Green Nation
by Qani Belul (Mali, 91-92)                 

      Recently, feeling the disquietude that many of us experience from
living in (and benefiting from) an exploitative economic  system, I
began looking for a place to move that would be more ecologically
sustainable. About six months ago I came across a newspaper article in
the Japan Times about Yamagishi- kai, a large farm commune based in
Japan. Yamagishiists egalitarian philosophy, capsulized in the article
as one people, one wallet, caught my interest and I subsequently
visited two of their communes in rural Japan. As I found out from those
visits, there are currently about five thousand Yamagishi-kai members,
living in communes both in Japan and abroad. They do not use money
among themselves and they share practically everything food, bicycles,
cars, tools, even some of their clothing.
      Adhering to the principle the world is a unit, a one-body life,
Yamagishiists work to strike a balance with nature through recycling,
reducing chemicals in farming, eating only two meals a day, sharing
resources, and similar sound ecological practices. Although I wasnt
interested in trying to join, I left thinking Yamagishiists are far
more progressive than the typical mainstream consumer in terms of
trying to live an ecologically sustainable life.         
      Looking west, and barely scratching the surface, Ive discovered a
plethora of opportunities in sustainable living. Members of Gandhi
Farm, a small commune in Nova Scotia, focus on organic gardening,
permaculture, and primitive life skills. As stated in their notice for
new members, they are a group of eco-activists opposed to capitalism
and working toward a back to the land revolution. Members do not eat
animal products (including honey), do not use tobacco, caffeine, or
distilled alcohol, and prohibit "electricity created by foul means"
i.e., no oil, coal, and nuclear energy and no toxic batteries or
photovoltaics. As with many such intentional communities, Gandhi Farms
political system is a leaderless group with decisions by consensus.
Not far from Gandhi Farm, in eastern Maine, a woodcarver and farmer
invites others to join him on his hundred acres to help develop a
sustainable community, also based on Gandhian plain-living principles.
There, too, are guidelines you must be willing to follow if you wish to
join him in building a community: no motorized vehicles, electricity,
power tools, telephones, etc.
      Through just a little research, I've discovered hundreds of these
pro-environment communities in the United States alone advertising for
new members. A landowner in Oregon invites others to move onto his 130
acres to help start an ecovillage; a 124-acre off-the-grid cohousing
community in Utah is also looking for new members; in Virginia and New
York State life-sharing communities that help the mentally disabled
need more workers; a chief in West Virginia is in search of Indians or
wanna-bes to help out on his 80-acre ranch.
      While reading of all this, I am reminded that beyond the backhoes and
nuclear waste sites and industrial toxic haze there is, still today,
potential for  ecological sanity in the industrialized world, and I
begin to imagine a diverse, loosely linked ecoanarchist nation someday
emerging in the West, a green nation comprised of environmentally
minded individuals and communities whove dismantled the nuclear-armed,
consumer-based, earth-destroying system and built in its place a more
natural, sustainable, and rewarding way of life.       
      The question is whether there will ever be enough people who have the
necessary desire, and the courage, to make the drastic changes required
of us restore that ecological balance, or if well simply go on leading
our complacent, overstuffed lives, waiting for some heavenly afterlife
while drawing ourselves and the rest of the planet ever closer toward
an ecological hell on earth.