It was a delight, while revisiting the ephemeral world of intentional communities, to discover that several of the places I had visited and written about twenty years ago are still intact. Quatsino, Hagensborg, Sointula and Argenta, in fact, are flourishing. The Doukhobors, while struggling to retain their culture, remain an exceedingly viable group. Kitsilano’s Community Alternatives Co-op is plugging along, as are the New Westminster Co-op and the Community Enhancement and Economic Development Society (CEEDS), formerly the Ochiltree Organic Commune, near 100 Mile House. The Emissaries, though severely diminished in number, have regrouped and are tenaciously clinging to their remaining strongholds.
As I prepared this second edition, however, it became clear to me that the creation of lasting, egalitarian human communities is an evolutionary process. Intentional communities will always struggle to survive. They are experiments, after all, and some experiments are destined to fail. Groups that endure seem to place a high value on co-operation and equality. Their members often support a consensual approach to decision-making. Successful communities are built on the shoulders and backs of unsuccessful efforts, and only exist because many before them have tried and failed.
British Columbia
Introduction
Promised Lands
Over the past 150 years, British Columbia has attracted its fair share of experimental communities. The model villages of the missionaries, designed to transform the bodies and souls of the province’s First Nations inhabitants, were in full swing by the 1870s. Before and after the turn of the twentieth century, idealistic Scandinavian and Russian immigrants established impressive colonies. The early 1930s saw the titillating, far-reaching scandals associated with Brother XII and his cult. The back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s led to a grand blossoming of communes. And in the 1990s, Canada’s first co-housing projects were making the news.
British Columbia is not unique as a proving ground for quixotic ideas. Cults, colonies and communes have come and gone elsewhere in North America and around the world. But the fact that Canada’s westernmost province has seen such an abundance of utopian settlement attempts, over a relatively short period of time, calls for closer scrutiny. This book examines some of the most significant alternative communities and looks at the impulses that inspired them.
Why is BC blessed with this rich history? Was it because the province was part of the last hospitable corner of the world to be explored and colonized by representatives of western civilization? To the European mind, preoccupied with the noble tasks of improving the human condition and getting rich, the Pacific Northwest was a vast remote space on the map, a blank slate where any number of ambitious schemes might take root and flower. The age of exploration—at least for the temperate zones—ended there.
The region attracted visionaries and schemers from around the world. Those who were chronically dissatisfied with the familiar and routine frequently ended up in British Columbia. Those who were used to moving on and starting anew stopped there as they searched for the kingdom of their dreams. They found they could move no farther. BC was the end of the road.
People came when times were good, to share the bounty of the land. They came when times were bad, to escape poverty and discrimination elsewhere. To many northern Europeans, BC’s landscapes appeared reassuringly familiar. The climate was mild, the terrain frequently spectacular. Caucasian newcomers were tolerated, even encouraged. Jobs were often available (albeit not very good ones). Governments offered incentives to settlers, and promised schools, roads and land grants. The appearance in BC of potential communitarians was not based on blind chance or mystical insight, but often had to do with economic and social imperatives. Economies are barometers of social health, and when one peaks or sinks to some new low, small, hardy bands of pioneers set off—sometimes far, far off—to try to create a better life.
Early intentional communities formed and flourished in BC for philosophical and religious reasons also. Some participants wished to perfect themselves, to attain a more spiritually evolved condition. Others wanted to create more equitable, sustainable and co-operative societies. A few, like the Doukhobors, were escaping social or political oppression. A constant thread over time was a yearning for deeper, richer human connections and a sense of belonging. More recent motivations include a desire for grassroots power, for harmony with one’s surroundings, and for safer, more productive and satisfying human networks and neighbourhoods.
The model Christian village of Metlakatla, BC, and others like it, were founded during a period of great colonial expansion. William Duncan, his missionary brethren and the English church societies that financed them were products of Victorian prosperity and moral certitude. But the resources of the frontier, which kept British mills running and made money available for missionary work, were extracted at a terrible cost to First Nations people. The degradation of the Tsimshians, which caused Duncan to come to BC’s north coast in 1857, had direct links to commercial avarice and corrupt trade practices. Ironically, the kind of community sought by many of those described in this book—one characterized by simplicity, environmental sensitivity, spiritual cohesion and a high degree of communal activity—was one that First Nations groups have had much experience with. They may yet lead us forward to a revised version of this old form of existence.
A depression in the United States in the early 1890s prompted the arrival in British Columbia of groups of Danes and Norwegians, who formed agricultural colonies in remote parts of the province. The Finns who followed at the end of the century were also economic migrants. All three groups chose to stay in BC because the government of the day offered them free land and other inducements.
The Doukhobors did not head west for economic reasons but because they felt betrayed by the Canadian government over the final settlement of land granted to them in Saskatchewan. They were able to develop their remarkable communal empire in British Columbia largely because of their agribusiness success before, after and during World War I. The same forces that caused their collective enterprise to decline during the Depression-era 1930s, and eventually fail, also attracted Brother XII and his disciples to BC. These Aquarians intended to hole up and wait out the coming global collapse, then emerge from the ruins and establish a new civilization.
After World War II, North America enjoyed an era of unprecedented peace and plenty, and the formation of utopian communities surged. Starting with the Emissaries of Divine Light in the late 1940s, the Quakers at Argenta in the ’50s and some early countercultural experiments in the ’60s, the wave of naive, optimistic activity reached a peak in the 1970s, when America’s children of affluence, the hippies, reached adulthood.
And today? As the third millennium and twenty-first century get off to a rough start, clouds of economic fear cast familiar shadows on the psychological landscape. The service sector is shrinking under the onslaught of technology; dwindling natural resources put other jobs at risk; the gap between rich and poor is rapidly widening. Yet our human population grows and grows. Globe-spanning corporations and giant bureaucracies grapple impotently with an ever-lengthening list of social and environmental problems.
In response to these threats, another cycle of utopian community-making is taking shape in British Columbia. Innovative living arrangements such as co-housing, where bands of people circumvent the traditional market to build their own custom-designed habitations, are just the beginning. User-designed neighbourhoods are the next stage. Other steps forward in this progression are ecovillages: