Neighbourisms
By Tom & Carol Braford
UK-based researcher, Savannah Faishell, says that the concept of what she calls “Neighbourisms”, daily practices that reignite the lost art of neighboring, are being enabled through the kind of intentional design choices and relationship centered housing that spotlight best practices for conflict management and inclusive and long-term affordability.
All of these, she says, are hallmarks of the Intentional Communities, Cohousing, Ecovillage and Cooperative Housing and Worker-owned business movements.
These parallel movements are now coming together under the recently rebranded National Cohousing Alliance and will all be represented at this year’s regional conference in Denver in October.
This is great news for our Islands of Coherence prototype projects in St. Louis, because we are going beyond the loneliness and affordability crises and addressing the metacrisis of climate change itself.
The metacrisis itself, which is mostly about climate change, has two almost equal drivers 1) the continuing buildup of CO2 in our atmosphere and 2) the continuing degradation of ecosystems and loss of habitat and species.
We are now substantially interrupting both of these trends and getting the ball moving in the opposite direction. We are on our way to stuffing the climate change and species and habitat loss genies back into their proverbial bottles.
The solution has been there since before the outbreak of COVID with the publishing of “Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing the Climate by 2050,” a white paper by the National Academy of Sciences. It even included instructions on how to get a social form of more climate responsible housing, like what we are building, to become contagious, endemic to a region and then pandemic in the world. The focus of this paper, however, was on halting the rise, and then over time the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. This takes care of the first half. The Buckminster Fuller Institute, however, has just launched the second ecological restoration and species and habitat preservation and restoration effort. They add this to the kind of climate responsible communities we are building and refer to the combination as an Eco Hub.
Adding a great, endangered wading bird Greenway with water features connecting from the old St Bonaventure Friary just north of our site where you will find the main part of the now seven years running annual endangered species rookery, connecting all the way to SLU’s main campus, IKEA, the Foundry and the Brickline Greenway would get it done.
Are you tired of doomerism and denialism and ready to roll up your sleeves and get something done? Then we invite you to join us. Contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.