A Look at Lost Valley on UofO’s ‘Envis...

A recent article entitled  “Cultivating Insight” was posted on  the University of Oregon’s newly launched Envision website earlier this week.  The Envision site article, written by Anna Smith, spotlights permaculture at Lost Valley Educational Center and Meadowsong Ecovillage.   The complete article can be found at the following link:   http://envision.uoregon.edu/archives/156  Posted March 19,...

LV Program Director visits partner site in Nicarag...

By Colin Doyle, Lost Valley Program Director I had the privilege of spending the first two weeks of March in El Lagartillo, Nicaragua, Lost Valley’s sister community.  The two communities began our partnership last fall (please see other Article on this topic), and I went there in person to strengthen this relationship.  The association Hijos del Maiz, located in Lagartillo, hosts Spanish language students from the...

Lost Valley partners with Nicaraguan community Hij...

Lost Valley recently entered into a partnership with a homegrown Sandinista community in rural Nicaragua. The village of El Lagartillo has been together since the 1980s. In addition to rural livelihood activities, for the last seven years its dozen-member association Hijos del Maiz (Children of Corn) has executed projects for area communities and run the Campesino Spanish School, giving individual language instruction to...

Sociocracy: A Permaculture Approach to Community E...

By Melanie Rios (Published in the Winter 2011 issue of Communities magazine – Issue #153.) In 2008 Lost Valley took decision-making power away from its consensus-based intentional community and transformed into a hierarchical business. The organization (a 501(c)3 nonprofit operating an 87-acre permaculture education and conference center outside Dexter, Oregon) hoped to become more economically solvent through this...

Is Sustainability the Same as Self Sufficiency?

by Marc Tobin – May 19, 2009 There is a proclivity for people to treat sustainability and self-sufficiency as identical phenomena. They assume that if a community or ecovillage is working towards “sustainability”, it must also be working towards producing all of its own goods and services on site and processing all of its own resources-we-call-wastes on site. In some case, on-site self...

Unrealistic Expectations of Community and LVEC

by Marc Tobin 4/29/09 The word “community” is sort of like the word “love”, “freedom”, “nature” or “sustainability”, in that for most people it has positive connotations, but is also very vague. Therefore, it can act as a “projection magnet” for people’s most idealist expectations. People will often have strong ideas of what community means,...