From tree house villages in Costa Rica to yoga communes in Hawaii, these 10 intentional communities are havens of peace, creativity and sustainability.

Imagine waking up to the sound of bells from a temple to share in a morning yoga ritual overlooking the mountains of Peru, or the glittering Pacific Ocean in Hawaii. Picking fresh vegetables from your neighborhood garden to cook in a community-wide meal in a spacious, shared kitchen. Building your own non-toxic, mortgage-free cob house in a low-impact neighborhood of like-minded nature lovers. Stepping out of your very own treehouse to gaze at a network of aerial walkways that look like something out of a sci-fi movie. These 10 intentional communities, from utopian eco-villages to cute historic houses in urban Los Angeles, bring people together with common goals of harmonic living, artistic exploration and sustainability.

Polestar Yoga Community, Big Island, Hawaii

What could be more relaxing than a yoga community in Hawaii? Polestar offers “an energizing lifestyle of daily yoga and meditation, karmic yoga or service projects, and outdoor adventure opportunities.” Though it bills itself as a spiritual community, people of all faiths are welcome at this cooperative living retreat which is home to full-time residents and also open to visitors and apprentices. Awakened each morning by the sound of music from the temple, a shrine dedicated to the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, guests enjoy daily routines involving organic food grown on site, volunteer service, art and lots of community involvement.

Eco Truly Park, Peru

It looks like something out of a fairy tale: adorable little cone-shaped buildings topped with colorfully painted spires, dotting the hillside on the Pacific coast of Peru. This ecological and artistic community, an hour north of Lima, was founded on principles of non-violence, simple living and harmony with nature. Both the architecture and the values of the community are inspired by traditional Indian teachings and lifestyles. Eco Truly Park has a goal of being fully self-sustainable, and currently boasts a large organic garden. Open to volunteers, the community offers workshops in yoga, art and Vedic philosophy.

Synchronicity Artist Commune, Los Angeles, California

Embodying the laid-back lifestyle of sunny Southern California, Synchronicity is a relaxed and welcoming intentional living community in the historic West Adams District of  Los Angeles. Though it’s small – nowhere near the size of the rest of the communities on this list – Synchronicity is a great example of the thousands of similar shared households around the United States. Synchronicity has eleven residents and focuses mostly on artistic actions and holding monthly artistic salons that are open to the public.

Earthhaven Ecovillage, Asheville, North Carolina

Located in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Earthaven is just one of many similar intentional communities focusing on sustainable living. You’ll find virtually every type of natural building here, including earthships, cob houses and rustic cabins, with construction methods that eliminate toxic materials, logged timber and mortgages. Set on 320 lush acres 40 minutes southwest of Asheville, Earthaven frequently holds natural building workshops and welcomes the public to learn about permaculture, organic gardening and other sustainable topics. They offer camping and visitor accommodations as well as live-work arrangements.

Milagro Cohousing, Tucson, Arizona

Twelve minutes from downtown Tucson, Arizona, Milagro is a co-housing community with 28 passive-solar, energy-efficient adobe homes on 43 acres. Set against the Tucson mountains, Milagro is simply a community of people who want to live a green lifestyle, surrounded by like-minded neighbors. Each resident has access to 35 acres of undeveloped open space, as well as the 3,600-square-foot Common House, which has meeting and dining space, a library, a playroom and storage space. Gardens, workshops and a solar-heated swimming pool make it even more enticing.

Finca Bellavista Treehouse Community, Costa Rica

If you’ve ever watched Star Wars and wished that you could live with the Ewoks in their magical tree house community, take heed: such a thing actually exists. And it’s in Costa Rica. Finca Bellavista is a network of rustic, hand-built tree houses in the mountainous South Pacific coastal region of this Central American nation, surrounded by a jungle that is brimming with life. The off-grid, carbon-neutral tree houses are connected by aerial walkways and include a central community center with a dining area, barbecue and lounge. Gardens, ziplines and hiking trails make it even more of a tropical paradise. Prospective community members can design and build their own tree houses. Additionally, some of the tree house owners rent out their homes, and there are visitor accommodations available.

Tamera Peace Research Village, Portugal

Aiming to be a totally self-sufficient community, the Tamera Peace Research Village is in the Alentejo region of southwestern Portugal and is home to 250 coworkers and students who study how humans can live peacefully in sustainable communities, in harmony with nature. It includes a non-profit peace foundation, a “SolarVillage” test site, a permaculture project with an edible landscape, and a sanctuary for horses.

Dancing Rabbit Eco Village, Missouri

Another showcase of the beauty of natural building techniques, the Dancing Rabbit Eco Village is a sustainable community located near Rutledge, Missouri advocating low-impact living and dedication to social change. Everything from members’ diets to the way they use water is dictated by a commitment to living lightly on the earth. The village is on 280 acres including six ponds, a small creek and 40 acres of woodland, plus 30 acres where they have planted over 12,000 trees as part of a restoration program.

EcoVillage at Ithaca, New York

What would the ideal sustainable community look like? The EcoVillage at Ithaca is one example that is already thriving in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. It includes three co-housing neighborhoods called Frog, Song and Tree as well as an organic CSA vegetable farm, community gardens and over 100 acres of protected green space. The houses are all energy-efficient and share facilities like a common house, wood shop, metal shop, bike shed, playgrounds and centralized compost bins.

Conceptual Community of Tiny Houses

It’s not yet a reality, but tiny house enthusiasts have a dream: idyllic neighborhoods where people who have committed to living in very small spaces can get together and share resources and camaraderie. Tiny house communities are hard to come by because of various city and county ordinances, which favor large houses and conventional utilities. At TinyHouseCommunity.com, people who live in tiny houses – or want to build their own some day – get together to talk about making these villages happen. There are two tiny house communities currently in planning phases, in Washington D.C. and Texas.

Top photo: Dancing Rabbit Eco Village

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Critics warn that large-scale eco-communities aren’t all they’re hyped up to be.

Conventional wisdom has it that despite Simon & Garfunkel’s harmonies to the contrary, no man or woman could possibly get by in this world living as a rock or an island.

Sustainability activists have applied that same logic to eco-villages, communities of intentionally-minded neighbors who share the same code of social ethics or the goal of achieving total or relative self-sufficiency. Translation: Despite all of your personal homesteading, composting, upcycling and permaculturing efforts, one-off sustainability is simply not enough to make a meaningful impact on the world. Rather, it takes a village to raise the world to a higher standard of living.

The Eco Village of Cloughjordan, Ireland’s first and only official eco-village, is one such experiment in sustainability. While residents and environmentalists have raved about its many virtues, building community being chief among them, critics and detractors wonder if large-scale developments of its sort make good sense or contribute to an environment of idealistic wastelands.

The Eco Village, In Context

Robert Gilman, founding editor of Utne Reader fave IN CONTEXT, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, is considered the godfather of the modern eco-village, which shares its roots with the anarchist naturism philosophies of Thoreau, the “back to the earth” hippie communes of the ’60s and even Yamagishism, a Japanese income-sharing movement in which the quest for happiness takes place on rural communes called “jikkenchi.”

To Gilman, a functioning eco-village is human-scale, fully featured, healthfully and harmoniously integrated into the environment, and future-oriented. The Village at Cloughjordan, with a maximum capacity of 130 homes in the Irish countryside built from ecological materials like timber, lime, hemp, and cob construction (earth mixed with straw), certainly declares itself to be that. They’re on their own energy grid, each resident is allotted 100 square meters to grow their own food, and according to village spokesperson Dave Flannery, “The car is backgrounded or as we say, the ‘car is a guest.’ The eco-village is designed around people and the family.”

Sounds lovely, but it’s been a long haul.

A Great Idea, Caught In the Eye of the Tiger

In 1999, founding members eagerly bought in committing up to £30,000 apiece, paid to the non-profit Sustainable Projects Ireland Ltd., for a piece of what looked like a modern day utopian dream. Come 2007, all 130 of its plots had been committed, but by then the Celtic Tiger economy had devolved into a pussycat.

Houses got bigger, amenities got more costly. In their wake, inflated property and construction costs pushed the original move-in costs up to three times higher than what the members had originally bargained for. Dystopia ensued. Spearheaded by self-professed village renegade, Joey Cleary, almost half the membership decided to leave.

“Basically, the project was claiming to be opposite of what was going on in Ireland, but in the end it got caught up in the same property speculation,” Cleary says. “It was a real moment of truth. The direction we were going in was economically unsustainable.”

Cleary, who’s now living as an expat in Barcelona, runs a private online community for ex-members like him.

Sustaining “Wealth”

Alanna Moore, a permaculture writer, farmer and teacher who’s lived in numerous intentional communities throughout Ireland and Australia, wrote a rather biting review of The Village as well, after she and a group of other curious tourists toured the site. Her biggest gripe, she wrote, “[it’s] too big and too concrete, [and that] makes for non-eco-friendly homes. A depressing sight with more in common with a modern unsustainable city environment than a friendly eco-village. Would people really want to be in such a soul free environment?”

Cement is an influential billion-dollar industry in Ireland and the material was used liberally in housing construction during the Tiger years. Environmentally, however, it comes at a cost producing more than 5% of global emissions of carbon dioxide. It also contributes to higher energy costs because it is so expensive to heat, especially given Ireland’s winter climate.

In a separate conversation with EcoSalon, Moore also talked about economic sustainability. When she first started living in sustainable communities during the 1980s, she says, “I was a single parent and saw them as a great way to raise children. We were poor, but poverty is a state of mind. We were wealthy in terms of fresh air and growing your own food and living among gorgeous rainforests, swimming holes and creeks.”

Echoing Cleary’s broader economic perspective, she says, “The Tiger Era boom was totally unsustainable and you can’t use the same sort of thinking to create a sustainable community.”

The Village of Tomorrow

For their part, the Village is now reducing the price on some of its sites to make them more affordable. They are also exploring co-housing as an option.

Moreover while revitalizing one’s own existing community is the more eco-friendly avenue to take, residents, who in addition to Ireland hail from England, Canada, Germany, Japan and the United States, don’t seem to mind living in what Moore describes as “An ivory green tower.”

Deirdre O’Brolchain, who moved to The Village from Dublin with her husband and two young boys in 2010, feels right at home. “Fundamentally,” she says, “sustainable communities don’t happen on a small scale. [It takes] diversity in numbers on a large scale.”

Indeed, as Seneca said and Joey Cleary’s ex-member’s board reminds us, “No man can live happily who regards himself alone; who turns everything to his own advantage. You must live for others if you wish to live for yourself.”

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