Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand seems to attract a disproportionate number of traveling people wanting to start eco-communities. I hear it literally 2 or 3 times per week, every week. Accompanying that first "I wanna come and live here in an eco-community", there is often a fairly predictable stream of qualifying statements:
- no one understands them
- they have disowned their family
- they're completely broke and often heavily in debt
- they use a fake name
- they are a victim of everything from the government to financial extortion, the health system, rapacious ex-lovers and stalkers
- they have absolutely no idea what they want to DO in this community, beyond smoking weed, sleeping and foraging for natural abundance
- they want other people to teach, show, encourage, support and uplift them
- the community will save them.
Having had a health and natural products store in the extraordinarily busy touristy part of the 720 year old walled city (enclosed by a moat) for many years, "I wanna start a community" has been an almost everyday occurrence. To the extent where my go to response to the words ecoVillage or eco-community have, for many years, been *"FOOK NO!
And yet, here I am, planning a trip to the mountains along the Thai-Burmese border in the next 10 days, and one of the items on my agenda is scouting for a large piece of land. Because I am already well down the line on the thinking and planning to start my own eco-Village community.
What are - and have been - the 3 most important things in my planning?
Community of Purpose.
The WHY factor is everything. If you're seeking to escape Life and to have things done and created for you, you need a therapist, not a community. Cos a community will only be as strong and healthy as the sum of its contributing parts. My favourite question to throw into the "I wanna start an eco-community* chat is, "What specifically will you be CONTRIBUTING to that community?"
The Purpose of the community will automatically self-create its constituent members. Reading the many responses so far who hailed "diversity" as being so important, that diversity splinters and ruptures rapidly without the cohesion of Purpose. Because it is from the over-arching Purpose that the community can measure its decisions and determine its own future.
In my own exciting journey, our Purpose is the transfer of natural and herbal knowledge through the indigenous people. My natural products business will relocate in the 2-3 year window to a large and reasonably remote site. We will have spaces for people to live and engage in supporting our indigenous Karen interns and workers, who will also live on site. We will produce our products there, teach, invite workshops, share language skills and culture, and showcase a natural, alternative way of life through our Earthship Visitors Centre - the Earthship Artemis. My existential panic around "How will I ever manage this amorphous and growing herbal project?" has grown into an invitation for engagement, support, skillshare and yes, eco-community.
Security of Tenure
Can't tell you how many people have invited me to come and :make my project on their family's land". But investing decades into land that ultimately is "owned" by someone else - someone who may (probably) have a vastly different set of values? Just no. I'm lucky (smart) enough to have established a Thai public company limited which CAN own land outright. My evil, controlling, 61% Thai shareholder? LOL... none other than my beautiful 15 year old daughter. Sorted.
Proximity to Conventional Farmland
Do I want to be close to a pesticide-riddled conventional farm? Heck no! As pretty as this image looks, it's covered in the toxic agro-chemical Paraquat. Never heard of it? Google it. Makes glyphosate look lightweight.
My travels this next week will be specifically to do some big-picture surveying. They're planning to build a bigger road here in 5 years? Cross it off the list, cos bigger roads bring farms which (mostly) bring chemicals.
Siting is everything. It MAY (and probably does) mean I will need to pay for a second site in the small town of Mae Sariang, for pragmatic and logistical reasons. And that's fine. But the Big Picture of eco-Village requires a HUGE discussion on siting, politics, geo-politics, climate change and issues like changing rainfall patterns.
I AM EXCITED that our Community of Purpose has evolved naturally (from necessity) and will be self-funded by the business I have worked 12 years to create. Will there be free seats on the bus? LOL. I have one ex husband and one former lover who will always have a freebie cottage down the back, if ever they need or choose. I work with the dying here in Thailand, and am an advocate of natural death as a part of life. So yes, I will be building one or two small cottage-earthships so people can die naturally, peacefully and without worrying about what dying costs. But the rest? No. The people who self-select to share in this work will need to contribute, actively, the things this community needs. So that the Community, as a whole, doesn't just function but CONTRIBUTES to a new world and a new paradigm.
Blissed and Blessed on a Beautiful Tropical Thai Sunday Morning.
