Why knowing your neighbors can be an important climate solution

Earthaven Ecovillage members work together to plant crops in their shared garden. Like many ecovillages, Earthaven's culture is built on a strong spirit of collaboration. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

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Earthaven Ecovillage is a community of around 100 full-time residents tucked away in  the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. In late September, this idyllic place with its modest homes, babbling creeks and bumpy country roads was rocked as Hurricane Helene swept into the Carolinas, dropping torrential rainfall and bringing high winds. Across the state, more than 100 people died, and billions of dollars in property was damaged.

However, unlike other places such as Asheville, N.C., Earthaven was relatively unscathed.

The power briefly went down when the village's hydroelectric system was temporarily damaged. Residents quickly implemented their backup solar system. The main road also washed out in places, and fallen trees made it impassable. But the community was able to quickly clear the blocked roads and make repairs because the village had chain saws and tractors. The residents also produce much of their food — fruits, vegetables and livestock. So no one went hungry. Few buildings suffered damage, and no one was badly injured.

"We got lucky," said Earthaven resident Brandon Greenstein, who has lived in the village for 26 years. "But we also made a plan to be prepared for unforeseen events."

Zev Friedman and Chloe Vieira relax on their porch. Earthaven is organized in part around ecology and sustainability principles like permaculture and building with natural materials. It's also self-governed, and residents are required to cooperate. That all helps when it comes to withstanding big storms. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

Earthaven is also well equipped to withstand big storms because its residents know how to work together.

This collaborative spirit — neighbors knowing neighbors and sharing resources in emergency situations as well as everyday life — is an important solution in a world of worsening climate disasters.

"There's a lot of evidence that shows that the stronger a community's social cohesion is, the better chances they have of resilience from climate hazards," said Rishi Sugla, a  climate resilience scientist at the University of Washington. "Close-knit communities tend to share resources like transportation, information and caregiving during climate-fueled hazards. And all of these things can help buffer the impact."

Earthaven resident Grace Birch walks through Earthaven Ecovillage. During Hurricane Helene, the village's main road was damaged, but the self-sufficient community was able to come together and make it passable again. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

A community comes together

Established in 1994 on 329 acres of land about 45 minutes southeast of Asheville, Earthaven Ecovillage is partly organized around ecological principles such as building with natural materials and practicing permaculture — the development of sustainable and self-sufficient agricultural ecosystems. It's also self-governed, and residents are required to cooperate in decision-making, village maintenance and other processes.

Organized in hamletlike clusters dotted between the trees, Earthaven's homes range from small, rustic dwellings to modern, multilevel residences. Some people live on their own, while others opt for cohousing. There are also community spaces for meetings and other gatherings. The village is a bit like the Shire from The Lord of the Rings. There's even a house built into the hillside with a round blue-and-green door known to locals as "the Hobbit House."

Earthaven got away relatively lightly after Hurricane Helene, but parts of the ecovillage were rendered inaccessible by flooding and fallen trees. Amy Belanger hide caption

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Amy Belanger

Earthaven is among hundreds of ecovillages throughout North America, designed to minimize their impact on the environment. There are more than 1,200 established ecovillages around the globe. They come in different shapes and sizes and offer a variety of sustainability practices. The Greater World Earthship Community near Taos, N.M., for example, features off-the-grid homes made out of recycled materials such as old tires. Findhorn Ecovillage, a 63-year-old community in Scotland, is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030.

" There are ecovillages that are made up of a lot of semi-well-to-do hippies," said Daniel Greenberg, co-director of the Foundation for Intentional Community. "But the bigger point is we are hitting a wall as a species, right? I see ecovillages as beta test centers. They're laboratories for how all of us can live in greater harmony with the planet."

Amy Belanger sits inside her Earthaven home, which is known as "the Hobbit House" because it's built into a hillside and has a quaint round door. The home was among the very few at Earthaven damaged during Hurricane Helene. A tree hit her roof, and the two upper levels of her home were mangled. Though some of her fellow community members helped pull the tree off, the house is still unlivable at the moment. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

The residents of Earthaven see themselves in this way. " It's a social experiment," said Earthaven's Greenstein. "Can we help each other to meet our needs and meet them so that we can live in a harmonious way?"

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents pulled together on many fronts.

Rachel Fee, a farmer who has lived at the ecovillage for eight years, did a lot of cooking in the weeks following Hurricane Helene. "I ran a kitchen on whatever kind of disparate food items we had and fed a hundred people," Fee said. The residents even held a big pig roast about a week after the storm.

Monique Mazza, a licensed practitioner of naturopathic medicine who came to Earthaven nine years ago, set up a health and wellness clinic. "I brought whatever I had medically, including enough stuff to start an IV if we had to," she said.

Andy Bosley, who has lived at Earthaven for 23 years, put his electrician and handyman skills to work by monitoring Earthaven's power systems. He's also good at keeping a level head, and so he took charge of community meetings. "It's sort of like being prepared, but not being a prepper and hoarding everything and having guns, and 'I've got a year's supply of stuff and you can't touch it,'" Bosley said. " Really, we rely on each other collectively."

Earthaveners try to be as self-sustainable as possible. The community produces much of its own power and food. The food stores and solar power were particularly handy during Hurricane Helene and in its aftermath. The storm, for example, damaged their hydroelectric system, knocking out power, but they had solar as a backup. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

Because Earthaven had recovered swiftly due to preparation and cooperation, its residents were able to help remove mud from the local Broad River Volunteer Fire Rescue Department premises. They also cleared fallen trees and rebuilt a bridge at Medicine Wheel Way, a nearby nonprofit offering Indigenous ceremony, celebration and cultural preservation for Black people, Indigenous people and other people of color.

"They're community people," said Medicine Wheel Way founder Sharon Oxendine, of the Earthaveners who came to her organization's aid. " They saw the devastation and they jumped in and did what they needed to do."

Earthavener Diane Leafe Christian sits on the porch at her home in the ecovillage. " A lot of people just think, 'Oh, I'll join a community. It'll be kumbaya in the meadow, and it'll be so fun. And I don't have to do anything except live there and enjoy life.' But it takes managing, sort of like raising a child." Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Collectivity as a climate solution

Collaborative efforts are not uncommon at ecovillages.

"Ecovillages are good at sharing resources, being very connected and knowing who has the tools and the skills that are needed for any given moment," said Allyson Quinlan, the co-author of a 2024 Global Ecovillage Network report looking at the climate resilience of ecovillages around the world. Quinlan is the executive director of Resilience Alliance, a group that researches the resilience of social-ecological systems. The Global Ecovillage Network collaborated with Quinlan's organization on the study.

The report examined 20 ecovillages in 18 countries to find out how well these communities could cope if the planet warmed by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit). The Earth is currently on track to warm even more than that by the end of the century unless humans dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions.

While areas for improvement include ramping up early warning systems and emergency plans, the report found a strong sense of social cohesion, self-organization and participation to be among the greatest strengths of ecovillages when it comes to their ability to cope with the impacts of climate change. "There's a lot we can learn from ecovillages about supporting one another and connecting as a community," Quinlan said.

Earthaven's Council Hall is the main meeting place for residents. The community is self-governing, so many decisions get made in this yurtlike building. "This building was designed to accommodate our governance council," said Earthaven co-founder Paul Caron. "It's a 35-foot circle, and that number was basically brought forth from data that suggested that at that size, people in a circle can see the facial expressions of the people across the circle. Once it gets bigger than that, then you start to lose that connection." Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

Earthaven co-founder Paul Caron grew up in Michigan and wanted to start an intentional community built on anticonsumerist, collectivist, permaculture-based principles long before Earthaven came into being. He was already living near the North Carolina site that would eventually become Earthaven when he met a group of people with similar plans. They went in together on a $440,000 tract of heavily forested land and started clearing it to build housing and communal spaces.

Before physically establishing the community, they laid down its guiding principles in writing. " We agreed that we would do permaculture, natural building and we would practice consensus," said co-founder Arjuna da Silva. Da Silva is talking about a form of collective decision-making where everyone has to agree before moving ahead.

" We had an explicit agreement that we signed that was that we're not allowed to hold grudges," Caron said. "We're not allowed to continue to have a conflict that you don't work on." Earthaven has in recent years modified its approach to self-governance; now an 85% majority has to agree for a plan to proceed.

Conflict resolution training is offered to anyone who stays at Earthaven and is required for anyone who wants to become a member. A resident can become a member after living at the ecovillage for anywhere between one and several years while the community and the individual decide whether they are a good fit.

Caron said people in his community model collaborative behaviors because togetherness is one of Earthaven's core principles. "It's not a spiritual ideology that's holding it together," he said. "It's the foundation of that cooperative culture that we've actually created."

The cooperative culture shows up in many aspects of life at Earthaven today, from hashing out disagreements at community meetings to the regular Friday night music jams. And it showed up in the residents' response during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Earthaven co-founder Paul Caron was living in the area in the 1990s when he met the people with whom he would go on to create the ecovillage. " The original founding vision was to model a village, kind of like going back to an earlier pattern so that we can regroup as a species to go forward, basically. That's what Earthaven really is — a social experiment more than a physical experiment." Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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The downside to interconnectedness

The interconnectedness also comes with downsides when dealing with the impacts of climate change.

Lack of diversity is a big one for Earthaven. While there is socioeconomic range, the residents are largely white. It has been that way since the beginning.

Resident Chloe Vieira is concerned about the lack of racial diversity. "If we have a monochromatic set of people, we're gonna get a certain answer," said Vieira. " But if we have a diversity of backgrounds, then people are gonna be looking at that question from multiple angles and we're just gonna come up with a better answer."

Zev Friedman explores the greenhouse next to his home. "The things that make good community are also the things that make effective disaster response." Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

Resident Zev Friedman is worried about how whiteness can lead to patterns that cause gentrification. "A gentrifying ecovillage leans towards insulating us from what's going on in the world," Friedman said. "And therefore being less willing to take on truly transformational ideas and actions around what it would mean for us to play a significant role in true climate adaptation."

Residents NPR spoke with said they want Earthaven to grow in size and be more diverse. There are advantages and disadvantages to this aspiration when it comes to climate change.

"If it's done well, integrating lots of new people can really increase resilience because you have a bigger and more varied pool of people, skills and capacities, and can leverage a greater collective intelligence," said Anna Kovasna, the strategic lead for community resilience at the Global Ecovillage Network. "But it can also lead to splits and conflicts. So it tests the shared vision and purpose, which is really important to ecovillages."

Earthaven's approximately 100 residents share an idyllic forested landscape. It has become more expensive to buy land and start an ecovillage from scratch since the 1990s, when Earthaven was founded. But co-founder Paul Caron says the ideals of communal living offer lessons to everyone — even those of us living in urban environments. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR

Looking outward

Part of Earthaven's effort to increase its diversity and potential size involves increasing public awareness of the village and its sustainable practices. It does this by running public tours and workshops on topics like climate resilience, permaculture and solar energy, mostly through its on-site School of Integrated Living.

"The main thing is to get people to come here, see what it is and go, 'Hmm, what could I do in my life to develop something like this?'" Earthaven co-founder Caron said.

Caron said even people who have no interest in starting an ecovillage — which has become increasingly expensive and difficult to do in the United States owing to high land prices and strict regulatory frameworks — or even joining an existing one, can learn how to live more sustainable lives right in their own neighborhoods from places like Earthaven. He said he wants communities everywhere to work collectively to be more resilient when it comes to adapting to climate change.

"Everybody can't move to the country and found an ecovillage in the woods. But everybody can join with their neighbors and figure out ways to cooperate," Caron said. "Like, if you've got three suburban lawns right next to each other, you don't need but one lawnmower. It's as simple as that."

The cooperative spirit of Earthaven's residents saw the community through Hurricane Helene. But the residents say there is still work to be done to make themselves even more resilient. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

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Ryan Kellman/NPR