Living Earth Village is an agricultural subdivision that is in formation. This will be a true, subdivided ecovillage where you can purchase your own 2.5 acre or larger parcel. Each family's domain will be as individual as a great artist's masterpiece and you may choose to:

• Build your own off-grid, green home, greenhouse, and root cellar
• Utilize permaculture techniques in your garden, orchard, and forest
• Create your own, large pond
• Plant a living fence of trees, shrubs, and berries around your parcel
• Construct your own simple beehives to pollinate your garden and provide you with yummy honey
• Design and plant a forest garden with rich biodiversity, including fruit and nut trees, conifers, oaks, cedars, berries, vines, medicinal and culinary herbs, flowers, legumes, grains, root vegetables, and all the veggies you can imagine.

There will be over 100 acres of community space that will include, with your guidance:

• A free-school designed and built by you and your children
• Community meeting and festival space
• Technology center
• Painting, sculpture, and other art studios
• Wood shop
• Recording and editing studios for music and video
• Small printing press
• Horse pastures and stables
• Spaces for other cooperatively owned animals, such as goats and chickens
• Parking for community-owned vehicles for your use
• A community lake and/or stream

Additionally, there will be commercial buildings at the front of the community where residents of nearby towns and cities may:

• Taste your exceptional surplus produce at a farmers' market
• Purchase the products of your creative work in a beautiful art gallery space
• Rejuvenate and relax at a healing resort and spa
• Learn from your expertise in our public workshop and seminar space
• Celebrate nature, life, and music in our public amphitheater

We are also assembling resources for an eco-agribusiness incubator, which will help any entrepreneurs in our community to establish thriving business that add value to what is grown on their land or market their creative output. Resources will include:

• Angel loans to help startup businesses within the community
• Facilities and equipment
• Marketing, accounting, and legal assistance

We aim to help create a truly prosperous community!

Our Philosophy

Living Earth Village is a new breed of intentional community. Privacy and freedom are equally as important as our connection to nature and each other. We believe all religions, in their highest forms, describe the same Truths and all are welcome who intend to live on their land and practice permaculture in their gardens. This is not a religious community and we will never have a guru. The founders have come together with the sole common beliefs in our individual freedom of thought and choice and in the divine nature of Nature. We will self-govern democratically initially and ultimately we'd love to learn how to make decisions consensually as a community.

The concept for this community design is described in beautiful detail in stories contained in the Ringing Cedars series of books written by Vladimir Megre, a former Russian entrepreneur who changed his life radically after he met a Siberian recluse named Anastasia. These books are an amazing resource for ecovillage living, permaculture, and many other topics from politics to relationships and raising children. We highly recommend you check them out. You may purchase them at ringingcedars.com.

This community concept has been proven in more than 300 existing communities in Russia and world wide in which tens of thousands of families reside. This will be the first of many communities using this model in the United States.

Permaculture

Permaculture is the art of learning about the natural relationships between plants, animals, insects, soil, water, and sun and applying these naturally thriving conditions to intentional gardens, orchards, and forests that benefit humans. The goal is to create long-lasting relationships that maintain themselves over decades. As an example, when many different species of plants are planted together without rows or other spacing, insect pests do not tend to invade the plant species, eliminating the need for chemical sprays. You may choose to plant as many as 300 or more species of plants on your own parcel of land.

We have heard the question, "Agricultural subdivision? Isn't farming a bunch of work?" Our response is yes, traditional farming is a lot of work and the return on investment of time and energy is minimal - at best, one year's harvest and then you have to start all over again. Conventional farming methods, even conventional organic farming methods, involve planting rows and rows of very few species of plants, a scenario impossible in nature. So then farmers try to manipulate and control nature and prevent it from entering their fields with artificial chemical and organic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. By using permaculture, none of this is necessary. Some plants take nutrients from the soil and deliver them to us in their fruits, others take nutrients from water and air and leave them in the soil. Some plants have shallow roots that take moisture and nutrients from the surface soil, others have deep roots that bring the moisture and nutrients up from below. When one plant crowds out others and prevents them from growing, it is an indication of an imbalance in the natural systems we have created and it becomes our job to address the root cause, rather than just the effect. When we invest our time, energy, and thought into these relationships the return on investment is infinite, potentially feeding our great-grandchildren 100 years from now and even their great-grandchildren.

For more information on permaculture and forest gardening, see our reading list.

Green Living

When you choose to live in Living Earth Village, you are choosing to live in a way that is not just environmentally sustainable, but environmentally prosperous. After building your home using new(ancient) green technologies and planting your gardens and edible forest using permaculture, you will be providing all of your food and shelter in a way that has a truly positive net effect on our healthy planet.

All of your choices can be convenient and at least sustainable at Living Earth Village. When you choose to drive someplace, you may use one of the highly efficient community vehicles. Inside your home, you may choose to dig a root cellar into the earth that will keep your food cool and much more fresh than a refrigerator would. You may build your home in a way that is as efficient as Earthships, where South-facing and extremely well-insulated homes can easily stay in the 70s and 80s F with a passive air heat exchanger instead of a furnace or air conditioner. You may choose to use a super-fast computer in the technology center and if you desire watching a movie, do so in the community center. You may choose to do your laundry in the community center or have your own machine and line-dry. As a result, your only electrical needs are reduced to just lights, perhaps a washing machine, and any small kitchen appliances and electrical devices you may use, all without adding significant maintenance work to your life. A small solar and/or wind generating system can easily handle such a load.

Regarding plumbing, you can easily create a home with the convenience of "modern" plumbing when in reality it is a closed-cycle system. You can collect rainwater from your roof and add a solar well pump if you like, filter the water and store it in a tank under your house. A composting toilet deodorizes and makes useful your black water waste and you take care to only use soaps and cleaning agents that your plants can happily ingest so your gray water can be used to irrigate part of your garden.

Your garden and pond will likely include as many as 300 species of plants or more, creating life-giving habitat for many species of insects, birds, and animals that did not previously exist. 

Imagine! You and your family can not only tread lightly on our healthy planet, you can leave sprouts of paradise in your footsteps.

Family Life

At Living Earth Village, you have an opportunity to create a home for many generations of your family to come. Think about how the trees you plant on your land will be loved by your great-grandchildren and some of the trees by their great-grandchildren! You can begin envisioning your happy family extending centuries into the future now. We are creating this paradise for ourselves and our children and all our future generations. The saying, "it takes a village to raise a child" holds much truth. Living Earth Village's primary goal is to be that village.

If the purpose of life is to experience joy and enthusiasm in what we do, we have more to learn from our children than they do from us. Our children tell us they still desire learning the 3 R's and all the sciences, and we will give them the opportunity to design and even build their own school. Any teachers in the community are invited to come together with the children and parents to design a curriculum with a focus on child-directed learning.

We are all mentors for and students of each other, especially our children. Your neighbors already include permaculturists, healers, entrepreneurs, herbalists, musicians, engineers, builders, artists, furniture craftsmen, heavy equipment operators, elders, writers, teachers, and the list goes on. What do you imagine will happen when you ask your children what kind of school they choose to create with their many friends in your community of families and elders? Our children are able to do much more than we might think - we choose to empower them to create at their full capacity!

One of our first community tasks is to hire an educational consultant and facilitator who can assist and lead us in a dialog with children, parents, and teachers in the community to create our school in a way that is perfect for all of us. Our school will include equal emphasis in academics, the arts, nature, and effective thought and communication. We may also open the school to a limited number of children outside of our community for an increased tuition.

Empowering our children is at the crux of our educational philosophy. When we become the very best examples we can be of living healthy, productive, and enthusiastic lifestyles, we empower our children to follow our lead. We are all available to engage in real dialog with our children.

Creativity and The Arts

After you build your house and establish your gardens, you will find that you actually have a lot of time to create what you've always wanted to create. Without a time clock to punch and TV to go comatose in front of, and with our basic needs met, you will have much time to create in whatever way you feel inspired. And at Living Earth Village, you will find state-of-the-art facilities and tools to assist you in bringing your creations into physical form. Whether your medium is nature, photography, painting, sculpture, writing, woodworking, music, filmmaking, food, business, teaching, or the healing arts you will feel so much gratitude that you chose Living Earth Village as you utilize these great tools. And the cooperative commercial spaces and website will be highly valuable - and profitable - outlets for all of your creations.

Sacred Spaces

You are wholeheartedly invited to co-create with us various sacred spaces for ceremonies of any kind and tradition for your family and neighbors. With many acres of mostly undeveloped community land you will find many special places to celebrate your beliefs and your connection to divine energy.

Neighbors and Community

When you and many other families, individuals, and elders come together for the purpose of connecting with nature and creating in line with our highest desires and inspirations, the result is a very exciting community! We are all your friends, teachers, and students. We all become true neighbors to each other. You have our family domain enclosed by your living fence and when neighbors come by to visit, they stop at the entrance and holler in the quiet valley to ask if they may enter. Visitors may come or go. You may choose to go within and be silent on your domain for months on end or you may fully enjoy your social life. You have freedom to choose.

Freedom of the individual and family is crucial to Living Earth Village. Our guidelines are to obey national and local laws and to respect our neighbors. We have created a set of Covenants, Codes, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) similar to those in any other master planned community that provide detail to these tenants specific to our needs, including animal use, respecting wildlife, invasive species, and chemical use. Overall our CC&Rs promote freedom. We are a community of sovereign families who come together to practice permaculture and prosper as we create our Space of Love. The rules we do have are designed to make it as easy as possible to do so.

We will all co-create our own celebrations and holidays throughout the year. How much fun will be our community potlucks with music and poetry and games and surprises and the kiddos perhaps numbering in the hundreds! Our celebration has already begun. We do look forward to meeting you, neighbor.

Community Economy

Every landowner in our community will contribute financially to the formation of the community, just like in any other subdivided community. Lots will be priced according to size and location. Waterfront lots on major bodies of water will be higher priced and lots bordering more major roadways will be lower priced. We hope that your inner guidance will select the right land for you.  We commit to price every lot appropriately and fairly.

Additionally, commercial lots will likely be designated for various purposes including industrial (for private workshops, storage, etc.), retail, private offices, resort, and spa and will be available for purchase by residents who wish to sell and 1031 exchange any income property holdings into the community.

Community land, which will include community-use buildings, the school, forest land, and roads will be owned by either a Home Owners' Association or a Community Land Trust. Minimal annual fees will be collected from every property owner to maintain and pay taxes and insurance on this land.

Our goal is to create a truly prosperous community where every resident is creating financial freedom. We can use our currency and financial system to do good by mastering it, eliminating our money-energy blockages and creating prosperity for ourselves. The result is we can all focus on our bright future, big goals, and Space of Love regardless of the state of the economy.

Our Land Search

Two members and friends, Scott McMahan and Donanne Dean, have collaborated on this vision since August 2007. Scott lives near Sedona, Arizona and Donanne lives in Portland, Maine. Donanne has been searching for land in Maine and is continuing to view new properties as they come on the market. Scott has recently found a property near his long-time home of Sedona that he has been dreaming about since he was a child.