Ecovillages Day at the Living Cities Forum 2020 in Russia
This report was initially published in the GEN Europe Circular on Resilience & Regeneration in December 2020.
GEN Russia (Ecovillages and Ecoinitiatves Union) has been invited to the Living Cities Forum 2020 to organize the ‘Ecovillages Day’ within it’s program. The forum’s founder Lev Gordon considers ecovillages as living labs that research and develop alternative lifestyles, so that experience and knowledge is also important for any urban spaces and communities that want to be live, integral (according to all Ken Wilber’s ’s maturity levels), and regenerative.
As this summer the forum was only Zoom-based we easily could participate and program the day as follows:
Yasnaya Sloboda ecovillage reported on their sociocracy experiences and the Waldorf kindergarten creation. Kins domain settlement Kovcheg about their village-based school and theater (10+ and 6+ years correspondingly) inception and daily life and Kind Land community presented their advances in various fields of self-sufficiency and community living and building — Kind Land Festival and the Eco-Traditional-Villages Sustainable Development Forum.
Families from the Orphan village Orion and free families village Clear Sky (‘Chistoe Nebo’) told about their transformational experiences both in personal and family lives and in their communities’ evolution. Traditional village Revisioning to transit to a live village community was presented by active participants of the Verkhny Bereznik Russian North village of Arkhangelsk region with their international project on Climate-Education and Youth and educational program Eco-stream on forests, perma and traditional cultures.
Joint session by Andrew McMillion (Board Member at KVANN) and Igor Polsky (research and outreach Ecophilosophy project ‘On the Edge’) delivered the vision of the world’s history as a cooperative process and the biocentric eco-villages with bio-domes as the model for further sustainable development and ecological crisis adaptation. Andrey Krylov presented his overview on successful rural village features, while ‘Agroforestry — let’s do the professional association’ session was organized by Dmitry Cherepkov, founder and owner at eco-park ‘Yasno Pole’.
The closing reflection session was guided by Lev Gordon with sociological remarks from Igor Zadorin (Zircon Research Group) on how to scale ecovillages experience and how to meet newcomers of 10 0000 that are estimated to settle on the land within the nearest years in Russia. One of the results we’ve got in the end is just one another intentional community and one another associate member has joined GEN Russia.
The day’s program’s creation and moderation were delivered by Dmitry Soloviev (Kind Land, GEN Russia), Andrey Krylov (kins domain settlement ‘Krasivaya Skazka’) and Sergey Dmitriev (GEN Russia, Back-to-the-land Practices/Communities Researcher).
Here’s 9 hours full video of the day (in Russian).
Meanwhile, as the whole — Living Cities Forum with its other days dedicated to ecological topics shows that the agenda of sustainability and the strongest need for the deep adaptation to the ecological crisis is still significantly far away from the mainstream discussion and actions in Russia, only few scientists and researchers share this agenda. At the forum we’ve met Pavel Luksha from Global Education Futures and Nicole and Alexander Gratovsky — Dolphin Embassy, with whom we’ve initiated contacts for further cooperation as well as to continue joint events and experience exchange with Live Cities.
More details about the Living Cities Russia (the initiative and the forum) are in the Interview with its Co-Founder Lev Gordon by Marilyn Hamilton — Founder of Integral City Meshworks Inc. and ‘Integral City’ book author.
More details about Russina ecovillages, kin’s domains and new farmers are in my review ‘25 Years of the Modern ‘Back to the Land’ Movement in Russia/CIS’.
