After a week in Toronto to catch up on zees and digitize footage, I headed
back out onto the road to continue the mission. This time, I don't need
to rent a car, because I'll only be in big cities, meeting urban
ecovillagers. I'll be getting around mainly by Chinese bus companies
that organize inter-city transport from Chinatown to Chinatown for a
fraction of the cost of a ticket on Grayhound. You don't have to be
Chinese to ride the bus -- in fact, a majority of the passengers aren't
Asian at all.
First stop is Albany, New York, where Scott Kellogg has recently relocated
to. He co-founded the Rhizome Collective, an inner-city ecovillage in
East Austin, Texas, that has been in existence for 10 years.
Unfortunately, their main space was recently shut down by building
inspectors, so there was no longer any good reason for me to truck it down
to Texas, if I could save time and money by including him on my Eastern
Seaboard communities tour.
Another veteran of the anti-globalization anarchist movement that grew
weary of protesting the problems and wanted to move towards providing
potential solutions, Scott used his inheritance to buy an ugly industrial
lot on the wrong side of the tracks, but in a hip city that's fertile
ground for fermenting culture-change. It's not only the economic
constraints of high property values in urban areas -- if you really want
to transform a town, permaculture demands that you depave ugly asphalt and
remediate the earth underneath from toxic contaminants, not pick a
miraculously unblemished oasis as your starting point.
In his book "Toolbox for Sustainable City Living", Scott explains how they
grew edible mushrooms, chickens, and even freaking tilapia fish! He
illustrates how Rhizome harvests, filters, and recycles precious water.
He demonstrates how the collective produces carbon-neutral energy with
appropriate technology methods. And all of this occurred in a collective
living situation for a dozen inhabitants, with permanent office space for
a whole host of radical activist organizations, to boot.
Despite their successes, greedy developers put pressure on the city to
reverse their hands-off policy and start to find fault with the various
ammendments that Rhizome had applied on site. Once there was political
will to eject the collective, they had no choice but to run away and live
to fight another day. Even if they abide by the spirit of the law, deep
ecologists cannot co-exist with capitalism, which will use every dirty
trick in the book to crush any alternative.
But what troubles me most about this story is not the fate that befell it
in the end, but rather the problems that it faced on-and-off for a decade
around issues of property ownership, which may have prevented it from
mounting an effective resistance. I've seen these issues come up time and
time again in collective living situations in which the owner of the
building also lives in the building. Even if they don't want to be
over-assertive and try to be as benevolent as possible, in the end there
is no way to avoid the fact that owners and non-owners have different sets
of interests that occasionally come into conflict and cannot easily be
reconciled.
I am incredibly attracted to the eco-city model of converting an old
factory, warehouse, or small office building on the edge of town into an
Irbutz, urban bolo, eco-anti-squat, whatever you want to call it. But it
requires more than one person to pay for it in partnership in order to
avoid the dangerous dynamics that inevitably result from the
landlord-tenant relationship. Even if every actor in the equation means
well, I can't figure out a formula that would neutralize the inherent
tensions in this economic arrangement.
While I was in Toronto, I started toying around with the idea of
co-creating a collective living space, based on the
Austin/Albany/Asheville models. But most of my old friends and natural
allies have coupled off and aren't interested in co-housing anymore, it
would seem, and the younger generation isn't necessarily ready to invest
in a project as serious as this. Or maybe it's because all of the
aforementioned success stories have names that start with a circle-A for
anarchy. I dunno, does this mean that we need to start up an eco-colony
in Ajax, Ontario?
