This network has been set-up to provide a meeting place and discussion group for people interested in establishing and transitioning to semi-intentional communities within Japan. It’s open to people from any country to join, but much of the discussion will focus on Japan or the home countries of Gaijin (foreigners) living in Japan. To get started read the About page, and then read though the Core Program articles, and then have a browse around the rest of the site. To contribute you must join. We are looking for original content for most of the site, so please add your thought, ideas, reviews, projects, observations, guides and experiences to the related categories on the site. If you just want to draw attention to a great resource, or a cool site or post from elsewhere on the net, but not directly related to HBS, please post these under the “Posts from beyond HBS” categories. They won’t appear on the home page, but in their own areas of the site. This will just help keep core content front and center for all. Thanks.

Sustainable Futures, that is what its all about. So this document makes interesting reading. At just over 250 pages it will take a little while to work though it, but I thought I’d share the intro so you can get a feel for it. I just don’t know how to sell the idea of degrowth to those that need to do it to make the difference.  It presents some suggestions, but I’ll need to read it carefully to see what to make of it. I am sure there are some worthwhile concepts to take away from it though to apply to the ongoing research on community.

Sustainable Futures Report

The starting point for this project, Sustainable Futures, has been a search for sustainable cultures past, present and future. For more than four decades, there has been an intense, ongoing search for a balance between modern industrial development and the environment. However, the results of this search are far from impressive: complex environmental problems, such as climate disruption, impoverishment of ecosystems and toxification, are still threatening the future of humanity, more than ever before. There is a clear need for reassessing the cultural foundations of the present modes of industrial development. The search should be for agendas for transformation.

Excerpt from “The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough“

“The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was a sage of modest pleasures and simple abundance. He believed that anxiety about status, wealth, and having more was the single greatest obstacle to human happiness. No matter how wealthy we are, we can’t be happy if we crave more riches. No matter how much fame and pleasure come to us, we won’t enjoy them if we hunger for greater thrills. Epicurus understood the good life as a simple life where the modest pleasures of home and hearth – good foods, gardens, and conversations – are the ultimate luxury. Contentment arises when we feel a gratitude for what we have, when we revel in the “luxury of enough”.

The luxury of enough stems from knowing what you love and how you want to live at home. When you think about it, the modest pleasures of living – winter sunlight, the small of coffee, the feel of moss – are surprisingly easy to bring into your home environment and daily routines. The journey is to find your own modest pleasures. The luxury of simplicity start with understanding your own true tastes and throwing out notions of what you should have and like.“

Here here, that rings so true, you know its got to be right. The books concepts are based around 6 themes:

The 6 Paths to Simplicity:

1. Simple is Enough
2. Simple is Thrifty
3. Simple is Flexible
4. Simple is Timeless
5. Simple is Sustainable
6. Simple is Refined

I think we could apply that to life in general, and thus to our communities as well. We seem to be so busy making everything in life more artificially complicated, but I don’t think its really working out, do you? Our social and economic structures grow ever more complicated, and this seems to dis-empower people, taking away their ability to make sense of the world we are living in, and thus growing more and more dysfunctional.  Its not a problem with complexity itself, nature is gloriously complex, but with artificial complexity, complexity that goes against the natural flow, designed to channel and control decisions that were previously made though our natural commonsense and good judgement. There is that famous quote, something like “Commonsense is not that common”. I would hope that within any community we could imagine, the need for lots and lots of rules would be replace with commonsense and the basic premise of “Respect”. Then we could live a little simpler maybe.

Maybe I could add one more to the list: “Simple Pleasures”.

350.org were promoting a day of action on climate change for 10/10/10, so we felt this was a good day to try our own local community building exercise.  We were not able to prepare for a big event, and the weather forecast was not good, so we opted for a simple meet and greet with the locals, to talk about food, gardening and getting to know each other. So we letter dropped the two streets that make up our little corner of the suburb, about 40 houses, inviting them to our back yard for a morning tea.

Considering we had an absolutely terrible day with weather, it was a better day than we expected! Its been raining solid for the last three days, everything is soaked through, plus the wind has come up and its cold and miserable, back to winter! We really didn’t expect anyone to turn up, but they came. A dozen households came, people we’ve not met before, some we’ve just said hi to on the street, a couple we knew. Two lively ladies in their nineties who were a treasure trove of local history. A good first experiment with a very localised community/street gathering, worth the effort.

It got me to thinking about what community is.

What is “community”?

I often wonder why I’m spending time here, starting to talk about building communities. I’m not qualified to do so, I’ve not studies any social sciences, I’m no expert on psychology, I’m not even a very social person. I hate being the center of attention, awkward at gatherings, always lost for words – certainly not leadership material, never understood why anyone would want to be a leader. And I’m not even sure I really know what being in a communityreally means.

But I have read a lot, and worried a lot, about the future. Time and time again a thread emerges for me from those readings, and it has to do with interconnections and interdependence. And often this is expressed as community. If we were talking about natural systems I guess you would call it ecology. But defining “what is community” is like all definitions a little tricky sometimes, because there is the “point of view” clouding things. So I started thinking, what isn’t community, and what might people mistake for community. So lets try that.

‘Myself’ is obviously not ‘a community’ other than in the biological sense of all the living things that make up me. I’m quite happy with my little world, my little world view, and the beliefs I hold dear. Its totally myopic, but fairly benign. Its also singularly selfish, which is just the way ego must be unfortunately. My responsibility is just to me. Sometimes that is not so benign.

‘My Family’ is not ‘a community’. Its something much more contained, with just a couple of relationships that have very strongly biased bonds. There are strong implied responsibilities and dependencies that cannot be ignored, which means you can be ‘yourself’ within ‘your family’ and mostly be tolerated. But your family is not a community, and I think that is why intentional communities based on a “family” concept can be successful, but pretty restrictive and isolated. The responsibilities and dependencies are extremely tight and cannot be ignored. ‘Family comes first’ it is often said.

‘My friends’ are not a community. They have been selected based on various criteria that suit me. There is some variability, but many commonalties, which are needed for the bond of friendship. There are shared responsibilities and dependencies too, but mostly voluntarily entered into. Mostly though I choose my friends because they are reasonably compatible with my ego, my sense of self. But friends can come and go, fall out or lose track.

A ‘church group’, ‘political party’ or ‘club’ is not a community. These groups have a particular world view that demands a loyalty to that group, and these form a dependency based on an ideology. It is selective in nature, based on some arbitrary criteria. Sometimes its a belief system that tries to dominate others, sometimes a world view that places preference on one group of people over another, sometimes its just a belief that one sort of thing or way is better than another. It is often by definition and design not inclusive, but exclusive.  It can feel a bit like a community when then size is large, but its not quite. Which is why I feel intentional communities based on an ideology could be unwelcoming for many people. They can work, and do, as a family based group can work, but its not really a true community in my mind.

So, what is left then to call ‘a community’. We often would use that word with some of the above. I think the definition is in what is left out. I think what makes ‘a community’ is simply the people who live around you, those that you interact with on a daily basis, or ignore on a daily basis, but they are there. And the difference is that on the whole in our westernised worlds, there is very little truly shared responsibilities or dependencies, except maybe in times of emergency. If you don’t talk to the person two house down the street, it really doesn’t have much impact on either of you does it? The person five doors down that plays thrash metal at 3am, you’re quite happy to have nothing to do with them, but they are part of your community too.

Which brings me to why defining “what a community is” as so hard, because to do so it has to included everyone around you, especially the ones you might not like, or that have different world views, or that are part of some select club, cult/religion or political party. The single most difficult part of dealing with ‘community’ is that it includes the ones you’d rather avoid! That’s a bitter pill to swallow isn’t it. I think I’ve talked myself around to having to rename this site! But maybe not. Maybe I’m just defining it from one narrow perspective, and its all in the semantics.

But the thrust of this ramble is to point out that ‘a community’ needs to be inclusive of everyone physically in it, like it or not. That doesn’t mean we have to invite the thrash metal guy to dinner, but just that when we talk about community we have to try to remember its bigger than us, our families, our friends, or our groups. Our ‘semi-intentional communities’ are really ‘semi-intentional-clubs-for-like-minded-people-interesting-in-sustainability-and-simple-ethical-living’ located within a community. And managing those edge interactions seems to be a big aspect of success or failure maybe.

So I’m thinking that community is a bit like ‘the edge’ in permaculture. That is where a lot of the interesting stuff happens, where the really authentic interactions occurs because its the place where predefined responsibilities and dependencies are at their weakest, which means it also takes a lot of extra effort to control how things work at this level, but the possibilities are much greater too maybe. Its also the most complex set of interactions, and the least within our control. In our modern lives we don’t really need to commit to these interactions, which was once not a option if you wanted to survive. Now we can mostly avoid these inconvenient interactions, but at the price maybe of a strong community?

Community is certainly a tricky subject to pin down. We all have a bit of a view of what we think it might look like, some romantic notions, but that is almost always our personal view, and it tends to leave out the awkward bits around interacting with those you don’t necessarily want to interact with, or dealing with these elements when things don’t go our way. I know who I want in ‘my group’ but I can’t apply this same logic to ‘my community’. They are there, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that is why I think the success of community is underpinned by respect for each other over everything else. Of course, that is easier to say than implement, but that’s another story.

Also, I could be wrong.

As you know I’m quite a fan of the Transition Town concept, I think its a relatively simple, logical approach to taking steps towards “being the change”. Very democratic, very open, very grass-roots. So I am happy to see progress for the movement in Japan. For me TT represents a method to engage with the greater community, to raise awareness, and would be a foundation stone for any future community concept in my mind. Worth pointing your Japanese speaking family and friends towards….

More Japanese Transition Towns…

Originally posted on the old site – by yukkuri_kame:

by Janelle Orsi

Residents of cohousing communities could benefit from the advice of “sharing lawyers.”

What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities?

That sounds like the beginning of a lawyer joke, but actually, it’s the beginning of new field of law practice. Very soon, every community will need a specialist in this yet-to-be-named area: Community transactional law? Sustainable economies law? Cooperation law?

Personally, I tend to call it sharing law. We need sharing lawyers to help people like Lynne:

• Lynne lives in an urban cohousing community and shares ownership of a car with two neighbors. Every day, she fluidly shares, borrows, and lends (rather than owns) many household goods, tools, electronics, and other items.

• She is a member of a cooperative grocery, through which she receives significant discounts in exchange for putting in a few monthly work hours. She grows vegetables on an empty lot and sometimes sells the veggies to neighbors.

• She has a successful rooftop landscaping business, which she launched using 20 microloans and investments from friends and family. She often barters, doing odd jobs in exchange for goods and services.

• She also owns a 5 percent share of a hot springs retreat center outside of town, which she acquired through sweat equity.

With the help of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration, Lynne has managed to craft an affordable, comfortable lifestyle, put her skills to use, do varied and self-directed work, and live/work in a supportive community. She has “financed” property ownership and launched a thriving business off of the traditional financial and banking grid.

Lawyers Are Going to Have a Ball With This

Now, if only Lynne knew how to report all this to the IRS, and how to explain it to her car insurance company, the Health Department, mortgage lenders, the Secretary of State, the Department of Real Estate, the city planning and building departments, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and all of the other regulatory and bureaucratic entities that have a say over what she can and can’t do.

And if only Lynne could feel fully assured that her rights to partial ownership in the cohousing community, retreat center, car, shared goods, and consumer cooperative would be honored by her co-sharers, or, in the event of an unresolveable dispute, honored by a court of law. If only she could find affordable ways to manage the risk of her activities, since her activities don’t fit into traditional insurance application check-boxes. If only there weren’t so many legal headaches involved in living well and creating more localized, sustainable economies …

article continued here: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-24/cooperation-law-sharing-economy

If anyone is interested in learning just how bad we are doing a preserving our global bio-diversity, you could get along to this conference…. (It sounds like its been about as successful as Copenhagen so far – i.e. the rate of extinction of plants and animals is far worse than all the worse case scenarios they’ve been working to avoid! I heard this week that one third of amphibian species could go extinct in the next TEN YEARS! Almost certainly within our lifetime. I think we are in big trouble.) The thing is that everything we are talking about when we talk about sustainable communities (which can only really happen in the countryside I think – a ‘sustainable city’ is an oxymoron) includes being aware of, and preserving the natural environment around the place we want to live. Anyone with a bent for permaculture knows that working within the natural environment, preserving it and using its inherent advantages IS the only way to go. I feel if you do go to this event, be prepared for bad news.

Tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 10) for the Convention on Biological Diversity.

…. will be held in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, from 18 to 29 October 2010.

Introduction

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) entered into force on 29 December 1993. It has 3 main objectives:

1. The conservation of biological diversity
2. The sustainable use of the components of biological diversity
3. The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources

Issues for in-depth consideration

• Inland waters biodiversity
• Marine and coastal biodiversity
• Mountain biodiversity
• Protected areas
• Sustainable use of biodiversity
• Biodiversity and climate change

And we are loosing it…!!!

Some related reading:

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity is an international agreement which aims to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology that may have adverse effects on biological diversity, taking also into account risks to human health. It was adopted on 29 January 2000 and entered into force on 11 September 2003. More »

Originally posted on the old site – by Gomu:

Thought some of you might be interested in this article. For my ears it seems a little too dependent on there not being a sudden shift in environmental/socio-economic circumstances, like wot I fink there will… but none the less here it is for your commenting pleasure.

By Juliet Schor
Source: The Broker Online
August 29, 2010

Juliet Schor is professor of sociology at Boston College and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream. Her most recent book is ‘Plenitude: the new economics of true wealth’. She is one of the keynote speakers at the ISEEconference and expands on her speech in this blog post.

In my address to the International Society for Ecological Economics I argued that to reduce ecological footprint and solve the unemployment crisis, hours of work should be reduced. This shares the available work and reduces pressure on eco-systems. The additional time off work available to households can then be deployed to what visionary philosopher Frithjof Bergmann has called high-tech self-providing. That is, people make and do for themselves in areas such as food, shelter, energy, clothing and small manufactures. The high tech dimension is that the methods of production used require sophisticated knowledges and skills and in many cases, computers and other high-technology machinery. With HTSP, small scale production is high productivity and therefore sensible to undertake in an advanced modern economy.

The high tech self-providing economy is one that has a great deal of initial appeal, but also raises many questions. Is it really possible that people could go back to doing so much for themselves? Is it a viable option for the unemployed? What can be done to promote such a model?

The answer to these questions is yes, this is a viable model. Once households and individuals have time available to engage in it, the way to accelerate its adoption most quickly is to organize it at a community level. Bergmann has been active in Germany for many years, encouraging what he has termed New Work Centers. These community gathering places were initially aimed at the unemployed, who were time rich and cash poor. The centers purchase the machinery needed for some of the HTSP activities, such as the small-scale manufacturing technologies. (One version of these is the “fabrication laboratory,” pioneered at MIT in the US, which is a complementary set of small-scale machines that can be programmed and used to make small numbers of almost any kind of simple manufactured item.) Centers can also be used to house lowertech tools for woodworking, sewing, etc. and they are also centers for skill development. Workshops, classes, talks and informal skill development activities take place at centers. They serve as nodes of networks of people who are practicing self-providing (of the high and low tech variety). By bringing people together who are involved in these activities, centers lead to faster adoption of this way of life, both because it becomes socially normative and because of the practical advantages of learning that are possible in a communal setting. Such centers also build social capital, and with it the potential to be organized for political change.

In coming years, the economics of HTSP are likely to improve, for two reasons. First, fabrication technology and practice and other high-knowledge ways of production such as permaculture are being refined and improved on a continual basis. The extra work required by early adopters will be lessened over time. The transmission of knowledge and machinery will become more routinized and easier. These ways of producing things will become more feasible for those who are technologically less adept. Second, with economic stagnation and high unemployment likely to continue, and income growth predicted to be low, the financial benefits to individuals will increase. When households have surplus time and are short on cash, self-providing becomes a more intelligent way to meet needs than in eras of plentiful market work and easy money.

Finally, HTSP is also a high satisfaction way to spend time. In contrast to more passive or spectatorial methods of entertaining oneself, self-providing activates our creative impulses. That in turn creates deep satisfaction and happiness. In the end, the joys of making and doing may turn out to be the most important factor promoting a return to this way of life.

If you thought that was interesting, you may like to watch this video titled “Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs”.

Originally posted on the old site – by Gomu:

I’d like to ask people what values they feel should be pursued by our imaginary community, or whether in fact a declaration of shared values is even necessary.

I for one, do feel that some shared values are necessary, and further that they should be declared. I propose that shared values are what ties any community together. If your neighbours and fellow communards are working with the same values in mind, then at least some potential sources of disharmony are forestalled. Further, shared values gives definition to our behaviour and shape to our decision making. It also makes understanding and explaining what we are tying to do easier. Our values would begin to define us as a group.

I’d like to suggest some values that I feel are important.

• Diversity
• Equity
• Self management
• Solidarity

There may be others.

Diversity because there is more dynamism in that than in homogenous structures.

Equity because … do I need to explain this one?

Self management because it’s tied in with equity, responsibility and sense of worth.

Solidarity because we should want to support those with similar values and because it produces mutual regard instead of antisocial otherness.

Originally posted on the old site – by tomatonion:

India’s Ayurvedic medical system,possibly the world’s oldest,was formulated thousands of years ago in response to the perceived ills of people living in urban environments.

Although those ancient cities must have borne little resemblance to our modern ones,it was still seen as necessary to devise a ‘help’ system for the residents,who lived in increasingly artificial environments.Perhaps it was at the same time that the concept of “Okage-sama” started to be eroded – that village and small community values started to be usurped by individual and institutional values,that organized war and resource pillage started to become widespread.Perhaps – it is almost impossible to see back into the dim depths of those times.

Whatever happened back then,it is historical fact that 2600 years ago Gautama Buddha came along,and from his enlightenment shared the teaching that all life is suffering,as well as the four-fold path to release oneself from this.About 600 years ago a second “Enlightenment” started to occur,ushering in the Age of Reason and its technological marvels.

It is these marvels that are today used to ease the suffering of human beings – to make life more convenient,more comfortable;to protect us from the vagaries of wind,rain,cold,heat;to ensure that we do not have to climb rocky paths,endure back-breaking labour,be preyed upon by other species.A natural consequence of this is that we should all live in air-conditioned,automated cities,that pork should be grown from pig cells in vats to feed us,that our eyes and minds should be focused more and more towards virtual realities – in short that we should use these marvels to insulate ourselves as much as possible from the suffering caused by our exposure to our natural environment.

It is no accident that the bulk of the inventions that led to this technological explosion came from Northwestern Europe,and Britain in particular.In that part of the world the natural environment is one of the most uncomfortable and unhealthy for human beings to live in,and it has an horrendous climate.It is also no accident that the people of that area are amongst the most vicious,brutal and exploitative the world has seen;and that the technology that was born there,when not being used to provide comfort for human beings against life’s sufferings,is most often used to kill other human beings.

But back to the subject of this article (and by extension to the question in my comment on Ken’s preceding article).The logical,rational result of urbanization,and its facilitator,technological innovation – is that we should all,in the end,live in a big Machine. This is humanity’s alternative vision and replacement for the the natural world,with all its attendant sufferings,inconveniences and discomforts.Never mind the loss of the “Okage-sama” and our separation from each other and all else around us,and all the other urban ailments – at least it would be air-conditioned,right?

I’m in Kobe right now,and I don’t know about the rest of you,but from where I’m sitting that Machine already looks half-built.Which brings me back to the question on the Two Agriculture system – if the majority are not farming (i.e. living in small communities in synergy with the natural cycles and rhythms around them) and not growing their own food – then what are they doing? The only alternative in human history (apart from hunter-gatherers) is to work as a cog in something called a city,which is basically an attempt by human beings to create an artificial reality – a machine.

Cities have existed from time immemorial,as have people whose specialized trades have meant they neither farm nor hunt/gather.Modern cities exist because an industrial base exists,and vice versa.I’m not entirely sure as to the rural/urban proportion globally,but I seem to remember it’s reached somewhere around 50/50.The purpose of growing cash crops is to enable the farmer to buy industrial products – and of course we all still need those products.But in terms of long-term community structure/land use/activity,shouldn’t we be looking beyond that,towards a future of renewed values;a future where,to paraphrase Yukkuri Kame,it becomes possible to revise the relationship of the group to the individual and the individual to the group?