Kirby, A: Self in Practice in an Ecological Community

This book examines the motives and experiences of members of an ecovillage community as they strive to develop a redefined sense of self-world relations. The ecovillage movement has arisen as an attempt to define the parameters of a new social paradigm, in response to the dominant social paradigm that is seen to have had disastrous consequences on the social, ecological, and personal fabric of our lives. This paradigm has, through 300 years of history, constructed a ‘consumer landscape‘ over the original ‘empty space‘ of the American continent which binds up our psychic attention, alienating us from the holistic and ecological ground of our lives. Residents of the Ecovillage at Ithaca came together to give concrete expression to a new set of ideals in a unique form of domestic protest. The book explores the processes of the first years as residents began to react and adapt to competing demands against a review of literature from diverse sources that examines the nature and conceptions of the self. The result is a vision of a newly emerging sense-of-self-through-practice that seeks reconstitution on personal, social, and ecological levels.