We Got Started!

Sunday evening, 9/20, we had our first meeting, with 6 attending. We spent most of our time becoming acquainted with aspects of our backgrounds that brought us each to be here. Billy Trip painted a picture of a settlement of 15-20 homes built using "green" principles and able to support its members re: energy (maybe even food) in a sustainable way. Peter sees this as the ultimate desideratum--the desired end-point ("having all of one's best friends living in the same neighborhood")--but also sees the financial investment necessary for this as the major stumbling block, and wants to explore more feasible interim steps. Pierce Presley would love to live "28 miles from nowhere" (like the Washington Post journalist who is blogging his back-to-the-land experiment), but this isn't practical with jobs to hold down and schools to keep children in. This is another aspect of the financial problem--we all need to make a living, and our places of employment are pretty much here in the city. (Stephanie and Mark Walls, however, have deliberately chosen to home-school Stephanie's son Michael, which offers an alternative to the "school problem.")

Peter suggests that creating alternative culture is part of the "project," not simply creating an ideal intentional community. So, prompted by Dorothy Haecker's questions, we described the various ways that we each remain connected to the umbilical cord of Mother Culture--addictions to TV shows, surfing the internet, etc.

Stephanie asked if I would post the titles of the books that I had brought with me to share with those who might be interested. I won't list all of them, just the ones I think are most immediately relevant to us--and interesting:

All of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael books, and Beyond Civilization.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, 1985 (20th anniversary edition recently re-issued).
Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Robert Putnam, 2003.
The Riddle of Amish Culture, Donald Kraybill, revised edition, 2001.
Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, W.F. Whyte and K. K. Whyte, 1991 (the story of the worker coops in the Basque region of Spain).

I have several other, more academic books on social capital and worker cooperatives, as well. (I think the history of Mondragon is relevant because of the degree to which its alternative model of capitalist organization depends on social connections.)