The March Hare: Autumn '98
Issue 18

From the earliest days, Dancing Rabbit fashioned itself to avoid becoming yet another attempt to sugarcoat the seriousness of the world ecological crisis, or softpedal the depth of the efforts that needed to be made to avert it. As we put it, we didn't want to create a "subdivision with solar panels", meaning something just like the old system, but with a thin veneer of change covering a rotten interior. We thought that recycling was the classic half-measure--it does just enough to persuade people they're trying, without really addressing the underlying problems. At Dancing Rabbit, we thought, we should plunge through the rhetoric that surrounded these issues and grapple much more deeply with their root causes.

Cecil pounds in bamboo pins after the fifth bale course

The goal was to start by assuming sustainability as a given in everything we would choose to do. Sustainability, to us, meant that whatever activity was under question could be continued indefinitely without significant ecological damage. We would therefore choose amongst options by comparisons against this yardstick. This approach has helped guide Dancing Rabbit now for six years, and has brought us our Covenants, which abolish chemical agriculture, fossil fuels, grid power, old growth lumber, and private car ownership on the Dancing Rabbit Land Trust.

But of course, real life is more complex than our models and plans, and we've often had our eyes opened by unexpected details during the building of Dancing Rabbit. One of the most important complexities has dealt with creating a balance between attracting more residents to Dancing Rabbit and creating a truly radical place to live.

One arm of this balance is the desire to have Dancing Rabbit grow. More people living on the land will help spread the work, create a richer and more satisfying social scene, and help Dancing Rabbit have a greater effect on public consciousness. We have eight full time people living on the land now, and we ambitiously hope to grow to fifty within four or five years.

Another arm of the balance is keeping Dancing Rabbit on its radically sustainable path. Our project seems to fill a particular niche in the ecovillage movement. Our Covenants place us at the far end of the spectrum in certain ecological particulars such as outlawing private cars and gas, and having no grid power anywhere on the property. If we forego our radical uniqueness, then our ideological "pull" on the movement, as well as one example of what's possible in a sustainable culture, are both lost.

Sometimes these two goals seem to be in conflict, either with each other, or between the people who hold them. Among the many who count themselves as environmentalists, relatively few are eager to make the lifestyle changes Dancing Rabbit strives to demonstrate. In some ways, our potential membership pool seems limited given the strictures the Covenants put upon life at Dancing Rabbit. Even among those who read about us, are excited to meet us, and make the effort to come visit, there is often surprise about the changes a move to DR would require. Of course, these surprises can be hard to take (for DR and for the visitor) and sometimes create an aura of judgment around visitor interactions - DR is judging the visitor for worthiness of membership, and the visitor is judging DR for appropriateness to their life.

One way we are trying to strike a balance is by creating underlying systems that help people live in accordance with both their beliefs and the Covenants. For example, Dancing Rabbit expects members not to drive privately owned cars, which is a strong filter for many people. However, the Dancing Rabbit Vehicle Co-op (DRVC), our car-sharing cooperative, provides a route around this roadblock. The DRVC will do the research needed to make alternatively fueled cars available to the membership; all a villager will have to do is sign one out and take off. In this way, residents can follow the letter and spirit of the Covenants without having to know how to make biodiesel themselves.

But are we going far enough to achieve this balance? Even the car co-op itself (as opposed to private automobiles) is a stumbling block for many who are used to the increased convenience and control of owning their own car. And so, the dilemma presents itself: we may be limiting our ability to grow by sticking to our radical structures, but if we relax the Covenants so that DR can be more inclusive of a less pioneering class of folks, Dancing Rabbit as a whole may lose its radical momentum.

So, we tread the middle ground and try not to have either of these negative outcomes occur. First, it's impossible to tell if we'd truly limit our growth potential by staying strict, since our housing capacities are already strained to the maximum. Also, we might gain some members by allowing the Covenants to be stretched or broken, but that might lose us potential members as well, as people who expect an extremely high degree of ecological sustainability come to DR and are disappointed by what they perceive as a failing in this area. One possible solution to this conundrum is to be selective for a while now, to build up a pioneering core, and later be more easygoing and accept almost anyone who would be interested in living at DR and willing to sign the Covenants.

Despite these rationalizations, the fact is that choosing our new members carefully and selecting for a high level of willingness to adapt one's lifestyle to meet radical ends is going to mean saying "no" to some people, and that's just hard to do. We often miss deeply the presence of those we've turned away, since even though Dancing Rabbit life and what they wanted from their lives might not match right now, they are wonderful people who have much to offer and share. They might even be longstanding personal friends!

Relaxing our standards doesn't seem too attractive either. We've narrowed Dancing Rabbit's rules to be as few as possible, and now there are only a half-dozen or so Covenants. In general, we'd like to govern ourselves not by laws but by compassion. So the rules that are left feel like the core of our meaning, and that changing them would alter the basic nature of Dancing Rabbit. DR has presented itself as "the truly sustainable alternative" for years now, so sometimes it can seem pressing to be ecologically advanced right now rather than later. Finally, Dancing Rabbit is a widely-advertised demonstration project that will be under intense scrutiny. Saying "we intend to be truly ecologically sustainable" but then making too many compromises will be an obvious contradiction that will negate our attempts to change the world through example.

Sometimes this contradiction can cause tensions within the group, as different people holding different pieces of the puzzle try to have an effect on Dancing Rabbit's consensed-on positions. Other times the tensions are within ourselves. For instance, I'd personally love to have more people around, but also want Dancing Rabbit to fulfill its mission as it's been conceived. These issues come up every time we consider accepting a new person for membership, so we're trying to work with them from the ground up and develop a general approach that will enlighten specific cases. Hopefully a combination of enlightened compromise, better infrastructure, and good luck will enable us to grow quickly and be true to our dreams.