ABSTRACT
Leaving the city of Ithaca by car, an uphill ride past single-family homes, brings you to the top of West Hill. The road leading to EcoVillage is not paved with gold; it is paved with dirt. The turn onto the dirt road, only a short distance from the city, leads into a unique community. The search for a better place and way to live has been a preoccupation of the US middle class dating back to nineteenth-century European settlers. Ecovillages emerge at the apex of intricate social phenomena that are at once an alternative way to engage with nature and, at the same time, constrained by market-driven exclusionary politics and practices. Ecovillages raise interesting questions about the direction of US environmentalism. It is no secret that the United States consumes a disproportionate amount of the earth's resources. Certainly the effort to reduce consumption will not be easy or quickly implemented, yet there are projects that attempt to do just that.
