We are a couple of Brazilian university professors, senior researchers of alternatives to environmental collapse, who have been visiting communities that offer alternatives to the society that is causing this collapse. For over two decades, we have been visiting ecovillages, intentional communities, indigenous tribes, and eco-places where environmental regeneration and a lifestyle of non-consumption are practiced. We have visited almost fifty ecovillages in more than 20 countries on five continents.
We had the opportunity to live for a few months in Auroville, the largest ecovillage in the world, in India, three times, and Débora wrote a book about this community (access here). In order to share this unique experience, Débora also produced, together with Alicia Blanco from the citizen media outlet Pressenza, a series entitled “Discovering Auroville” (access here).
In recent years, we decided to organize visits to communities in a project we call “Visiting the New World,” and we made short videos about many of the places we visited (access here). Also in partnership with Pressenza, we produced a podcast with interviews with the women founders of some of the communities we visited. Access “Builders of the Future” here.
Back home from our last trip, this time through Europe, we felt the need to share a summary of the experience and express our deep gratitude to the laboratories of the new humanity that we have been getting to know with great joy.
We have witnessed a myriad of innovations in everyday life that point to another perspective of society: communal, ecological, egalitarian, democratic, and more connected to the sacred. We invite readers to learn more about our impressions through this text, in which we briefly discuss the innovations mentioned and also the multidimensional context in which people decided to “be the change they wanted to see in the world” and create happier pieces of the future, as Mahatma Gandhi suggested.
