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Salt & Earth
Jonathan Taggart, 2008
Whole Village is a self-described “intentional community”; an ecovillage and biodynamic farm founded in response to a perceived loss of genuine community, increased urbanization of rural areas and impoverishment of farmland. Located on a 200-acre tract of land an hour north of Toronto’s city centre, the community is made up of 30 educators, professionals and farmers living in a 15,000 square-foot co-operative residence, with sustainability as their ultimate goal. I first visited Whole Village in April of 2007, and over the course of the next 18 months I lived on the farm in installations, working the land to earn my keep while photographing the community.
On the surface, Whole Village offers a solution to the frustrations faced by environmentally conscious urbanites.. In contrast to the tarpaper shack and haphazard “free love” stereotypes associated with communes of the 1960s, Whole Village is highly organized and surprisingly modern. The farm’s main residence set a zoning precedent with a green design that prioritizes personal space while preserving communal eating and recreation areas, and the consensus leadership model that helped administer the group’s farm purchase now ensures a level of social and financial accountability among community members. The way of life the community supports is one that blends traditional family values with modern ecological practices, and the result is what one member describes as being more like a “condo on a farm” than a contemporary commune.
As an agricultural collective, Whole Village’s success can be measured largely by the community’s ability to meet its own food requirements. Food production fluctuates between 20 and 40% of the total need – a figure largely affected by the quality of the growing season but nonetheless healthy for a community founded only a few years ago. Any produce that the community cannot consume or preserve is sold to members of the surrounding townships through a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) program, an increasingly popular offshoot of the local food movement. Employing biodynamic farming practices that incorporate all the animal,
plant and land components of the farm into a closed, self-nourishing system, Whole Village’s CSA program gives shareholders access to local and sustainable organic produce, as well as the opportunity to know where and by whom their food was grown, and elusive luxury within today’s model of decentralized, high-output food production.
While the success of Whole Village demonstrates that the environmental and social actions increasingly seen as necessary can in fact be put into practice, the project is not without its challenges. If the elder generation has shown that it is forward-thinking and environmentally progressive, the community’s youth struggle with the same stigmas faced by the “flower children” of the 60s and 70s. Home-schooled and largely isolated from their peers, the children may face the challenge of not being able to affect change on a system they have grown up largely removed from.
A further challenge is the financial burden placed upon those middle-aged members who do not have the benefit of a lifetime of equity with which to put their values into practice. Land purchases and building costs may be the most obvious expenses, but hidden and ongoing costs related to simple pieces of farm equipment or complicated legal fees to navigate zoning restrictions can leave community members financial drained. The pressures of contributing to community life in addition to the need for many to seek full-time employment off-property have led a number of members to engage in the difficult and heavily bureaucratic process of selling their farm ‘condos’. In the last year several members have left the community, citing economic or social stress as their primary motivation, but an influx of seasonal volunteers and the increasing appeal of a sustainable rural lifestyle main that Whole Village’s population is never depleted for very long.
Ninety per cent of ecovillages and intentional communities don’t make it past the planning stage or fail within the first year, and it is easy to see why: environmental ideals come in a variety of strengths and focuses, and the shared goals that initially unite members can later widen the rifts between them. While Whole Village has moved steadily towards its goal of sustainability since its founding just a few years ago, the success of the community rests as much on achieving social sustainability as environmental sustainability.
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