How not to build a sustainable community

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I dropped out of university after one year to pursue a dream, and it ended in spectacular failure.

This dream was in sympathy with degrowth, though I hadn’t heard of the movement at the time. It formed when I was sixteen, as a kind of antibody to the depressing ex-steelworks town I grew up in.

Instead of working a menial job, contributing to environmental and social degradation in a thousand small but significant ways, I wanted a more ethical life.

I wanted to take responsibility for meeting my basic needs. To grow my own food and reduce my energy usage so I could get what I needed from the temperamental Scottish sun.

I wanted to live in community with others, knowing everyone in my immediate surroundings rather than having so many anonymous neighbours.

So I started reading about homesteading and joining online forums around the topic. One day I was browsing a chat group for people interested in sustainable communities. I didn’t think anything would come of it.

Then I saw someone looking for people to join a new community in the Scottish lowlands. I reached out, and things moved along at light speed. First a video call, then a visit.

It was near enough my first time seeing the countryside. There was nothing but sheep and rolling hills from the bus windows, which seemed both strange and amazing.

The place itself was breathtaking. A grand hunting lodge from the mid 18th century, falling into ruin, but with one half renovated. It sat on 20 acres of land, including a tremendous, crumbling walled garden and two areas of woodland.

There was no further interview. If I could afford a yurt or caravan to live in, I could move. It was time to tell my mother I was leaving university to live in a commune.

Always open minded, she took the news well. She didn’t think it would work out, but felt it would be valuable life experience and compensation for the gap year that lock down canceled.

As for the yurt, I could afford both that and to live for some time without rushing into employment. My father died as the result of an accident that the state accepted responsibility for, so when I came of age I inherited some money.

This financial stability was ultimately what allowed me to explore alternative ways of life at a young age when most are studying and working, trying to set themselves up to survive in a tough economy.

My yurt was assembled and I watched, blissing out in the sunshine, feeling that this place was my ‘forever home’.

Eighteen months later, I left early in the morning when most people were asleep. An ex community member was parked outside the gate. No one wanted her on the property, so I struggled alone with a heavy crate containing her two guinea pigs.

I saw only the oldest member of the community, leaning on his cane and smoking his pipe outside the house. “I understand why you’re leaving,” he said, wishing me the best and shaking my hand.

Then I got in the car and we drove off, stopping to gossip with the owner of a nearby animal sanctuary before finding beds in a hostel in the neighbouring village.

So what went wrong?

It’s time to deliver on the title of the article, and give you a rough guide on how not to set up your future community:

1) Don’t bother with a legal framework

Our community was based on no more than a verbal agreement between the landowner and the founding member. And there wasn’t much appetite to formalize things. We all felt we wanted to build something new and outside of the system, so why rely on its structures?

Well, the founding member left as a result of the in fighting that plagued the community from the beginning. After this, the landowner wasn’t so sure about the rest of us, and the subsequent insecurity put us on course towards collapse.

It was already an ambitious project, and the looming threat of homelessness made tensions run high and co-operation harder.

2) Don’t hash things out beforehand- figure it out in running!

There was never a time when all community members were in a room together before moving in. Documents like a community ethos, a conflict resolution process, and rules regarding visitors and volunteers were all created months after the community was underway.

People were simply ‘vibe checked’ by the founding member then invited to join. Initially, it seemed we were on the same page, all wanting a healthier and more sustainable way of life. But the specifics varied from person to person.

Some wanted to integrate with the locals and offer them services, others wanted to ‘bug out’- barbed wire fencing included.

Some wanted to farm and market garden as first priority, creating a collective income stream. Others agreed, but were vegetarian, so didn’t want to help with the animal care.

Some older members weren’t able to do much manual work and were looking for mutual support and a peaceful place to spend their later years.

Others were looking for a better environment to raise their children, and the needs of their family would always come before the needs of the community.

These are just some of the dizzying array of perspectives that cropped up during long meetings in which we struggled to make decisions.

3) Don’t worry about funding, the Universe will take care of things

There was never any ‘buy in’ for members, which is something that I liked as it made the project more accessible.

Everyone owed monthly rent to the landowner, but for the first year, he let us put this money towards the property. So we began with an illusion of financial security and many ideas, though no solid plan, for an income stream in the future.

The dilapidated old house would have cost almost a million pounds to renovate, and looking back, I can see that our goal to fix it up was a pipe dream.

Furthermore, the renovation project split our focus between the land and the house. Since finding consensus was hard enough already, this led to us getting little done on both fronts.

***

After the community failed, and in a messy way that left little goodwill between former members, I was crushed. What did this mean for me, and for the dream of a self-organizing, abundant human collective?

Now I see that our failure was almost inevitable. We made a litany of basic errors that undermined us from the community’s inception. And this makes me feel hopeful. It’s not like we did everything right and still some unknowable evil thwarted us.

While it would be nice to have a success story to share, the next best thing is to have an understanding of why utopian efforts to fix the world so often fall apart. It gives us the tools to do things differently the next time around.