Maybe the most important point is that some public decisions are becoming a natural outcome of all the work that thousands of us across the globe have been doing for decades. We've finally learned how to talk about sustainable communities so that government workers--most of whom know little or nothing about whole-systems approaches-- can "get it." An interesting-sounding "innovation" becomes the logical way to do things.

Lastly, as I approached deadline on this issue, my co-guest editor, Lynne Elizabeth, was called back East by the death of her mother, Penny Smith, who was prominent in Pittsburgh's affordable-housing movement. The nascent ecovillage movement will play an increasingly important role in the affordable housing movement. We know that Penny Smith would have been in the forefront of that effort. So we dedicate this issue to her along with the tens of thousands of others who are working tirelessly for a healthier future for all of us. Little by little, they are spinning and weaving their dreams into daily living patterns, demonstrating with their friends and neighbors a radically different way of being in and on our planet.

Every morning now, I wake up to the sounds of ducks and chickens in the heart of Los Angeles. I expect that as I live here in my neighborhood over the next 30 or so years, those animal sounds, along with the sounds of children, will ring clearer and stronger. And the sounds of cars, and the general polluting buzz of the mechanical city, will give way to the natural sounds of a city in harmony with its life support systems, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Lois Arkin is the coordinator of L.A. Eco-Village and the Executive Director of CRSP, a resource center for small ecological cooperative communities. She co-authored Sustainable Cities: Concepts and Strategies for Eco-City Development   (Eco-Home Media, 1992) and Cooperative Housing Compendium: Resources for Collaborative Living   (Center for Cooperatives, U.C. Davis, 1993). She is an FIC Board member, and can be reached at 213-738-1254 or crsp@igc.apc.org.