To face the inevitability of change, many groups and individuals have turned quietly away from the dominant culture and its unfulfilling, wasteful emphasis on consumption. Some are thinking small, designing local land-use systems that integrate food production, housing, wildlife habitat and appropriate technology—a process called permaculture. Some are thinking large, applying the permaculture approach to bioregions. All are searching for enduring, decentralized alternatives that celebrate diversity and human co-operation. The future may depend on their efforts.
Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to clarify a few terms and sketch in some background. What exactly are utopian communities, anyway, and how did they get started? No universal standards exist for classifying such settlements. A number of adjectives are commonly used to describe them, including alternative, experimental and intentional. They are also called colonies, communes, collectives, co-operatives and cults. The places described in this book were all created with deliberate intent; none were accidental or haphazard. They were not necessarily isolated. They had a common purpose of some kind and were established as alternatives to the surrounding society. These criteria do not define them, though, but merely bring an illusion of order to bear on a changing social phenomenon.
The phrase “intentional community,” which originated in the US in the late 1940s and is now in widespread use, refers to a group of people who live together by choice, have collective goals and co-operate to create a way of life that reflects their shared values. Monasteries and ashrams, student housing co-operatives, communes—all are intentional communities. The term “commune” had a slightly sinister connotation forty years ago; today it designates an intentional community where income and assets are shared. Some degree of authoritarian control or manipulation is implied by the word “cult,” and, at the very least, the free will of a cult member may be restricted or interfered with.
It is the concept of utopia that gives the most trouble. Each person’s version is different. Those who have this dangerous word applied to their community unfailingly reject it. There is a world of difference, apparently, between “utopian,” a useful term describing the intention to achieve a better society, and “utopia,” the improved society itself, which is imaginary and can never be achieved, except in books. These days, “utopian” is often misinterpreted as “naive and impractical,” and “utopia” can mean just about anything. An advertisement in the Vancouver Sun defined it as “a place where the sun always shines, where Mother Nature teaches surfers who’s boss, where a slice lands your ball in the ocean, and where Alaska Airlines gives you Double Miles.”
The word was coined, of course, by Thomas More, that “man for all seasons” who was beheaded by Henry VIII for his adherence to the Catholic faith. Published in 1516, More’s Utopia is both a political essay and a fictional account of travel in a communistic island state where all men and women received an education and religious freedom was accepted. The title is taken from the Greek outopos, or “nowhere,” though it also plays on the word eutopos, or “good place.” Utopia is short but multi-layered: a satire on English laws and social conditions, a discourse on effective government, a parody of the explorer’s journal and a futuristic fantasy. It invented a new narrative form—the “utopian” novel.
Other writers before More had described ideal societies. Biblical interpretations of paradise on earth, from the Garden of Eden to the prescriptive visions of such Hebrew prophets as Amos and Ezekiel, have influenced Judeo-Christian thinking. One early utopian author was Plato, whose blueprint for an alternative society, The Republic, was published in the fourth century BC. Plato’s plan was far from egalitarian and outlined instead a rigid class system ruled by a caste of benevolent philosopher kings who owned no property, lived together in spartan unity and participated in a selective breeding program designed to encourage intellectual rigour.
A number of historic utopian communities are known to have existed. The Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that inhabited the western shores of the Dead Sea in the first century BC, dwelt communally, sharing possessions, agricultural production and meals. Biblical scholar Barbara Thiering has suggested that Jesus Christ may have grown up in an Essene settlement. After Christ’s death, his persecuted followers formed countercultural communes based on the principles of equality, common ownership of goods and shared work, food and ritual. These groups were the forerunners of the monastic movement.
As the Christian church grew rich and powerful, its communal foundations weakened. Hundreds of groups of heretics, disillusioned with ecclesiastic excess, broke away from the main body of the church and sought renewal in Christ’s teachings and a simple, co-operative way of life. A tradition of dissent began that would eventually include the Hutterites, Mennonites and Doukhobors. These sects, persecuted in their homelands, found refuge in North America, where they retained their utopian, collective lifestyles and flourished.
On the literary landscape, meanwhile, Thomas More had unwittingly opened a floodgate in the human imagination. A steady outpouring of social and political commentary, thinly disguised as travelogues to distant, wondrous lands, followed his Utopia. Jonathan Swift and Voltaire took the genre to new literary heights with Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and Candide in 1759. But it was not until the nineteenth century, with a flurry of communal experiments in the eastern US, that life seriously began to imitate art.
Several of these American communes became very famous. Some of the individuals who would help form utopian settlements in the British Columbia wilderness later in the century were certainly aware of them. New Harmony in Indiana was one of the earliest. Originally established by German Pietists, the entire village was purchased in 1825 by a Welsh social reformer and industrialist named Robert Owen, who tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a showcase of co-operative business and social practices.
Lutheran dissenters known as Inspirationists established the Amana villages, which still exist near the Iowa River. Nineteen Shaker communities, their inhabitants dedicated to lives of simplicity and celibacy, flourished by the mid-1800s. Nashoba helped slaves buy their freedom in Tennessee. The New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the founders of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, an agricultural co-operative based on the theories of French philosopher and socialist Charles Fourier. The Christian socialist collective of Oneida, founded in 1848, became notorious for rejecting exclusive sexual relationships in favour of “complex marriage.” Echoing Plato’s Republic, it endorsed what was known as “stirpiculture,” a form of eugenics where a committee decided who should procreate.
Successful novels by Samuel Butler (Erewhon, 1872), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888), William Morris (News from Nowhere, 1891) and H.G. Wells (A Modern Utopia, 1905) added fuel to the utopian movement in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. These books envisioned ideal societies free of the inhumane, unhealthy working conditions inflicted on Europe and North America by growing industrialization.
Experimental communities, both fictional and real, continued into the twentieth century. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) became bywords for the anti-utopian or dystopian novel. B.F. Skinner’s futuristic Walden Two, published in 1948 and based on his psychological theories about human behaviour, has inspired the formation of at least a dozen communities, including Virginia’s well-known Twin Oaks and Los Horcones in northern Mexico. Since the 1960s, the popularity of science fiction has allowed writers to create a torrent of imaginative literary utopias and dystopias. To date, Canadian author Margaret Atwood has set five novels in disturbing human societies of the near future. Utopian themes have found their way into the work of many BC novelists, including Jack Hodgins, Jane Rule, Audrey Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Marilyn Bowering, Pearl Luke, Douglas Coupland, Claudia Casper and Susan Musgrave.
In Canada, not all experimental communities got their start in BC. Mennonite and Amish groups started immigrating to Ontario in 1786. Nearly forty thousand Mennonites moved to the Prairies in the 1870s and 1920s, and large numbers of Hutterites arrived in 1918 from the US. These Protestant sects, born of the sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement, were systematically harassed for their beliefs, which were based on early Christian