Communities Magazine, Fall 2009
Making Home
Home Is Not Just a Place
I had always considered Foxboro, Massachusetts my home. After all, Foxboro brought me up. I attended elementary school there, edited The Fox at Foxboro High, received my college acceptance letter, watched the New England Patriots practice behind the old mental health hospital, and fell asleep every night to the factory hum of the Foxboro Company.
Once at college, I studied biology in Costa Rica and contracted the international bug. It drove me to live in Honduras, Guatemala, and now Costa Rica and to work as far away as Indonesia, Africa, and Argentina. Despite these sojourns, though, Foxboro should still be home: my mom still lives there, my driver’s license still declares Baker Street, and I am a Patriots fan come bitter and sweet.
While nostalgia tickles every time I circle the Foxboro Common, I could also assign home to Costa Rica. I studied biology there, served in the Peace Corps, married a Costa Rican, have my son who was born there, and we live in my wife’s family house (now our family house) in Tres Rios. So maybe Costa Rica is home.
Or maybe, it’s neither. If home isn’t only where you live, but how you live, then I offer a third possibility. First consider that both Foxboro and Tres Ríos are suburbs. We need cars to get most places and where people live in relative isolation. By “isolation,” I mean, though we know and see many neighbors frequently, we don’t depend on them almost at all. We don’t depend on them for food, transportation, educating our kids, entertainment, financial support, even security (can’t leave front doors open when we’re not home anymore). We can’t depend on them when we’re sick, to attend our funerals or weddings. They usually can’t fix our shoes, mend our clothes, or clean our oil furnaces. We depend on the Town Hall far more than people who live within a shout. By this definition, the nearby supermarket is a better neighbor; definitely the Verizon Internet connection; and even the stores around Gillette Stadium.
Many people have studied the collapse of the American community, especially in the suburbs (for example, Robert Putman’s classic Bowling Alone), where suburban life often exceeds urban life in environmental damage, depression, loneliness, obesity, and well, bowling alone. This lifestyle grew from modern seeds of autonomy, mobility (hence the “auto-mobile”), and individualism. Thus while I feel happy butterflies when getting off I-95 at Foxboro after a year away, I am attached to the place, not the lifestyle.
In fact, the only lifestyle to which I do feel attachment doesn’t even exist. One that my and several other families here in Costa Rica labor to create. This lifestyle, which has no associated physical place, not yet, is embodied in an ecovillage we hunger to create. This is my third possibility for home.
Intentional Communities Movement Explodes
A common vision, set of values, and goals lend communities their “intention.” Their founders together envision, design, plan, build, and co-manage these communities. We might say communities without intention arise from a salsa of individual interests of for-profit developers, office-bound city planners, government-run housing projects, or random congregations of homeowners, each of whom builds a house in the same vicinity according to personal goals, few if any involve extending their family to include surrounding neighbors or living a style more ecological and socially responsible.
Our ecovillage envisions a Costa Rican community (but also with foreigners) that models the best low-impact green technologies such as alternative energy, green architecture, recycling with the best social construction methods such as intentionally designed culture, conflict resolution, consensus-based governance, and equitable distribution of power. It uses the best communication, outreach, and training techniques in Latin America so that Costa Rican communities, both urban and rural, can find relevance, inspiration, and guidance in improving their own capacity to learn and adapt in a rapidly changing world. There’s more to it than that, of course, so please visit www.querencia.co.cr.
Citizens Create Community They Truly Desire
But you can’t just carve an ecovillage out of our standard societal base material. Whether Foxboro or Tres Ríos, neighbors expect too often that others will do for them. We depend on government to supply our basic needs (water, electricity, security), Hollywood to package our entertainment, non-profits to fight our causes, and supermarkets to prepare our food even before we’ve decided what to buy. We have become nations of consumers where producers lay out options, bombard us with marketing messages, and we usually consume that which tingles our tastes at the time. This applies as much to buying cereals as it does to electing presidents. When our tastes change, we vote for a different cereal.
Creating community with others requires energy, patience, inspiration, open-mindedness, creativity, and especially persistence.
To create an intentional community, as I’m now dawning to discover, requires that its members create community, not consume it. Founders must envision a future they really want to create, organize people, and seek a way to survive reality’s obstacle course to get there. Not yet do ecovillage companies direct mail us, stylize different ecovillages to meet ever smaller market niches, from whose shelves we choose. And with my seminal experience at creating an ecovillage, I’ve discovered the sweat of true citizens.
As Peter Block, organizational consultant, says, being a citizen has little to do with voting, a consumer act of choosing among competing products (campaigns) in a political marketplace (though we must vote). Being a citizen isn’t about banding together only when we’re pissed off or threatened by a NIMBY development (though often we have to do this). Being a citizen certainly isn’t about just following laws (we certainly must do this). Being a citizen is about creating the society we truly want to live in. Sometimes that comes through resistance, most of the time through inspired and painstaking creation. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French observer of American democracy in the 1820s–30s, noted that, “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
He also noted that, “The English often perform great things singly, whereas the Americans form associations for the smallest undertakings.” This may be why the intentional communities movement thrives in the USA.
Home We Must Create
Certainly many people in Foxboro and Tres Rios do participate in associations that have yielded admirable and citizen-worthy gains for their towns far in excess of anything I can inscribe on my tombstone. I still don’t see a citizen when I look into the mirror, only when I look into my dreams. Yet I do realize now that creating community with others requires far more energy, patience, inspiration, open-mindedness, creativity, and especially persistence than a consuming community.
Seen this way, then, home isn’t a place that we inherit — home is a place that we create.
Jon Kohl is a writer on sustainability and natural resource issues as well as a founding member of Querencia Costa Rica, in formation. He currently lives with his family in Costa Rica. To contact him or learn more about his writings and experiences, visit www.jonkohl.com.
