Slide 1 I've been asked to speak with you this morning on what resources do intentional communities bring to the table when we are trying to talk about post peak oil, the world, the changes that are coming, the adjustments, whatever you want to call them, the transition from where we are now to wherever we are going.

Slide 3 What kind of resource sharing do intentional communities do? There is a lot of diversity in intentional communities. They are doing all kinds of different things for all kinds of different reasons. So I'm providing things that some communities have done rather than what every community does all the time. But these are examples of what people can do if they decide they want to share their resources.

Some communities share their income, they share their expenses, and they often share equipment. They share lawnmowers, a rototiller, exercise equipment, a freezer, and laundry machines. Now what does that do for the environment? Remember that chart where the amount of energy to produce something showed a non-existent human piece and then 99.9% fossil fuel. So when we cut down on our purchases by sharing we are going to cut down on the use of embedded energy in all the objects around us.

What do you learn when you start sharing things with other people? You learn that if you're not careful everybody's device is nobody's device. That means when everybody is using it but nobody is taking responsibility for maintaining it, and pretty soon you don't have it. You have to create a strategy for maintaining what you have in the group so you still have it after a while.

My community learned that the hard way. We missed checking one oil compartment in our tractor for about 20 years and we ended up with a very expensive repair. We almost had to buy a different tractor because of the price of the parts. And we were saying "everybody's equipment is nobody's equipment. We know that"! But we all missed that one thing. We all maintained everything else. But we missed that one thing. So you have to pay attention.

You can share facilities. Auto repair – We have an auto repair area in our barn. One of my friends is an ex-mechanic. We have all kinds of tools, jacks, a concrete slab....We can go in there and cut down on the amount of money we need to go somewhere else to pay somebody else to fix our car. Now you may say "Fix a car?" Well, they're getting harder to fix. But they're liable to get easier to fix later on – if we were burning alcohol fuel we would only need about a third as much engine work.

Auto repair wood shop – this can range from co-housing communities where they will have a room with a few tools and a bench, to my workshop which I share with my community. I provided it for the community because I wanted it to be there. I let other people use it with supervision. I have a partner in the business.

There is a cooperative swimming pool in a land co-op in Florida.

Most communities that have a community center – ours is excluded – but most of them have an exercise room because who wants this exercise equipment sitting in your living room that you use once a week, or once a month, or in your basement? And most communities end up, especially like a co-housing community, in a situation where the people that have moved there have more exercise equipment than they can fit in their community exercise room. But once it's set up, you can go over there. An exercise room is great if it's not in your house, because you can go in there after work at midnight; you come off the second shift, you can go over there and run on the treadmill, and because it's in the community center, you're not aggravating anybody.

We've got a sauna. A lot of cohousing communities in our community have a guest room or a guest cabin so that your house doesn't have to be as big. That means 10 houses, maybe, or 20 or 30, don't have to be as big because you have one room. That is a lot of embedded energy. And in these days, houses are generally too big.

What else? Well, if you're sharing resources, if you're sharing your lives a little bit, you actually know a little bit about each others' lives, you can do much more carpooling than if you have to do some electronic thing with the city to figure out who's going to work near you. It's about 6 miles to the middle of town from my community. I can go to town with a friend, and we're doing half the gas. Or we can – if we're wild and crazy – we can get on our bicycles and ride our bikes together and have a pleasant conversation, get exercise, and get our groceries. But actually knowing about each other and being involved in each others' lives can promote carpooling as well as other resource-sharing.

We can share the risk and pool resources for technological innovations and improvements that otherwise might not get started. Vince is in a group in St. Louis that is doing a community biodiesel project that one person would be having a hard time doing by themselves. How easy is it to start an alcohol place, production facility, compared to doing it with a group of people? How about methane digesters for methane gas, instead of natural gas? How about water treatment? How about water treatment for sewage? It's easier to do that for a group of people than it is to do all the research, all the development, and all that stuff for one person.

Also, as a group you can create local businesses that are located in or near your land that allow walking to work, flexible hours, child care. I have a 400-foot walk from my house to my work. Now unfortunately, I also have customers who are not 400 feet away, and so once in a while I have to get in a vehicle and deliver furniture. In this case, I am on my way to Boston, which is not my normal work area. I'm generally more regionally located as far as my woodworking goes, but I have a friend in Boston, and I'm delivering a cherry mantle to him after this conference.

But in general, I can walk to work. I walk through the woods and the fields. I'm not on concrete. I have to go through the woods to get to work. What does that mean? It means I'm in touch with the seasons. It means I'm in touch with the place, I'm much more located, grounded in that reality every day because I'm in it every day. I don't get in my car, hit the garage door opener, have the door open – I'm not in a cage or a box all the time in my life. Watch out for the rants, folks, they come every now and then.

Health care, insurance. This was just brought up to me earlier today and it reminded me to put this in here. This is a problem for people, right? There are a variety of things you can do about this. And a variety of solutions. One of them is to be healthier – all right? Now in spite of working to be healthier, sometimes health problems still exist, or occur. The Vale – a long-established intentional community here in Yellow Springs – has still managed as people get elderly, not to have anybody have to go into a nursing home. How can that be? Well, people have a support group. People have folks who they have long history with and they are willing to help each other out.

In my community, a woman got breast cancer about 13 years ago, no, 11 years ago, and she was a nurse but she had no health insurance. Amazingly enough, between family financial resources and the fact that she not only lived in my community but had developed deep roots in two other communities in our area, she never had to go in the hospital. She had people coming from the other two communities to share the work of taking care of her with our community, so that we didn't burn out, because she had put her time and energy into community in her life. When she died – we have community lands, we had a community woodshop – we made the casket in the shop, her mother and daughter prepared the body, and we buried her on our land. And my wife and I and two other couples dug the grave by hand. And we were sure glad we didn't have to go any deeper.

There is a holistic attitude about your whole life when you can take care of people all the way until they die. It's very different from the general attitude – here's another rant coming, I'm just going to try to keep it brief. If you're into permaculture, you understand about decline. Patricia brought this up in one of the discussion groups yesterday. Things decline, things die. People decline and die. And if you're not prepared to face that reality, and most people in our culture don't seem to be ready to face that reality, then this whole part of life gets totally screwy and very expensive, because you're paying somebody else to deal with something that you're scared of. There's the rant.

So what about health insurance? In my community, we have separate incomes, each person is responsible for their health insurance, and it's a challenge. We also have a doctor in our community, so we don't tend to use insurance or official care nearly as much as we would if we were on our own. There are communities like the income-sharing communities, the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, where they have a similar enough structure and enough trust built up between them that they can create a major medical fund that they all contribute to per capita every year, and they've got hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have enough that they're not worried. Each community self-insures for the small stuff, and then they have a major medical for the catastrophic illnesses. And they're still ahead of the game. Remember, when you pay somebody else for insurance, you're paying their overhead and their profits as well as for the money that they are reluctantly bringing back to you.

Slide 4 So these are ways communities can share. If you think that you as a community are doing great sharing because you're sharing inside these property lines, you're missing something. Sharing can spread out beyond the property lines to the neighborhood. And there are a lot of communities that provide one or more of these possibilities to their neighborhood. So in general, communities provide cooperation low-side. (That means I'm an ex-mathematician.) Groups of people that are into cooperation, and they act as seeds in their neighborhood to spread cooperation into the whole area around them.

What's an example? My community had no access locally to good health food, whole grains, stuff like that, nutritional supplements, back in the 70s. We started a food co-op. We had friends who were homesteaders. How were we going to say, "we're going to buy for ourselves, but you can't do it." So we created a whole regional, well, really, county-wide food co-op, and it's been going 25 years. We don't have to worry about its stability because we have both a group of people in the community who are fixated? obsessed? interested in cooperation. So we have the core group in our community, and as homesteaders come and go around us it doesn't matter, because we have enough within our community to support that. It's less work and a lot more fun, and more economical, if we share it with our friends. But we provide the focus, we provide the space. We have a community building, we call it the Community Center, and we donated a room in that community center to the food co-op. Well, I'm not losing anything. I can walk to the food co-op. I can go shopping at midnight and buy brown rice that I can't buy at any store in town. So it's actually convenient for us. I kind of feel sorry for our friends who have to drive to get to it. But we have shared that with the local group.

Another example from our community as well as Mikisukee down in Florida – we heard about some local people, some of our neighbors, who were interested in trying to start a volunteer fire department. They had had one meeting. We went to the second meeting and we said, "this is right up our alley." We came home to our own community business meeting and we appropriated $500, actually we each donated money, to make up $500. We went back to the next meeting, we put a $500 check down on the table and said, this is going to happen, isn't it, and everybody said, yes. Because even though it was not much per family, we could act as a group and say this cooperative endeavor is important and we're going to support it as a group, and we can make a difference, because there's a bunch of us all thinking the same way. That doesn't mean that in our community meetings we all think the same way. Don't get me wrong.

Celo Community in North Carolina started a health clinic. It's located, as I remember, on their land, but it's open to the people in the area. They also started a whole food store, and they had a better place to put it off the land, a more accessible place, and so it's located off the land, but both of those were things that Celo started and opened up to the surrounding area. They also started an alternative school. Greenbrier in Texas started an alternative school, and they discovered that there are all these people in the area who really wanted their kids to go to that school. They started having a home business of an alternative school. After a significant number of years, the demand started to dwindle for some reason, and they went back to just having it on their land for themselves.

Communities and other people can start alternative currencies. Earthhaven has an alternative currency that they can exchange back and forth. Why let the Federal government be the only people who make money? The Federal government has a different agenda for the money than we might have. So if you start alternative currencies, you can spread that into the area. It's essentially a barter system except you have a measurement tool, the alternative currency, to measure how much the barter things are worth. Money is a medium of exchange and so we created our own medium of exchange. You can also do barter systems directly. Again, the cooperative spirit that you have in a group of people can be the seed that it takes to get these things off the ground. And then all our talk about zoning and development rights last night reminded me that some communities have started land trusts, not only to own their own lands, but regional land trusts, and they provide the service of holding the development rights in trust for people who want to somehow protect their land like family farms. They have a land trust that the Farm community started, or people at the Farm community started, in Summertown, Tennessee, and they get support from people all over who are interested in land issues and land preservation. So there are all these different things that spread out into the neighborhood when communities have the perspective that my ideal of cooperation doesn't stop at the property line.

Zoning craziness. We were talking about this a little bit last night. We can work on developing plans, zoning possibilities for clustered housing. Shannon Farm in Virginia had to gerrymander their land, because they wanted to have clustered housing, a variety of clusters on their land. They have about 45 or 50, no, 60 adults now, and maybe 40 households, some of them group households. They wanted to cluster their housing into little neighborhoods and have discrete neighborhoods, and neighborhoods would have different styles. There was an eco-neighborhood, and kind of a more standard house neighborhood, and various neighborhoods. They had to have, I think it was, 5 acres per house designated for that house, and so they had these houses in a little circle, and then they had things going out like this to get their 5 acres, especially because the property line was going along near some of the clusters, and so they had to designate, they had to survey out 5-acre plots that went around each house and then went off into the woods. Well, realistically, zoning shouldn't have to make them do that. There are changes happening across the country in clustered housing design. A lot of times this involves having the development rights to a larger piece be restrictive so that the houses have to stay in a small area. There are also ecovillages where they are working on changing the zoning pattern inside the cities to make people able to live and work in the same areas. In a lot of college towns in particular, there are very strict restrictions on unrelated persons living together, like only two unrelated persons are legally able to live in a residential unit together in most college towns. Communities and urban co-ops have been working on that restriction, and what they're doing is they're having to go back to the excuses that the landlords gave for why they created these regulations, like parking, and nuisance noise, and stuff like that, and they solve those problems, and then the landlords don't have anything to stand on. So they had to go back and do the work of solving the problems for the city that the landlords had used as excuses to keep people from living together.

Zoning craziness also prevents mixed-use neighborhoods. Well, if there's no commercial activity of any sort in your subdevelopment, you've got to get in a car to go somewhere, to do anything except sit in your house. I mean, you've got to get in the car to go to school, you've got to get in your car to go shopping, you've got to get in your car to go exercise unless you just run around the neighborhood, to go to work. So mixed-use neighborhoods have been just about zoned out of existence in our society, and we've got to bring them back. So people are working on that as one of the zoning issues. I have a woodshop 400 feet from my house, because there is no zoning outside of the town in my county. I have a lot of freedom to create a more sustainable pattern because of the lack of zoning. If you get anywhere near a big city and in some places, statewide, you run into odd, crazy zoning. So people are breaking that down in their areas. Zoning and codes, although there are national patterns, the regulations and the people doing it, enforcing them, are all local. So you can spread the information from place to place on how you dealt with the zoning people, but you've got to go deal with your local zoning and code people in particular to get them to change. That's why it's a neighborhood idea.

You can go enlighten your own neighborhood – local banks, architects, developers – to create more sustainable patterns when they are doing their developing. If you go to a bank and you want to build a small house, they'll laugh you out of the bank. Why is that? Because their thinking is "if I'm going to put a mortgage on, when I foreclose on it, I want it to have as broad a range of possible buyers as possible, so that I can sell it for the most amount of money." The more buyers, the more demand. So if you don't build a three-bedroom house, you can't build a house. It's hard to get a loan on it. Co-housing communities have been breaking down those barriers, because they're building residential areas that there is such demand for, the banks are noticing. The fact is, the houses that banks want to build, are not the houses that people nowadays need. We have smaller families, we have a lot of single adults, we have a lot of single mothers with one or two kids – so we don't need huge houses. And yet when you step outside, you drive, walk, bicycle outside of town, what do you see? McMansions – one of the ways in which the patterns of development over the last 10 or 15 years have been driving us in the wrong direction.

Well, architects. They're in this mindset that they want something that is going to look really good on their resume, in their portfolio. I kid you not. I don't know if there are any architects in the room. Some architects – I know some good architects. Some of my best friends are architects. And lawyers. In any event, the general rule – a friend of mine was a building contractor trying to do solar architecture back in the 70s and 80s and 90s, and he discovered that when an idealistic couple came to him and wanted to build a solar house, he would work with them a little bit, and then they would say, "we're going to go to an architect and have plans drawn up," that was the kiss of death for that project. Because the architect wanted to design something that looked good in their portfolio, had no relationship, or limited relationship, to what the people actually needed and could afford. The architect had no idea of what it cost to build what he had designed. But they had to pay him for the service of getting that house designed, even though they could never build it.

Things are changing. People are working with architects. There are architects out there, who are interested in sustainable design and housing that actually works for people. There is a book on Patricia's Earthhaven table, Pattern Language. When I first saw that, I thought it was a great book and I tried to get my woodworking partner, David, to go with me and have it be a shop expense. And he said, "Written by an architect? I don't want it." We had had some interesting experiences with architects in our woodworking business already. About a year later, some friend of his in a bookstore in Alabama showed him the book. He opened it up, came back, said, "we've got to buy this great book!" So even people who have trouble with architects, can find architects who are really designing for people and understand what we're talking about and can help us design stuff that works for people and works for sustainable patterns.

We can model movement in our neighborhoods to sustainability. So when people see us, they say, "what's going on?" we start talking to them. That's kind of clear. We can work with our local and regional planners, our Chamber of Commerce. At this conference, we understand a lot more about what's likely to happen in this country over the next 10-15-20 years. They may not have a clue yet. They need input, when they're starting to do their planning, or are continuing their planning, they need input on what we know and what's likely to hit them. Two months ago I sat in on a guy who came who was a futurist who said, "you do nothing and your county's going down the tubes." Now what he didn't say was "oil prices are going to skyrocket." And there's a big difference in the planning when you start thinking – we're going to have to be more locally self-reliant – instead of we're going to have to figure out a way to keep our shoe factory that makes shoes for all over the country from going overseas. There is a different mindset about how you're going to develop when you start thinking about the upcoming locality requirements.

Slide 5 What else? The stuff I've been talking about is all very nice, but it's very local. And it's not that big a change in what's going on, not that big an assist, not that big a resource, even though it's important. If we're out there walking our talk, as they say, in our own community and in our local region, it gives us credibility when we go farther.

How are we going to go farther? What's important? Interpersonal stuff, process stuff. This is the stuff you can't so much point to as you have to live. And this is the area where our culture is the most destructive. As I said last night, we have an environmental movement, which has its struggles still, but at least we have an environmental movement for the last 30 years or so. We need a community movement. We need an interpersonal and process movement. We need to spread the word that people actually can deal with each other. They can work together, they can cooperate instead of being forced into being more individualistic, more autonomous, more isolated, more alienated, more fearful. And what happens when we get that way? What happens? We're more manipulatable.

What have intentional communities been doing? We've been creating, testing, and developing decision-making processes other than Roberts Rules of Order. One of the interesting things about our country is that voting is sacred. Voting is the basis of our democracy. Talk to a Quaker about voting. Their most succinct phrase is "voting is violence." Now it's better than the violence of a king, but voting is violence. It is the violent imposition of the will of the majority on the minority. As does Patricia, I do workshops on consensus decision-making and I say, if you go to a meeting where people are voting, everybody can walk out of that room pissed if you have three votes. Because with three votes, everybody can be on the losing side of one of those votes. And they'll remember losing a lot more than they'll remember winning. If you don't believe me, go South and ask somebody about the Civil War. It's even worse when you lose and you get your nose rubbed in it like the South did. It's a totally different attitude. So create, test, and develop decision-making processes other than Roberts Rules of Order.

Consensus. I happen to be – I don't know what word to use – but I'm pretty strong about how wonderful consensus is. Let's say, right now it's the best thing I know of for decision-making. In situations where you can't get people to believe that consensus is possible, you can do what are called agreement-seeking strategies, rather than trying to get 51% and then vote as quickly as possible. If you can create agreement instead of dividing at 51%, you're going to have a lot more happy people.

Planner-manager systems: Twin Oaks has a planner-manager system that is fairly complicated, but the idea is they have planners, and then they have managers for each of their workgroups, and these folks are responsible to the community, they are callable – there is a way that the community can rein them in or change the direction if they need to. It keeps people from having to deal with the day-to-day running of the community, it's a fairly large community, income-sharing, and so they have this setup. And the point is there is equal access to the decision-making process. Some people are more eloquent, some people are more energetic – it's not that everybody's equal, but they have equal access to that decision-making process.

The last example I have is the servant-leader. We have a tendency to imagine, because of the way our business hierarchies and organizational hierarchies are, we have a tendency to imagine the manager as being the boss of everybody that works under them. Well, there's another way to do it, and that's the servant-leader, and that is that the person who is managing the process is the servant of that group, rather than the boss of the group. And there's a whole movement of people talking about that.

And intentional communities have a lot of experience with making these things work, with what does work, what doesn't, what you have to include. At Alpha Farm, out in Oregon, Caroline Estes, who lives there, trains people in consensus. She learned it as a Quaker and discovered you have to bring everything with you, if you have a successful model. You have to figure out how to translate pretty much everything over into this other realm, into the secular realm, because if you leave one piece out, it's going to end up being essential and it will cause you problems. So they have what they call a threshing meeting every now and then where they just work on the interpersonal stuff, because if they don't do that once in a while, they're going to end up having it come out in odd ways and dysfunctional ways when they're trying to have their business meeting.

What else can we do in interpersonal process work? We can model groups working out our personal group balances. What kind of balances? Resources. How much time do I have for myself, how much time do I donate or provide to the group? How much of my time does the group have a call on? Different communities have different ways of doing this. At Twin Oaks, they plan how many hours each person needs to contribute per week. At my community, we just have work days. And we have people doing things kind of in the background. If they see something needs to be done, they do it.

Money. How much money do people contribute to the community? How much money is available for community work, how much money do people keep for themselves? Again, the answers to these balance questions are all over the map from one community to the next, but the communities are actually working on these in meetings. They're figuring it out for themselves, and it's really interesting to watch people do that.

Space. How much personal space to have, how much community space.

Attention of the group. How much attention do you put in, how much attention do you get back?

Privacy issues. How much privacy, how much time are you around other people?

Power issues. Balance between the group's power and individual power.

How much do you have self-identity tied up in yourself and how much with the group? How much does the group want you to be part of this group and how much do you want to be an individual?

All these things – the reality is that, in theory, this is what our government does for us on a larger scale. Have you noticed that it's not going very well? So we need people working on how to do these things better, and this is one of the things that communities have been working on. How do we balance between the personal and the group on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis in all these areas?

Model trying to live out our ideas. This is an interesting thing. A friend of mine was teaching a psychology course at Birmingham Southern College, which is a conservative college in Birmingham, Alabama, and she took a group of her psychology students for their January in-between semesters project, she took them to Twin Oaks for a three-week visitor period. Culture shock. Major culture shock. I don't think you can imagine how much culture shock unless you've been to Twin Oaks. The men are wearing skirts, tattoos, interesting interpersonal relationship possibilities. There is actually a cartoon that was done by a guy at Twin Oaks where they were talking about the love of a man for a woman, and they said, "oh, we must not forget about the love of a man for two women," and then it goes on to, "the love of ten men for ten women, and ten women for ten men," But what the kids came back with, after they got over the culture shock, they had never seen somebody actively trying to live out their life through their ideals, paying attention to their ideals, trying to make it work between their ideals and the practicalities of life. And they'd never seen people trying to figure out the balance between conflicting ideals.

A simple conflicting ideal is honesty and kindness. How do you balance being honest to somebody and being unkind? Because there are times when you can be painfully honest and all you're really doing is dumping on them, you're not being kind. Other times, if you're being too kind, you're not giving them the information they need, you're not giving them the feedback they need to be a better person. How do you balance between conflicting ideals? How do you live them out? It's tough, it's not easy stuff. And for people to actually see folks trying to do that, struggling with it, working with it, creates the possibility that they can do that in their own lives. A lot of these kids came back from Twin Oaks, they started volunteering for civic organizations. They started doing stuff with their lives besides just going with the program, partying, and studying. They saw people living intentionally for the first time in their lives.

My friend wasn't perfectly comfortable at Birmingham Southern. She ended up at the University of Alabama in one of their research places. Tuscaloosa was a lot more comfortable for her than Birmingham and Birmingham Southern.

So I've got examples of ideals that we have to balance inclusivity with prudence. If you let everybody in, pretty soon you won't have a community. People learn that the hard way. If you plan to reuse everything and just keep it around, pretty soon you have a trash heap. You've got to be able to take care of the material you want to reuse. You've got to balance the long-term efficiency of reusing materials with the short-term efficiency of going to the lumberyard and buying those new 2x4s that are all the same, and you can get the number you want instead of three-quarters of what you want from the building you tore down. You can balance between the ideals of being vegan and doing animal husbandry, which can often be an efficient form of agriculture depending on the location, the land, and the land use patterns.

You can develop and share conflict resolution and mediation skills. Biggie. How much can I say about developing and sharing conflict resolution and mediation skills? A whole day, again. Whole day. These are things that are not modeled in our culture. People don't have a clue that it can be done. If you watch a TV program, the typical sitcom, there is some weird thing that gets them, a miscommunication, they yell and fight for 25 minutes, and then suddenly it's all resolved. Doesn't work like that, does it? In reality, people are in conflict. If they're in conflict with their boss, they either quit their job or they go home and kick the dog. If they're in conflict with their wife, they either yell at each other, or they go to the bar and drink, or they get divorced. If they're in conflict with their neighbor, they either build a fence, or they move, or they shoot the dog if you're in Tennessee.

We don't get a lot of cultural role models and information. The hardest thing is for people to believe that it's possible. Once they see it's possible, then they can start working on it. And to see it's possible, they've got to start with small stuff. You can't start teaching people about conflict resolution with the biggest conflicts that they know. You've got to get them to trust the process through small improvements in their interpersonal relationships.

Mediation. This is more a negotiation, but sometimes that's the best you can do. And a lot of times in urban areas, that's way better than people going to court. A lot of folks on the Farm in Summertown started a mediation organization in Nashville to work especially with teenagers who needed to stay out of the criminal justice system. They needed a good experience with suffering the consequences of their actions other than going to the reform school, as we used to call it. And so people from the Farm were in that mediation headset already. They went and started an organization that worked with the court to keep the kids out of the penal facilities and taught them that they had to go back and do some kind of service for the people that they damaged.

Finally, we can just spread that cooperative perspective and possibilities wherever we go, in whatever group we are in. I'll talk about that again in a minute, or three.

Slide 6 Holistic solutions. Communities can be test labs for holistic solutions. Some of them won't volunteer for this, others of them are already trying it. The ecovillage movement is really interested in finding a holistic solution to sustainability. My personal opinion is that our culture is so far away from it we don't know what it looks like yet. We can't even plan sustainability, because we don't know what it looks like until we get closer. So these folks are working on getting a lot closer as quick as we can, because we need the information.

How many of you have heard of a book called Limits to Growth? I have never read this book, I've never seen it. I was given a copy of the research paper that the folks wrote before they put the book out, because a friend of mine was in school at MIT where they were doing this back about 1970. It became part of my worldview. Very controversial book. The folks who were the most angry with it were economists and oil companies. But economists have this belief that unlimited growth is not just possible but it's our destiny. We have a different opinion, don't we. So in 1992, how many of you have seen Beyond the Limits? Some of you are tuned in. Confronting global collapse, envisioning a sustainable future. They came back 20 years later, they reevaluated with new information, new technologies, new problems of the earth. They studied not just resource consumption, which is what we are talking about primarily here; they also looked at population, industrial capital, food production, and pollution. For those of you who haven't seen this book or the ideas behind it, they did a computer model and they discovered that if you leave any one of these unsolved, somewhere in the middle of the 21st century, and that's pretty approximate because it was a computer model, but somewhere along in there, the population that's been going up like this, goes like that and you have a crash. You have a crash not just of population, but of the systems that support human life. And you have a crash in many cases that is not recoverable from. You can't go back with the amount of resources you have left after that crash, and correct the problem that caused it. You look at the Sahara Desert. How much energy, how much human energy and investment would it take to put that desert back into being a productive environment? Incredible amount of energy. More energy than we probably have as a human race.

That was the problem that they found –that if you didn't take care of all these different facets, one of them would get you, and it would create that kind of tragedy that you could not recover from, because you no longer had the resources. So I was really glad the first night when Richard talked about this, because it set me up to be able to say that without saying, "okay folks, we're really just talking about the tip of the iceberg with peak oil." It has been really great to hear all the speakers really talking about the same thing, not just fixated on how many barrels of oil are coming out of the ground which year. We're really on the same page, because we better get there. We better get on the same page and quickly. Their conclusion in 1992 was that some of our opportunities, some of our windows of opportunity, had narrowed since 1972. Others had gotten better. There were some improvements, there were some narrowing. They were worried when they started running the computer model again, can we find a non-crash solution, and the answer was, yes, there are still non-crash solutions, but they're harder to get to. That was 1992. In the fall of 1992, I saw my first Ford Explorer. How many McMansions have been built since 1992? How many suburbs have sprawled out from cities in the last 12 years? We have been on a binge, and much of this country is still on that binge. We're still building McMansions, we're still buying now Hummers instead of SUVs.

So we're looking for holistic solutions. It's easier to see the interrelationships and the consequences in a smaller area. If you can contain what you're doing primarily to that area, you can see the consequences of what you're doing. There's no "away". If you contain what you're doing into this area, there is no "away" to throw it.

So you have to work on the interpersonal and cultural – I'm just repeating what Patricia said. You have to work on interpersonal and cultural, the energy and material inputs, the trash-pollution outputs, or the resources. Population – and that doesn't mean just humans – it means humans, cats, dogs, and other critters in our area. Food production and soil fertility. We have to do all that.

Now we don't all as individuals have to do all of it ourselves. Take that load off, right? But I think Patricia said last night, we've got to do what we can. We can't say, "well, it's going to be bad so we're going to go stick our heads in the sand," or "we'll go make it okay for me and mine." Doesn't work that way. Greed is not going to be a solution to what we're going through. There are going to be some people working on that basis. And the reality is, there's going to be some people working on that basis, there's going to be a whole range of different things happening. But we've got to work for the best solution we can see. And that involves all of it.

It means for me, I'm a community activist. I go around helping people learn about interpersonal skills, how to build community between people, how to get rid of that alienation and isolation as best we can, because that's the part that I relate to the best. It's just where I belong. Other people are doing peace work, people are doing permaculture work, people are doing all different kinds of stuff. Find the place that works for you, that fits your skills and your interests, and put your energy into it.

Slide 7 Challenges. How are we going to address the poverty in the world as our economy contracts? I don't have an answer for that. But we're going to do it. Because if we don't address poverty and the injustices and inequalities of our world systems, we're not going to have a very pleasant transition. How are we going to feel okay with less material wealth, in a culture that tends to validate us by what we have instead of who we are? How are we going to fill in the hole in our soul that isolation and alienation create? What we've been doing is using material wealth. We've got to find the connection to other people and to our world, to the natural world, we've got to find the connections to the rest of the world around us that fills in that hole in our soul so we don't have to fill it with consumption.

So what can we do? One of the workshops I give is "Creating Community Intentionally Wherever You Happen to Be." Why wait till you're living in an intentional community, why wait till some terrible thing happens like 9/11 so you can all feel in New York like you're part of the community because you've just been through a disaster together. Why wait? If you're active in a group of people, what builds a sense of community and connection in that group? Normally, when I'm doing a workshop, I've only got maybe 20 people in the room and I go on a fishing expedition, and I ask people to answer that before I turn the page over. Because stuff comes out. People have ideas, and why should I just shove them in there? But this is a different format.

Slide 8 So we're going to run through this list quickly in the hopes that we will have time for questions. Working together. When you actually work together, you get a different sense of people than when you just sit around and talk. Anybody ever noticed that? You see different facets of people. We had a guy – I tend to drag in cross-country bicyclists off the highway and give them a place to sleep and a hot meal – and we had this guy that we actually met at the Farm, which is about 30 miles from us, and he was bicycling in our direction, so I said, "well, stop in our place and you can spend the night with us." He had been talking; when he came, we were having supper and he was talking about what a great gardener he was and how he'd been working on this farm and the guy that was running it didn't know his head from his elbow. So the next morning, we said "well, great - we'll get this guy to help us in the garden." We went out to the garden, and the guy leaned against the fence and talked at us, and so after about an hour of that, I started saying "where are you going to spend the night tonight?" I had learned something about this guy by trying to work together with him. You can learn a lot about people by working together. Not only that, but you have something to demonstrate the group cooperation, something you identify with, being able to work together as a group, that you might not have been able to do either as well, as quickly, or at all by yourself. The outcome, even though working together is a great thing, the outcome helps build that sense of a cooperative group that does something together.

These are in no particular order. Ritual/celebration. Music. Ritual is interesting to me because many of the rituals that I was exposed to in my youth seemed empty to me. We have to create rituals that have the meaning in them for our own lives. That includes rituals about food, water, human connection. Don't just take something that you learned when you were three or eight and try to put it into a group where it's not appropriate. Find the ritual that connects you to the earth and to other people. Celebrate together. We have a New Year's Eve party, we have Thanksgiving, and we have a variety of celebrations together. Share music. Patricia was saying, just bring it in, every time. Do a song. Well, we don't do that enough in my community, but other groups do. We're just going to run down the list.

Eating together. From the potluck supper to the Last Supper, from the very secular to the spiritual, eating together is an important group bonding experience. Especially, as Patricia said, when you prepare the food or even grow and prepare the food, with love in your heart and you share that with other people. You're sharing the essentials of life together as a group, and you're doing it with love. Now of course, I'm discounting some of the potluck suppers, like the PTA, or something like that, where people are competitive about who can make the best fried chicken. So try not to get too competitive when you're making food for potlucks.

Equitable sharing of resources and responsibilities. It doesn't mean equality. It doesn't mean that you have to legislate that everybody's the same. But there has to be a sense that the resources that the group has are being shared equitably and the responsibilities that the group puts on people are also being shared responsibly.

Open and inclusive decision-making process. Roberts' Rules of Order is barely capable of satisfying that. Consensus, other forms of decision-making – people need to feel like they have some effect, some ability to be heard and to be part of the decision-making in a group.

Retreat, study, visioning. How do you inspire people to do the hard work that it takes to work in a group? You do it by being together, and up here, part of that retreat often is personal sharing. You study things together so that you can learn how to do what you are doing better, and you create a vision together that is inspiring and helps people live out their ideals.

So what happens when things don't work just right? You have conflicts, right? You better start learning how to deal with your conflicts. One of the lessons of intentional community is not, is there going to be conflict, but what are you going to do with it when it happens? There's always going to be conflict. Human beings are imperfect. We bring a lot with us when we come into these communities, and one of the things we bring in is our own egos, our own feeling like, "I know what's right." And we also bring in old hurts that people can unknowingly punch the buttons on. So there better be a way to do conflict.

I used to give tours around my community, still do, but I used to give more of them. People would look around. We'd see the buildings and the beautiful gardens, and the fields, and the birds, and they'd say, "this is all very nice, but what are the rules here?" And I would always smile at that point, and I'd say "the first rule is there are no rules. And the second rule is, you've got to work out your conflicts." Nowadays I say you've got to try to work out your conflicts, after 30 years of it. But that's the important part, because if you try, if you're really willing to try and put yourself in that position, it works.

And everything else in our community is agreements. What's the difference between a rule and an agreement? A rule is imposed from the outside, an agreement is something we've all made together, and we can change if we all agree in our consensus process to change it. You're buying into the agreements – the rules are imposed from outside.

You better improve your communication skills so you can deal with conflict resolution, so you can deal with decision-making, so you can figure out how to share your resources, so you can eat together without arguing, so forth. And there are a lot of things you can do, a lot of trainings you can work on, a lot of books you can read. There's a lot of information out there.

You better have a clear membership process. If you're interested in community, even a sense of community in a group, if you don't know who's in the group and who isn't, and you take in just anybody, you're not valuing your community. Community is precious in our culture, it's a scarce resource, and you better value it, and that means, you have to do something about membership. It's a sad thing to have to do, but there are times when you don't have the resources to incorporate this person into your group. My community understands we are not a therapeutic community, we are not psychiatrists and psychologists, and clinical therapists. We know that our community is therapeutic for the people in it, but we cannot take in large numbers of people who are broken, beyond the normal amount.

And lastly, we need to identify. It would really help the group to have some form of community space. We have a community center, it's open to anybody in our community, including the larger community of folks who come to potlucks. My stepdaughter and her family live in a little cul-de-sac street in Baltimore which happens to have one little triangle that didn't get built on and has grass. That triangle is the center of their community. It's a functioning neighborhood primarily because of that, that triangle, and the fact you can't drive through it in a hurry being aloof. So a community space can make a big difference. What have we got left? I said personal sharing was part of the retreat process a lot of times.

Slide 9 We've got some websites. If you are interested in intentional community, or even in community in general, www.ic.org, directory.ic.org. This is a new, on-line community of directories, it just came on in October. store.ic.org is where you can buy interesting things, books and other stuff, about community, and if you want to buy things that are made in intentional communities and support their home businesses, look at www.communitymade.org.

I have one thing I'd like to read from the book Beyond the Limits, and this is actually; part of it is from a review, and part of it in a magazine called In Context, which many of you may know. And part of it is the book itself. From the review: "What are the elements of the sustainability revolution? They go beyond good information, new technologies, democratic participation, and sound policy. The authors close their book with a description of five tools that are generally not mentioned in most supposedly serious studies of what we must do: visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving." And this is from the book: "One is not allowed in the modern culture to speak about love except in the most romantic and trivial sense of the word. Anyone who calls upon the capacity of people to practice brotherly and sisterly love is more likely to be ridiculed than to be taken seriously. The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their position in the debate about whether human beings are able to operate collectively from a basis of love. In a society that systematically develops in people their individualism, their competitiveness, and their cynicism, the pessimists are the vast majority. That pessimism is the single greatest problem with the current social system, and the deepest cause of unsustainability. A culture that cannot believe in, discuss, and develop the best human qualities, is one that suffers from a tragic distortion of information. Abraham Maslow asked, 'how good a society does human nature permit, and how good a human nature does society permit?' It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, or solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities. But we try and we urge you to try. Be patient with yourself and others as you and they confront the difficulty of a changing world. Understand and empathize with inevitable resistance. There is some resistance, some claim to the ways of unsustainability, within each of us. Include everyone in the new world. Everyone will be needed. Seek out and trust in the best human instincts in yourself and in everyone. Listen to the cynicism around you and pity those who believe it, but don't believe it yourself."

Q: What about your community?
A: My community is not full and we are open to the possibility of new members. We're not advertising for them. We didn't find that to be a particularly productive way to look for new members. But yes, we are open. There are many communities that are either looking for new members, or are willing to discuss that with people.

Q: Question on information
A. Here is your connection to the most amazing amount of information that you can find. The other thing I recommend absolutely, even though it's not the Bible, it's the best book that was written on how to form a community, it's out on the table, that Community Service is selling, and I think it's called "Creating a Life Together," by Diana Christian. If you get that book and you want to start a community, that will save you a lot of heartache. It won't necessarily avoid all the challenges, but at least it will get you avoiding a lot of the common mistakes.

Q: Do you have an integrated agriculture and permaculture and do you have renewable energy technologies you people use so you are self-sufficient?
A. No. We have – I have – a car. I have no alcohol fuel for it. In fact, one of the challenges in rural community living is that people, especially if you don't have your businesses on-site, people are pretty well tied to cars. Now bicycles are an option, and I use a bicycle a fair amount, but there are times when I have to haul something big and heavy, like a mantle to Boston, and so I use a car. And there are ways that my community activism works to create a pattern of consumption that I have to be a little bit uncomfortable with.

Q: My question is about learning how to live together. There is an organization...the name of it is RECI?
A: There is a good tool for helping people adjust to the realities of their lives. It's not necessarily a tool for curing schizophrenia by itself, but it's called re-evaluation counseling. It's a peer counseling system. There are people all over the country and all over the world who can do this. I have been trained in it minimally and done it some. Patricia knows about it. There are people in that organization who are true believers, who feel like this is the answer to all the world's problems. But we know there is another problem here at least, at least one more, called peak oil. But it is a valuable tool for understanding yourself and other people, helping yourself and other people, adjust and withstand the hurts that happen to us in our lives. So I recommend it. I don't recommend thinking that it's going to be the ultimate answer for humankind. It's located at www.rc.org.

Q: This is a quick comment rather a plug. There is a dearth of intentional communities in Ohio. We would like to network about this.

Q: How do you set up your community? Are the homes clustered?
A: There are a variety of ways to start a community, and my community was a little odd. We became a community of people, and recognized that fact, and said "what are we going to do with it?" We were living in Champaign-Urbana, most of us had come to that town because of the University of Illinois for one reason or another. I taught there, some people were students there, and a lot of people – this was the early 70s – people were forming worker-controlled collective businesses. We were communists in one sense or another. And the first odd thing was that these worker-controlled businesses got together and started taxing themselves to create a fund to help other worker-controlled businesses get started. That meant they met, they had business to do together, they got to know each other – it promoted people utilizing the other cooperative businesses. So you could get just about anything you needed, except for maybe a living space, from one of these businesses. You could get food, auto repair, clothing, records, the real essentials like music. And it became a community of people. And some of the folks were living in cooperative houses. I was living in a house in town, there was another place out in the country. And we realized we were a community, and it was a precious thing. And we were living in a place of high transiency. In a university town, people are coming and going. We decided, what are we going to do with this? And we looked around Illinois, central Illinois, and the land was $2,000-3,000 an acre, and it was flat cornfields, polluted, and some friends happened to go to Tennessee to visit Stephen's Farm and said, oh, this is a great area. And so we went down. We didn't look next door, we looked at a county away, and found a piece of land that was 160 acres. It was $200 an acre instead of $2,000. It had no buildings on it, but it was a beautiful piece of land. It was ugly when we bought it, but it was a beautiful piece of land. And we started building our houses. There were no houses on it.

We boot-strapped our way through. A lot of people had no economic skills at all when they got there. They painted barn roofs; they built string-wire fences, anything they could do to make money. Thank you.