"Context of the City which stimulated the founding of the Los Angeles Eco-Village
Los Angeles is a city in pain, a microcosm of the world. The economic dynamo that runs the city, and the world, is exploitative. Designed to extract value from people and resources for the benefit of relatively few, it leaves in its wake impoverished people, depleted resources, and a degraded environment. The creation of a holistic new economics--what futurist Robert Theobald called a "person- and ecology-centered development process"--here, in Los Angeles, can provide those of us who are making lifelong commitments to social and ecological change, something to look forward to in our old age.
Los Angeles is known for its congestion, smog, concrete, freeways, runaway development, crime, alienation, homelessness, pop culture, high cost of land and housing, and many other more or less awful qualities. In his Los Angeles: A History of the Future, urban ecologist Paul Glover wrote "L.A. is an army camped far from its sources of supply, using distant resources faster than nature renews them... Our region today is so dependent, so uninhabitable, yet so inhabited, that it must transform or die. Sooner or later it must generate its own food, fuel, water, wood and ores. It must use these at the rate that nature provides them. It can..."
Los Angeles is also known for its cultural diversity, entrepreneurial spirit, arts, media and entertainment industry, academic institutions, innovation in lifestyles and social experimentation, search for consciousness, social activism and community organizations, political and economic diversity, mild climate, ecological diversity, and many other more or less wonderful qualities, depending on one's perspective.
Many conscious and ecological people exploit our city no less than those whose purposes they view as the most crass and materialistic. They use L.A. to make friends, expand networks, get an education, make lots of money--then leave for more ecologically conscious, "safer" communities when they've put enough money away to make the move. L.A. suffers from an ecological brain-drain. Some, aware of the history of Los Angeles, believe we're a city that never should have been created in the first place--an accident of individual and corporate greed that repeatedly raped a delicate ecosystem. They believe that our city will surely and deservedly fall in some upcoming catastrophe, be it war, economic collapse, riot, earthquake or tidal wave.
Others among us feel that we must work for transformation wherever we are and with whatever we have to work with. We want to reinvent the way we live in our city. We want to develop a culture where rewards come from a healthy and spontaneous spirit and practice of cooperation. We are people of hope with a desire to heal the wounds in ourselves, one another and the great planet we share. Our cities beg for this healing energy. In his address at the First International Ecological Cities Conference in Berkeley, Australian architect and professor Paul Downtown stated "the purpose of all cities until now has been to develop their economy; the purpose of an ecological city is to develop the ecology....And to the cynics who still measure things against the bottom line, the answer is very simple: no ecology, no economy. No planet, no profit."
So with this context in mind, the nonprofit organization, CRSP, founded in 1980 by Lois Arkin as a resource center for small ecological and cooperative communities, began planning the Los Angeles Eco-Village demonstration. In the early 90s, in the aftermath of one of the city's worst tragedies--the Los Angeles uprisings-- the demonstration started. It continues to serve as a beacon of hope for many".
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