T HE ATMOSPHERE IN OUR SMALL WISCONSIN TOWN HALL bristled with hostility. Nearly 100 residents jammed the monthly meeting which ordinarily attracts only a dozen or so old-timers. This was heavy stuff: once again the Plymouth Institute (the educational affiliate of High Wind community), was encroaching on comfortable, entrenched local belief systems. We were seeking approval for establishing an ecovillage, and the troops had been mustered to stamp out any such insurrection.
At one point a man jumped up and glared at our little band of eight: "I'm going to ask you straight out," he shouted, "Are you Communists? Because what you're proposing is a commune!" Later, a woman came up to us and said: "I'm wishing with all my heart for you to fail, and I'm going to make sure you do."
Following this and subsequent Mitchell Township meetings, a rash of headlines in neighboring newspapers enlivened the summer of 1996: "Road to Sustainable Living Blocked"; "A Messy Political Environment"; "Ecovillage Put On Hold."
Around the town of Mitchell, a rural oasis of green meadows, woodland, and rolling hills 55 miles north of Milwaukee, traditional dairy farms are dwindling as new immigrants from Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere buy up the land.
When we bought land here in 1970 there was little development, but over the decades we've watched farmland turn into house lots and septic fields. Where we used to hike and see deer grazing, there are now driveways and horse farms. It's happening all across North America - the typical process where natural systems are devolving into sprawl.
Someone with capital buys up a farm or sizable tract of land and becomes a developer, breaking up the land into lots to sell, and cutting down trees and leveling odd bumps in the terrain to put in roads and utilities. The new buyers then build houses, drill individual wells, and often reestablish their urban lifestyles in the countryside, with manicured lawns and architectural designs and construction technologies that are heavy on energy consumption. Through this process thousands of acres have been taken over and forests thinned, endangering wildlife. Septic fields threaten the water table. While the developer reaps profits and moves on, one more act of degradation is added to the spreading environmental crisis.
Some 20 years ago we and a small group of friends created the High Wind community, which now occupies 148 acres. High Wind includes a 20-acre organic farm, solar homes, a conference and retreat center, and a land-use plan that stewards natural resources.
For nearly 10 years, first as the High Wind Association, and more recently as Plymouth Institute, a revolving core of us have held a strong commitment to identify some of the unhealthy trends we've seen unfolding around us. Many of the ideas, teachings, solutions, and concrete models for more sustainable living that we've introduced have met with enthusiasm and appreciation - both from the thousands who have visited our center and from those who know us through writings.
Four years ago a small group of us bought 144 acres adjacent to High Wind, the Silver Springs property. One of the last intact ecological systems in the county, it has hardwood and evergreen forests, kettles and moraines carved by a glacier 15,000 years ago, and an intricate network of trout ponds fed by myriad springs. We converted the property's 75-seat restaurant and four modern cedar chalets into a learning center and housing for workshop participants.
The land includes a high ridge with a 15-acre meadow on one side, superb forests, and a south slope that looks out to spectacular views 20 miles away. Several of us associated with High Wind, along with an eminent architect and "living machine" waste-treatment consultant, worked for two years designing the modestly scaled SpringLedge Ecovillage. Septic systems would be eliminated by constructing a half-acre wetlands area, where liquid human waste from each house would be converted naturally to clean water through full-circle biological processes.
We allocated 70 of the 144 acres for this project, but by clustering the 21 homesites in the scrub along the ridge, our plan kept wild all the forest area and also preserved the open meadow, except for the constructed-wetlands marsh, which actually promised to enhance the plant and wildlife. Residents would agree to an ecological covenant that establishes the legal/financial/technical framework of this budding community. They would own their own homesites and a share of the commons through a land condominium legal instrument, and a homeowners' association would become the governing body. Participants would agree to an architectural review committee made up of residents and a representative from Plymouth Institute which would promote state-of-the-art building technologies, including energy-efficient, clustered houses sharing wells and powered and heated by wind and sun.
SpringLedge would become part of our stewardship effort for the whole valley, which is rimmed by the eco village site on the north ridge and by High Wind land on a plateau on the south side of the valley, with the bountiful water resources and a CSA farm snuggled below. Our intention included a small telecommunications center so that ecovillage residents and others could share computers and advanced hardware, thus offering potential for home-based jobs. Residents could buy fresh, chemical-free produce from the CSA farm (which now feeds 300 shareholder families) and fresh fish from the aquaculture operation. The ecovillage would provide building sites for the inevitable push of people leaving cities, thus forestalling haphazard, unplanned development, while demonstrating that development can be sustainable. Furthermore, the economics of the project would pay off the costly mortgage we'd incurred, provide some surplus funds for our educational work, and show that conscious land use can be economically viable.
Having researched and drawn in the best environmental and technical information from around the country, in the spring of '96 the SpringLedge project was poised for launch. As a first step to delineating building sites for a handful of potential ecovillagers already lined up and eager to buy in, we began to lay out the driveway that would wind carefully through the spectacular upland of the Silver Springs property.
Over and over we walked the land with the road builder, making sure his bulldozer avoided any major growth - keeping both the homesites and road in open meadow and low scrub areas. We planned to hold the magnificent hardwood stands and pine forest as wild greenspace to be owned in common and enjoyed by all residents.
Then suddenly we were stopped in our tracks. Our immediate neighbors - most of whom have moved to the country and built in Mitchell only in the last two to seven years - saw arrival of the bulldozer as the first sign of action. Alarmed, they mobilized and packed the town hall to protest vehemently when we presented our plan in June.The Town Board, mainly farmers, had great difficulty with SpringLedge's proposed clustered housing and biological waste treatment. Even though licensing of our waste-water system belonged to Wisconsin State jurisdiction, not the local Town Board, we heard vociferous complaints that our constructed wetland would create a cesspool which the town would eventually have to clean up. In essence, the whole idea of the ecovillage suggested innovation and change - very difficult to digest in this conservative environment.
Another line of opposition, more subtle but better organized, came from the urban refugees, living all over the county in one to five-acre lots. These new migrants tend to be more sophisticated than the older farming community. They came to the country for its "quality of life" and, once settled in, resist any other newcomers.
We'd thought it enough to focus on the environmentalists' concerns. But farmers and newcomers alike were afraid: of increased density (a maximum of 21 homes on half-acre sites), lowered property values, and potential crime (one or two of the buildings were slated for several families - thus "affordable housing," which might bring low-income folks). We discovered too late that all the "good" environmental language we use routinely in our circles was an anathema, not only to the entrenched farmers but also to the newly arrived city types who now had their paradise and wanted to lock the gates against anyone else who might alter the rural tranquility they'd purchased. The "land condominium" legal instrument we proposed was an unknown concept that only conjured up images of high-rise buildings. Even the term "environmental" was a hot potato.
The upshot was, the Town Board rejected the ecovillage, preferring widely spaced lots and individual septic systems. SpringLedge was formally turned down. Furthermore, the town of Mitchell placed a moratorium on all land development until a new ordinance is created and approved.
The avid press coverage, though fairly sympathetic to us, fanned the controversy and pointed up how fear of change can translate into anger. The media covered all the meetings, and regularly sought interviews with us. Front-page articles provided a tremendous amount of information about the concept of ecovillages, solar buildings such as those in the High Wind community, and the need for careful land-use to curtail the disastrous trend toward irreversible sprawl and destruction of woodland, wildlife, and farmland. An editorial in the Sheboygan Press concluded: "The earth-friendly ecovillage proposed ... is the type of development the Town of Mitchell and other communities should encourage."
The media attention stimulated discussion throughout our county and state, and even nationally, fostering new thinking about ecovillages far beyond what would have happened had SpringLedge actually been built. The brouhaha even triggered the town of Mitchell to undertake a land-use study - maybe one of our lasting contributions.
In retrospect we realize that we could hardly have wished for a better platform from which to disseminate our ideas about sustainability. In our microcosmic situation we've seen how cultural groups can stand at very different stages of "eco-consciousness," how almost inevitably they clash, and how futile it is for one to make the other wrong.
The response to our project was a huge surprise to us, and in succeeding months gave rise to some fascinating and illuminating realizations about how we naively expected a community steeped in comfortably conservative traditions to accept revolutionary, if very practical, ideas from a maverick group accustomed to living on the edge. In the past we had deliberately avoided engaging in the local political scene, but now have been thrust into this final arena of activity, "where the rubber hits the road."
The town's moratorium on building also precipitated an immediate crisis for us, as we lack the resources to continue covering the mortgage without selling ecovillage sites. The Silver Springs property is now on the market. We hope to find a buyer who is not a conventional developer rushing to chop down trees and build a subdivision. Who knows, maybe the buyer will love and respect this land and choose to work with us?
In the meantime we are proceeding to build a modified ecovillage on High Wind land - a smaller community incorporating a number of the innovations planned for SpringLedge. If any Communities readers share these concerns about sustainability, are looking for a place to build and settle, and would like to join us in this work, please let us know!
Copyright 1998 by Fellowship for Intentional Community. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed by the authors and correspondents are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
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