Beautiful living interiors.
Nature - around you, beneath you, above you.
Self-reliance.
More time to do what you love.
Did I mention awesome toilets?
It took a couple of months to gain perspective about living the ecovillage life. Indeed, from North America, Svanholm and Munksoegaard, two Danish eco-villages, now evoke a certain nostalgia for nature, simplicity, community.
Ecovillages are “human-scale, full-featured settlements, in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future,” according to sustainability thinker Robert Gilman.
“They are places where people have invested time and money in finding new and alternative solutions to what is offered and what people are accepting,” explained Etienne Gernez, a young engineer who set out to document sustainable living in Scandinava during the 2009 summer. "When you live an urban life, you have to use the way energy is produced by the city, its waste management system, its transportation… you have all these services and facilities that are offered. You can just use them without any thinking about how improving them. These people in eco-villages are working on making them better.”
Gernez gathered a group of curious individuals from Europe and North America to collect footage and spread awareness about how groups of committed individuals are making big changes in the way they lead their lives. His team is now busy putting together the 50 hours of footage gathered this summer into one spunky, original hour and a half documentary.
For more information about the project and the team's findings, go to Taking Good Intentions One Step Beyond.
As for the cool toilets, you'll just have to check out Jytte Abildstrom's awesome composting potties yourself...
Whether you think ecovillages are paradise or utopia (or maybe somewhere in-between), finding out more won't hurt. Who knows, it may even inspire.
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