Customer Reviews

EcoVillage at Ithaca: Pioneering a Sustainable Culture

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an excellent first-hand personal account of the forming, and subsequent trials, tribulations and accomplishments of one of the most famous ecovillages in the US. Liz Walker does a good job describing how the ecovillage at Ithaca began as more of a movement than just a simple community. She details some of the initial aspects of getting the community going, and offers up some vignettes on life in the community as it formed and once it was formed and stable.

The reason I give this 4 stars instead of 5 is that while it's chocked full of anecdotes, it's short on actual advice for those wishing to form duplicate communities elsewhere. The group at Ithaca had some tremendous advantages early on, (such as being offered free land, and enjoying overwhelming support from the local community). Still, it's a good read for anybody interested in intentional communities or ecovillages.

One thing I took to heart from this is that the CSA farmer couple at Ithaca felt like they were getting something of a raw deal, and not enough support from the community. This is a recurring theme in other ICs that have a single person, couple or small group responsible for growing food for the community, with a community that's free to shop elsewhere if they desire. It's a valuable lesson.

This is a very truthful and inspiring story of the development of Ecovillage at Ithaca, with all its successes but also with the challenges and problems faced by the community. If you are thinking about joining or starting your own community I would highly recommend you this book and a visit to the Ecovillage which I did in May 2007. It really helped me to confirm my dream of building an ecovillage myself.

Liz Walker is a startlingly untalented amateur writer, and it really shows in this book. Far from a page turner, this book is a challenge to enjoy from start to finish. Not only that but, as mentioned in earlier reviews, it fails to focus on what is arguably most important to its readers, how to replicate the success of Ecovillage at Ithaca elsewhere.

This book is jam packed with trite anecdotes and rambling stories, accented by Walkers unusual personality, which hijacks the book for pages in order to laboriously drag the reader through the mud of her petty personal grudges. Of course, in the spirit of personal vendettas and cowardice, Walker takes the stage only to belittle the efforts of those families that have chosen to move on from Ecovillage. Walker's inability to coherently detail events without a deep, and probably misconstrued, sense of personal importance, will leave the sour taste of rampant bias in any readers mouth. The book reads like it should be titled "Why Ecovillage Would Never Have Survived Without Liz Walker." The scope of her persistent self-aggrandizement is rivaled only by her remarkable ability to gloss over many of the problems faced by Ecovillagers (and, consequently, their solutions).

I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. It is nothing more than the angry, incoherent ramblings of a woman desperately trying to convince the world, and maybe herself, that she spent more time building communities, and less time provoking petty fights with the real pioneers of this brilliant sustainabe community.