Here, nearly everything is shared. There are two community electric cars - donated by the Erssons who no longer have a private car-, shared bicycles (and bike trailers), an extensive fruit orchard, berry and grape patches, and a considerable community garden space. Photovoltaics provide about two-thirds of the energy consumed by the complex. […] Rents here are lower than the Portland average because the Erssons want Kailash to be accessible to all income levels. There’s a 300-person waitlist, but Ole hopes others will follow their example.
“If you look at it from an economic perspective no business would want a complex landscape like this because it’s way too much maintenance, but what you have to do is turn the maintenance over to the residents, and then they do it: they get joy; it’s an antidepressant; it’s a way of creating food; it’s a way of creating community; so you have to do it in a certain way, but it’s definitely a lot more work than the typical grass and shrub landscape for sure.”
Yeah, it’s a wonderful functioning form of positive distribution and of an exemplary low-carbon lifestyle. It’s a great community builder. However, there are things gardening like this can’t solve. It’s simply more efficient to have large-scale agriculture. Especially with grain. Grain and pasture are the biggest problems for this kind of lifestyle if we are going to keep a similar modern diet(not that we should)
I want to stress that this food production system is better as a community creation method and carbon carbon reduction than as a food creator. Not that this shouldn’t happen or is in any way negative. This can definitely bring about positive change and reduce food insecurity in many communities. However, people will always want bread, rice, mochi, pastries, tortillas and naans. And a home garden is not very efficient at growing those crops or beef. It’s something to keep in mind and one of the reasons I’m an ML. We need collectivization and centralized grain production. The other side of this is protein. Even this decent plot of land, can’t feed more than a few goats, or a cow. ~50% of land in America is reserved for grazing. We can reduce that and people need to stop eating so much gd meat and beef.
I’m conclusion, I do find this community to be a wonderful vision of a carbon neutral or even carbon negative world, but it’s important to remember that dedicated farmers still have their place in civilization and we really need a lot of work on “traditional” agriculture and animal husbandry for these to be in any way sustainable. That’s also assuming all private/profit-driven corporations on earth have been abolished.
Yes I agree with your points here. Personally I enjoyed seeing how positive the residents felt about working together and seeing for themselves what they could accomplish in this way, as you said it is more of a community builder than an answer to how to actually produce the food supply for a society. As we’re posting in a mainly ML community here I didn’t make a disclaimer in my OP post about this, but I’m glad you made this breakdown of how simply making community gardens like this cannot achieve the type of widescale change necessary for the world.
Having participated in a couple projects like this one myself I can say that on one hand they are absolutely not revolutionary in and of themselves, but they do provide a great place for community-forming and education that can become a meeting place and entry point for other work.
Absolutely. I think as MLs realizing the power and importance of the humble farmer is second to none. I have also participated in urban agriculture and I find it to wonderful as well. It’s amazing to see that humans don’t need that much to be happy, cooperative and fulfilled. I think consumerism really is against humanity because it trains us to want more and want better, but only products and aesthetic vapidity. What we really want more of, are healthier relationships, peace and challenge(whatever form that may take). Capital definitely over complicated life and the human experience.
On a further note on complexity in the form of product consumption. We’ve survived just fine for millions of years without Gucci, ExxonMobil, Apple and McDonald’s. It’s a western philosophy idea that complexity for its own sake is a sign of development. Maybe a remnant of the enlightenment. Simplicity can be as rigorous and complex as any system. For example the game “Go” simple game, simple rules. Nearly infinite possibilities. Whereas, Chess is much more complicated on its surface, but doesn’t have nearly as many combinations and outcomes as Go.
I believe we can use the power of simplicity as a guide to many solutions. The community in this video doesn’t need as much, and provides a lot for itself and it’s surroundings, thus reducing the complexity of logistics for their city. If there were 20 of these in one city, it could be imagined that these would reduce the need for complex infrastructure. And yet allow for resources to be diverted to solve more complex issues. Like exploring space, rejuvenating ecosystems, creating food security for the world, educating the world and curing diseases.
Tl;dr By simplifying the material needs of the individual(as shown in the video) we allow for more complexity to arise in the global human system
