THE PHILOSOPHY OF A NATURAL LIFE STYLE

Throughout history, there have been people or groups of people who tried to live a more natural lifestyle. When people attempt to live a natural way of life, they usually try to live more in harmony with nature. In the history of Western Europe, people lived or had to live in close contact to nature until the Romans came here.
The past 2000 years, Western Europe came to be dominated by Christianity in a religious sense and by political systems that have grown out from mainly the Roman culture. The Romans brought to Western Europe the concept of a state powering over a large region inhabited by smaller tribes and communities. The Romans did not let those tribes and communities live and organize themselves as they wished. The Romans organized society in such a way that they could have good administrative control. For example, the Romans introduced the division of larger regions in provinces. In each province there came several ‘civitates’, urban concentrations from where the Romans could control the countryside. The origin of cities in Western Europe lies in the Roman occupation.
We don’t know of another world than that of big cities, smaller cities, and towns surrounded by pieces of farmland and nature. But that kind of world has been introduced by a culture that long ago invaded Western Europe and that replaced the indigenous traditions.
We now know of no other system than that architects design our houses, that we need building permissions from a local government, that we have to employ a building contractor to make a house, and that we still need a lot of other specialists, painters, electricians, plasterers, etc. to complete building it.
Where is the time in which people lived together in smaller communities, in which young men and women learned from parents, neighbors and friends how to grow their crops, to nurse their animals and to build their homes? Knowledge of materials and building methods went from one generation to another in such kind of societies.
I am not maintaining that life under such conditions was only good and pleasant, but there surely got lost some beautiful traditions where many of us are yearning for.
Throughout the past 2000 years, smaller communities have attempted to live a life closer to nature. Early followers of Jesus banded together to live in a community of goods. There came to exist monasteries where monks and nuns developed knowledge about health plants. During the Reformation, Anabaptists decided to unite in Christian brotherhood. Today, there are still many communities like that of the Amish who try to preserve a life style rather close to nature.
Again and again, people tried to build new forms of society. For example, in the 18th century, Henry David Thoreau explored the adventures of a simple life in nature. Also in the 19th century, groups of people have set up utopian or cooperative communities.
We all know of the more recent attempt in the 1960s by the hippies. They tried to live together in some forms of communes and attempted to liberate themselves from the cuirass of state regulations.
Though many hippie communities broke down, several of them have developed and prospered. In these days, there are hundred of groups that live together to attempt new life styles. We call them intentional communities, or sometimes also ecovillages.

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES AND ECOVILLAGES

It is difficult to give an exact definition of what is an intentional community or what is an ecovillage. Hundreds of such communities do exist worldwide and they have organized coordinating networks. Each community has its own purposes. What practically all of them share is an interest for a sound environment. Many of these groups try to build ecological houses.
Here are a few examples of what some participants of such intentional communities think of themselves what they are:
“-- An ecovillage is a small community of between 50 and 2000 people, based on shared ecological, social and/or spiritual values. Working with the principle of not taking more from the Earth than one gives back, ecovillages have the potential to be sustainable indefinitely.
-- The ecovillage is a response to the complex problem of how to transform our human settlements, be they villages, towns or cities, into sustainable communities, integrated into the natural environment. Ecovillage principles can be applied to both rural and urban settings, to developed and developing countries.” (Findhorn Foundation)
“An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values. The people may live together on a piece of rural land, in a suburban home, or in an urban neighborhood, and they may share a single residence or live in a cluster of dwellings.” (The Fellowship for Intentional Communities, Geoph Kozeny)
Here are some more definitions that i found on a website by Dan Questenberry:
“An intentional community is the seedbed of society.”
“( An intentional community is an) interdependent, cooperative grouping of aligned humans, animals, plants, earth energies, and benevolent multidimensional beings who together comprise a sensitive, sustainable ecosystem.”

THE LIFESTYLE OF DOMINATING AND CONSUMING AND THE LIFESTYLE OF HARMONY AND CREATIVITY

Why did Romans build houses of stone, and why do utopian communities tend to build with more natural materials such as loam and wood? What are the underlying philosophies of these so conflicting life styles?
There is a life philosophy of people who want to control life, who want to dominate their environment, who tend to consume what they can lay their hands on. Such is the lifestyle of a culture like that of the Romans who imposed their culture and their power on other peoples.
There is also a philosophy of people who want to be creative, who want to live in harmony with each other and with nature, who try to find gratification in life by their own learning and developing. Such is the lifestyle of people who attempt to live in utopian communities, but also of people who lived in more primitive circumstances before the rise of overpowering state structures in Western Europe.
Please note that i don’t intend to condemn everything the Romans did or people who live in the ‘normal’ Western society. I also don’t want to idealize too much a life of going back to nature.
I believe that somewhere a balance has to be found between the organization of a state controlling larger portions of human society, and the individual happiness of people living in smaller communities.
When your life is one of searching for power and dominion over people around you and over your environment, your whole focus is on establishing structures and constructions that will help you to keep that power. When you set up a building, you don’t care much about learning how to build it. You just want a building that is strong and lasting. When you cultivate the land, you want your profit from it and you tend to forget the long-term interests. When you want to consume, you try to take out the most from the land, with the least effort. You use artificial fertilizers, you invent big machines to cultivate the land and to harvest the crop, and in the end, after several generations, the fertility of the land is destroyed.
When your life is however one of exploring your own talents, of learning how to live right in relation to your family and friends and the nature around you, when your focus is on giving and on developing your creativity, you will have respect for the land and give more to the earth than you took from it.
When you build a house, your concentration is more on the pleasure of building it yourself than on the material benefit that this house is going to bring you. Like a child enjoys playing, so you enjoy building your house. Your house does not need to last for several generations, because your joy is not only in setting it up but also in continuous maintaining it. You experienced how beautiful it is that you built your own house. You also want your children to have this experience of learning and working together in harmony. Therefore, your children will not inherit your house; they will build their own, fitting to their personal needs, lifestyle and family composition.