Why the Ecovillage?
(This is the only section of this report where whining and complaining is allowed)
The idea for the Abundance EcoVillage Project was born of frustration and dissatisfaction with a way of living that is not healthy for the earth or it's inhabitants. In a conventional home, subdivision, village, or city, the options provided for energy, water, waste handling, built environment, landscape, food, transportation, and a livelihood are grossly out of tune with the growing desire of many people to live as responsible citizens on the earth, in harmony with our planetary resources and our fellow creature inhabitants. 
This ethic of being in harmony with our planetary resources means not destroying the natural systems that provide services that are vital to life and are impossible to obtain at any price elsewhere. These services include maintaining of the balance of gasses in the atmosphere by the plants and animals, the maintenance of clean water through the cycling of water into the atmosphere, and the production and maintenance of the fertility of the earth (topsoil) that feeds us.
These systems do their work autonomously and provide their services for free. Simply not destroying them is not enough - we must live in a way that acts to enhance and restore them. Sustainability is a good place to start, but a better goal is to go beyond sustainability to restore and enhance the natural systems of the earth. They are our natural capital, and we have been spending it at rate that far exceeds its annual productivity. If we use money as an analogy to natural capital, we are not living on the income produced by our capital resources (money in this analogy), we are spending our capital resource itself. We are spending more than we take in. If we do this for long, our capital resources (money) will be gone. If we learn to live on the income produced by our capital, or even a little less, we can make our capital last and even increase it.
The result of spending our natural capital instead of living on the surplus is that we are depleting the fertility of the earth, effecting the balance of gasses in the atmosphere, polluting the water, changing forests into deserts, and destroying habitat for other creatures who share the earth with us. And we are doing it in a way that is highly inequitable - if everyone on earth lived in the same way as North Americans, it would take 4 more earths to supply them. Can we live in a way that enhances the natural capital of the earth and also provide for our basic needs, and beyond that to a comfortable standard of living? Research and new technologies developed over the last 25 years or so indicate we can. In fact, there do not appear to be any insurmountable technical and economic barriers to this goal. In most cases the more sustainable way to do something is also the least costly. For example, compact fluorescent bulbs last 10 times longer and use only one quarter the energy of standard incandescent lighting. This saves hundreds of dollars in energy and bulb replacement costs, hundreds of dollars in power plant construction costs, and hundreds of dollars in lower cooling equipment and energy costs. ItÕs better than a free lunch; itÕs a lunch you are paid to eat. (See Lovins lighting efficiency article and Lovins Hypercar article in The Wiley Encyclopedia of Energy and the Environment). One reason that we can be so confident about improving the way we use our resources is that the current productivity of our resources is so low. As an example, about 3 percent of the energy in the fuel delivered to a modern electric power plant is turned into useful light using a conventional incandescent light bulb. In a car, only about 1 percent of the energy available in the fuel in the tank is actually used to move the driver. So there is ample opportunity, even if we aren't very clever, to clean up the earth and live sustainably at a profit by using our resources more productively. Most things can be done better and cheaper (sometimes at a profit) for 1/10 the energy currently used simply by better design, by putting more consciousness into the matter we use every day. The barriers to implementing these improvements are social and cultural more than they are technical. No doubt technological changes and improvements can be made, but the barriers to implementing these technological changes are more social and cultural in nature than they are limits to technology.
In conventional society, we have many threads that connect and bind us to old technologies and cultural patterns that damage the earths vital systems. For example, in Iowa, 98 percent of electrical energy comes from coal, fossil fuel, and nuclear power. Every time you pay your electric bill, you support these forms of obtaining power by paying the mortgage on utility company nuclear power and fossil fuel generating plants and the attendant pollution and environmental degradation associated with the extraction and using these fuels on a massive scale. Worse than that, it ties up a stream of revenue that you could use to supply yourself with solar, wind, or water power as a replacement. There are similar threads that tie us to unsustainable, destructive, and costly sources for food, water, transportation, etc. Sometimes the initial price we pay for these services appears cheap, but only because we have an economic system that gives consumers the price of everything but the true costs of nothing. Subsidies abound, both direct financial subsidies and subsidies in the form of using up natural capital.
Abundance EcoVillage is a response to these concerns, a way to reconnect the threads that bind us to an unsustainable way of life and culture and to create new connections and threads to a more sustainable way of life. A way to live that provides more satisfaction because it is in tune with an ethic of how to live on the planet and uses common sense ideas to achieve this ethic. People can redirect the money they already spend on life damaging services to life supporting services. Residences can buy or build homes built of natural materials, powered by the sun and wind, and local food production is built in to the project. Wastes are treated as valuable sources of water and nutrients to be recycled and reused. The village will plant and restore native ecosystems including prairie, savannah, mixed hardwoods and wetlands. The village will be surrounded by edible landscaping - orchards for humans and shelterbelts and windbreaks for wildlife. The project is close enough to schools, shops, and the new bicycle trail to encourage the use of bicycles and electric vehicles.