Scattered notes on future imaginaries, collapse, and exit strategies – Part 2: On ecovillages as survival units and everyday preppers

Note 4. ‘When I told them, they didn’t want to believe me’: Ecovillages as survival units

Hope is a muscle

That allows us to connect.

Atopos by Björk and featuring Kasimyn (Björk and Kasimyn, 2022)

In one of our first interviews with key people within the Danish ecovillage movement in spring 2022, we visited Ross Jackson, a highly successful entrepreneur and famous Canadian-Danish philanthropist. In an interview for the Danish newspaper Information, he was called the Danish George Soros (Havmand, 2018). Many see Jackson as the originator of the ecovillage movement together with his late wife Hildur. After a series of profitable transactions, Ross and Hildur Jackson started the Gaia Trust in 1987, which financially enabled the founding of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and Gaia Education, which work worldwide to spread and teach about the underlying principles for ecovillages and ecovillage living. While telling us his story and talking about his world view, Jackson mentions almost offhand that the collapse, as he calls it, is coming. Not if it will come, but when. Having been confronted with the inevitability of humanity’s fate, our visit leaves us feeling somewhat stunned. Little did we know that collapsology had taken a strong hold on the ecologically conscious progressive landscape in recent years. And Jackson is not alone in thinking that collapse is imminent. 

In early autumn 2022, we had the opportunity to conduct a long interview with Angel Matilla[1], a key member of the GEN Europe team. Matilla lives in the ecovillage of Arterra Bizimodu, in Navarra, Spain, close to its mountainous border with France. He has previously worked in engineering and lived a quite ordinary life until 2011, when – in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 North Atlantic financial crisis – he became familiar with the grievances of the Spanish Indignados movement, leading him to develop an interest in theories of social, economic, and ecological collapse. After initially feeling anger and despair, his new awareness eventually led him to discover the ecovillage movement:

You cannot just solve the crisis by focusing on the ecological aspect, you cannot just use renewables. You also need to change how society is making decisions. You need to change how we treat each other. You need to change how we look into ourselves. You need to change our values, our economy, and many other things. And all of that needs to happen interconnectedly. And so, that realization led me to find it. I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but then I found the world of ecovillages. (Matilla, GEN Europe)

He firmly believes that the ecovillage movement represents a blueprint for future societies, where disaster adaptation and mitigation will be indispensable for survival:

I don’t know to which extent the existing ecovillages or adopting an ecovillage lifestyle can prevent the collapse. I mean, we’re already past the tipping point. (...) So now that the society is crumbling down, people are starting to look everywhere to see where they can find possible pathways towards a different way of doing things. So, the first thing that I want to say is: we are not avoiding the collapse. We cannot do that, but we can mitigate it by creating and implementing blueprints for possible current and especially future societies. (Matilla, GEN Europe)

During our conversation, Matilla explained that some ecovillages – Arterra is one of them – have been organizing thematic workshops (Sembrando Futuros, 2023) to explore not only the practical, but also the emotional implications of living in times of collapse.

So in Arterra, we held a workshop last summer already about collapse, and it was mostly about how individual people, that were aware of collapse, could integrate all those things that were happening, not only the rational level like what to do, but also how to feel into what was happening, how not to give in to this fear or how to deal actually with despair and all these emotions that come up with it. (Matilla, Global Ecovillage Network Europe)

According to Matilla and other followers of collapsology theories, collapse is not a single catastrophic event, but a process that can slow down or accelerate according to the circumstances (Kaminski, 2008). Unforeseen events that have the capacity to unsettle or disrupt the status quo are called, Matilla explained, black swans (Taleb, 2007). These events can be natural disasters, financial crises, technological disruptions, political uprisings, and of course wars, of which the current war in Ukraine is indubitably a tragic black swan. The war there unexpectedly turned out to be a test of the ecovillage movement: Could the movement prove to be a best practice for solidarity in face of this sudden and violent black swan? Could the war in Ukraine and all the other ongoing wars worldwide be interpreted as a manifestation of a generalized collapse to come, the collapse Jackson and Matilla foresaw? 

Immediately after the war in Ukraine broke out in early 2022, the Ukrainian ecovillage network and the non-governmental organization called Permaculture in Ukraine started to mobilize to shelter Ukrainians escaping from cities and the urban conglomerates under attack. This mobilization gave rise to the Green Road project, a network providing support to Ukrainian war refugees in the form of temporary or permanent housing in ecovillages and permaculture communities. Bombings and military attacks have affected ecovillages less since they are often situated in rural and isolated areas. In addition, ecovillages can rely to some extent on the food produced in their own fields. The network includes approximately seventy locations in Ukraine and another two hundred scattered across Eastern Europe. The green road connecting all Ukrainian ecovillages provides more than just food and shelter by helping to create a grassroots humanitarian corridor (figure 1). By moving from one ecovillage to another, refugees wishing to leave the country can reach the border, safely cross it, and be hosted in other ecovillages in the network. According to the Green Road project website, Ukrainian locations have hosted almost two thousand people since April 2022. 

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During the GEN Europe gathering held in July 2022 in Denmark, we had the chance to meet and speak with a group of young Ukrainians who managed to leave the country due to the project. Only a few of them were already living in an ecovillage before the war started, but many of them had previously been involved in various training activities concerning permaculture and ecovillage design. They told us that, after the first explosions in February 2022, Ukrainian ecovillages quickly became hubs for people seeking shelter. Shortly after, other European ecovillages opened their doors or started sending basic goods and materials back to Ukraine. Being welcomed into an ecovillage, according to our interviewees, is quite different from being hosted in a humanitarian aid centre: ‘You feel home away from home; you’re in a community, in a circle that already exists’. The togetherness characterizing ecovillage living seems to have allowed these young refugees to process the emotional trauma of what they experienced. Interestingly, they mentioned that during times of war, ‘You can be a volunteer, a refugee, or a fighter’. They chose to become volunteers ‘to fight in a different way’ by supporting the network and the Green Road project from inside or outside Ukraine (in this case, from Denmark).

Already before the war, during the COVID pandemic, the Ukrainian ecovillage network, established in 2018, reinforced its ties to the rest of the European network of ecovillages when it received financial and logistical support to set up a series of workshops on food security, self-sufficiency, and permaculture. These pre-existing ties between Ukrainian and other European ecovillages proved to be of fundamental significance because this meant that a strong network of collaborations, relationships, and friendships was already in place when the war commenced. As one interviewee recounts, ‘If I need some help in Italy, I can go to Riccardo [key representative in the Italian ecovillage network] and he will’ – she clicks her tongue and snaps her fingers twice – ‘will receive me, not randomly. They will consider me as a part of their family from day one’. 

On our way back from the GEN Europe gathering, with these stories of solidarity and hope fresh in our minds, we started to think about Jackson’s words: What if ecovillages could represent, for real, one type (among many others) of solidaristic and ecological survival unit in case of collapse? We also asked ourselves whether the long-standing critique against ecovillages and intentional communities more broadly as being gated and exclusionary communities, would remain valid once the refugees’ stories became public knowledge. A feature of the communities that refutes the aforementioned critique is their rather porous boundaries, which allow people to pass through them and stay for only a few days before moving on to cross the border, or remain for longer periods, even permanently. 

Integrating into the community is understandably demanding when people decide to stay. In this regard, we recalled the words of a Ukrainian woman we met during the GEN Europe gathering who told us that opening the doors of their communities to refugees escaping from the cities under attack was challenging for both sides. On the one hand, ecovillages had to reorganize their structures and logistics to increase (often exponentially) their capacity to welcome, shelter, and feed refugees. On the other, refugees, who are normally not used to communal life, must adapt, learn, help, and become actively involved in daily activities and tasks. 

Going back to the key question in this note: Could ecovillages serve as survival units in case of societal collapse? Matilla seems quite sure that this is the case. Before concluding our interview, he confessed that his family and friends used to take his ideas and concerns about an impending societal collapse quite lightly in the past, but now things are changing: 

So today, or let’s say this year, could be the year where I finally can tell people: I told you so. But it feels very sad to say. So, I haven’t been telling anybody [laughs]. Yeah. So, I secretly wish I had been mistaken somehow. (Matilla, GEN Europe)

Note 5. Resistant exit: Turn on, tune in, and reach out

While studying ecovillages and intentional communities, one of the main critiques we encountered is that they are unable to overcome the idiosyncrasies of contemporary capitalism because they represent an escapist strategy accessible only to the lucky ones who can afford to join them. Our initial exploratory research caused us to realize, however, that the concept of exit as a political strategy must be problematized instead of being rejected or ridiculed tout-court. Sci-fi books and films have accustomed us to think about exit, or better, escape strategies. The great majority of these books and films portray humans escaping from a planet on the brink of collapse or, worse, from one that is already lifeless in a post-apocalyptic scenario (see Part 1, Notes 1 and 3). 

We are all too familiar with tropes of human micro-conglomerates and self-sustaining capsules traveling endlessly into space looking for new planets to colonize and new resources to extract. And when escaping elsewhere is not an option, when humans cannot be the colonizers, they become (willingly or not) the colonized. Some Hollywood blockbuster films portray long-haired hippies gathered on the rooftops of skyscrapers holding signs and bellowing ‘Take me with you’ at approaching alien spaceships. In these scenarios it is taken for granted that the aliens are more intelligent, more evolved, and more sensitive than humans. None of these narratives contain an exit strategy capable of saving planet Earth and its inhabitants. Escaping into space (and colonizing it) or being colonized by an alien species appear to be the only strategies left for survival. What would happen if the exit were on Earth and involved not only survival but also the regeneration of life?

Engaging critically with the concepts of exit and escapism means we must strive for some definitional clarity. Within academic scholarship, Albert Hirschman’s (1970) book Exit, voice, and loyalty is a classical reference. Hirschman describes exit not only as a strategy that unsatisfied consumers implement in the marketplace but also as a political strategy that people enact when they drop out of the standard loci of political participation, e.g. voting, political parties, and civil society organizations. Hirschman’s theory is the product of an economist’s mindset that applies Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor indiscriminately to the workings of market capitalism and politics. Hirschman’s conceptualization of exit does not have any emancipatory or transformative value and instead serves as a signalling device. 

But recent contributions in the field of post-Marxist cultural and social theory are reviving the debate on the emancipatory value of exit strategies. Virno coined the term engaged withdrawal, which is a type of exit deemed necessary to unhinge existing horizons of domination (Virno, 1996). The idea is that fighting the system implies legitimizing it, accepting its very existence, and its power. Walking away from it, according to Virno, is as effective, if not more effective, as fighting it. Virno’s philosophical and political thoughts are quite marginal among Marxist and critical thinkers, who are traditionally dismissive of exit strategies. For example, Erik Olin Wright’s (2019) book How to be an anticapitalist in the twenty-first century, published posthumously, mocks the strategy of escaping capitalism with the cunning example of a Wall Street financier retiring into the wilderness with millions of dollars secured in the bank. 

A possible first step toward a genuine re-evaluation of the concept of exit is to reflect on its etymology. Exit is not a direct synonym of escape. The Cambridge English dictionary defines escape as ‘the act of successfully getting out of a place or a dangerous or bad situation’. The definition alludes to being compelled to run away from something dangerous, which is done in a rush, usually in a state of emotional distress and panic. Exit is different than escape in that it evokes a choice, something premeditated, done deliberately, and executed intentionally. Along these lines, US-based scholar Jennet Kirkpatrick (2019: 137) recently proposed ‘resistant exit’ as a new analytical category and defined it as a set of actions that ‘interrupt, intervene, or object to a prevailing mode of power and, through strong opposition and engagement (...) reveal an alternative perspective, a different agenda, or a new course of action’. 

Taking Virno’s theories as a generative foundation, Kirkpatrick rejects romanticized interpretations of exit strategies because they ‘erase the cooperation and trust that are integral to most real-world acts of resistance’ (ibid.: 141). Three main features define Kirkpatrick’s resistant exit: making a spectacle out of the exit, constructing unorthodox alternatives, and maintaining bonds with those who did not exit (ibid.: 136). In other words, resistant exit involves exiting, building alternatives, and making sure that the rest of the world knows about them. 

Our attention is inevitably drawn to the second feature of resistant exit, constructing unorthodox alternatives, since it accurately captures what intentional communities and ecovillages do or at least try to. These communities prefigure, materialize, and embody a vision in the present of the future, ‘moving to a new place – a physical exit – in order to construct an alternative society or organization’ (ibid: 146). According to Kirkpatrick, constructing these alternatives implies an exit that is often overlooked: ‘they physically moved from their normal, private homes to inhabit a new place and this visible, collective transition signified their opposition’ (ibid.). Exit, in this sense, is the necessary preamble for the construction of alternatives, it is ‘integral [our emphasis] to opposition’ (ibid.: 147). In Kirkpatrick’s view, however, exit and the construction of alternatives alone are not enough to qualify as a resistant exit since the exiters must keep a certain level of political attachment, i.e. continue to create bonds, solidarity, and connections with the world outside. 

Timothy Leary, one of the leading voices of the counterculture era, is famous for his mantra ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. While ‘turn on’ and ‘tune in’ represent an invitation to heighten the level of one’s consciousness and to ‘interact harmoniously with the world’, ‘drop out’ has been interpreted as a ‘graceful process of detachment (...) and commitment to mobility, choice, and change’ (Leary, 1983: 253). Many communities and communes founded in the 1960s and 1970s were established with the aim of following Leary’s invitation to drop out from mainstream society. Many of them strove to completely (or almost completely) isolate themselves from society and quickly morphed into cult-like, self-referential, and highly problematic gated communities. Others, confronted with the difficulty and perhaps the impossibility of completely cutting ties with the proverbial outside world, embraced a more moderate, but by no means less difficult to achieve, philosophy of reaching out. 

These communities became examples of best practices, showing the world that doing things differently, living otherwise, is possible. Whether this is enough to bring broad progressive change in the world can be debated. Academic scholarship has discussed the extent to which leading by example in intentional communities and ecovillages constitutes or not a driver of social change (Trainer, 2002) and has emphasized the prefigurative nature of many of these initiatives (Monticelli, 2021; 2022). According to UK-based scholars Jenny Pickerill and Paul Chatterton (2010), who study radical ecological alternatives, it is impossible to remain impermeable to capitalism, to completely isolate or escape from it. We are embedded in capitalism. It is possible, however, to exist despite capitalism and show the world that doing so is possible. In other words: turn on, tune in and reach out.

Note 6. Where does despair lead you?

After a financial crisis, pandemic, inflation, war, housing crisis, natural disaster, and looming ecological catastrophe, despair lurks at every turn nowadays. As Matilla’s story illustrates, discovering the sorry state of the world can result in feelings of despair, anxiety, and sadness (figure 2). Despair comes not only in many forms, but its drivers can also vary tremendously. Note 6 does not focus on the personal and individual drivers of despair since our reflections are based on the acknowledgement that hopelessness often stems from problems occurring at the societal and not the individual level. 
 

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TEOTWAWKI, which stands for ‘the end of the world as we know’, is a popular acronym in the prepper movement (more on that later). No one can be sure when it will happen, but it is inevitable. The details of who, what, how, and where do not matter as much as what you decide to do with your agency, assuming that you have any. Speaking of agency, that leads us to our first fork in the road. Do you want to act? Do you think you can? 

Whether due to a lack of political freedom or surplus mental energy to devote to activism or exit, you might choose to sit this one out. If you choose the path of civil disobedience, several present-day examples can serve as inspiration. On the public and collective side, there are activists from Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future raising awareness and trying to prevent a complete climate disaster. In parallel, there are plenty of examples of people deploying a more individualized approach, one that still manages to express social discontent, or at least foster the public debate around grand societal issues. One of these is the tang ping 
movement in China, which began around April 2021 (Allen, 2021) to protest the 996 working hour system, where employees are required to work from 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week. Tang ping, which can be directly translated from the Chinese (躺平) to ‘lying flat’ involves disobeying the societal commandment of maximizing individual productivity at work. Tang ping emerged around the same time as people in the US started talking about another work-related movement, the Great Resignation, which involves vast amounts of employees quitting their jobs. Another example of an individualized response to despair in the workplace is quiet quitting (Kudhail, 2022), where employees put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs and no more. 

If social movement mobilizations, protests, ethical consumerism, quiet quitting, and impulsive resignations do not trigger your survival instincts, you may simply want to choose to prepare for the end by becoming a doomsday prepper, which is someone who takes a survivalist approach to the impending apocalypse. A prepper, sometimes prefaced by ‘doomsday’, does everything they can to prepare for the duration of the disaster and society in its aftermath. Doomsday prepping is also an interesting example of applied risk management. Scenario building is a well-known risk management tool in the world of business strategy, but it has found extraordinary applicability among those who believe in the imminent collapse of civilization. Collapsologists – those who believe in theories of collapse in contemporary post-industrial, capitalist system(s) – also work with the elaborate process of scenario building. Preppers and collapsologists alike build scenarios and narratives all the time to explain and anticipate when, why, and how the current conditions and workings of civilization will implode. 

TV series and mainstream media effectively erase the variety of reasons for and ways in which people prepare for the apocalypse by almost exclusively highlighting the radical and problematic aspects of the movement. Aside from the most conspiratorial elements typical of doomsday prepping, however, prepper activities also include innocuous everyday actions. From our personal experience in scouring prepper (public and members-only) forums online, we believe that painting these people exclusively as doomsday preppers fails to acknowledge what one might call a diversity of preparedness, which includes, perhaps a bit surprisingly, the stereotypical image of the post-World War II American housewife (figure 3). The housewives of yore were in charge of not only the household budget but also keeping and maintaining assorted resources to provide for the family on a rainy day. For example, they used all kinds of preservation methods for perishable foods, stocked up on certain necessities, and naturally had savings socked away.

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Considering that the overwhelming majority of preppers active in online communities are men, it is thought provoking that the (postmodern) male prepper has appropriated what in (pre)modern times was deemed as exclusively woman’s work in the household and turned it into a way to bravely and honourably protect their families. Moreover, household and care work has gone from being criticized by feminists as a form of unpaid labour depriving women of leisure activities (and the possibility to work outside the home) to being labelled a fun task and a hobby by contemporary prepper men. The tone of some online forums is surprisingly moderate, especially in online communities outside of the US. Which radio device do you recommend? If I want to pickle carrots, should I do a cold brine or is there a better method for long-term storage? Contrary to the popular belief that preppers are solitary creatures, several of the communities we followed online arrange in-person gatherings so members can socialize and discuss tips and tricks to be applied within the (prepper) domestic context. 

While some subgroups in prepper communities tend toward distrust and paranoia, the idea of preparing for the future has existed for far longer than it has been associated with gun-happy Americans. People would do well to remember that the idea of preparedness has likely existed since time immemorial. The scouts’ wholesome motto of ‘always be prepared’ is an example of how staying prepared is a skill learned in everyday life. Prepping is more practical and more down to earth than you would expect. So, if you have the energy and the survival instinct to handle the apocalypse, you might be closer to becoming a prepper than you realize. Do not let videos of a white man in the desert training with his newly purchased bow for hunting people coming for his stock of soup cans distract you. Out there, in a forest somewhere, sits a 12-year-old learning how to start a bonfire and a 45-year-old is standing in their kitchen using this year’s tomato harvest to prepare 30 bottles of sauce for the winter.

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[1] He agreed to let us use his real name and quote him directly, with minor adjustments, in our contribution. A video recording of the interview is available on GEN Europe’s YouTube channel (2022).