FAQ

Where will Living Earth Village be located?

We have found a great location for Living Earth Village in Arizona on 3000+ acres. We are currently negotiating for the property and preparing to launch a membership and fundraising campaign to purchase the property, master plan the community, obtain necessary entitlements from the county, and develop the first phase of development.

Who can live in Living Earth Village?

You! Anyone who has a sincere, heartfelt impulsion to live in the community with eyes wide open to the commitment who loves to co-create with nature and wants to create a permanent home for their whole life and future generations is welcome to join. We understand the magnitude of this decision for all of our future neighbors and we encourage you to ask questions and get involved.

We especially love responsible, visionary, entrepreneurial folks. This vision is HUGE and requires a visionary community to bring it into being.

Is co-housing or communal living an option?

Our intention is to create a Space of Love that will last for all time. While we love and respect what many co-housing communities have accomplished, we have found that most co-housing communities have relatively transient communities. Family bonds have a greater likelihood of lasting lifetimes and it is these bonds that we hope to cultivate along with our forest gardens. We are open to inclusion of non-related “families” purchasing domains as long as they share a heart-felt impulsion to co-create.

The Living Earth Village concept creates an ideal balance between privacy and public community life. Every resident is encouraged to plant a living fence of trees, shrubs, and bushes that provide food, medicine, and utility along with a significant sense of privacy. Neighbors may not enter a domain without permission. And with optional community meals, festivals, rituals, and other cooperative and business ventures, there will be daily opportunity to commune with and enjoy the company of our neighbors.

What will a domain include? What will it look like?

The domain design will be a living work of art unique to each resident. Each plot will be approximately 2.5 acres with gently rolling to flat terrain, with frontage to a community road and surrounded on all other sides by a minimum 15 foot wide alleyway. A water source will be provided to each domain and the state government may require a centralized wastewater treatment plant, to which each domain will have access. There will be no electric grid in the community. Each domain includes free access to the shared community spaces and the opportunity to lease space in the commercial and cooperative areas of the community. Also, the community will seek variances for all domains for certain components, such as windmills, that the county doesn’t normally allow.

We encourage some key components that will make each domain more comfortable and sustainable long-term. These include a living fence, extensive perennial food forests, water features, and outdoor living spaces. We encourage residents to minimize building footprint and avoid driveways to maximize productive land, as it is our food and utility forests that will ultimately provide us with everything we need.

What kind of house can I build?

As long as you can get a permit, you can build it.  We encourage a small home that will adequately accommodate your family’s needs.  The only restriction Living Earth Village puts on house construction is use of only non-toxic building materials.

We also encourage residents to live initially in temporary or quickly constructed shelters at first while studying the micro-climate on their domain and developing their outside spaces first. This will help us to adjust to investing most of our time outdoors, which will dramatically increase our sovereignty, health, and enjoyment of life.

I don’t have much experience with permaculture. Will there be training available?

Yes! We plan to allocate significant resources to attract the world’s experts in permaculture, green building, multi-bottomline business development and more to consult with us and hold extensive training for all residents.

I don’t see myself as a farmer. Could this work for me?

Yes! Most of us see ourselves pursuing creative endeavors in our lives once we achieve enough money/time/personal freedom to do so. Our domains will give us that freedom by providing us with all of our shelter, food, medicine, and energy requirements with extremely low-maintenance, long-durability and self-sustaining systems. The result is freedom to pursue our passions!

Now clearly we won’t get there overnight or in a season or two. It will take a few years of focused attention, thought, and work to achieve long-term sustainability. The world class training and resources will help. And in the process we will learn so much about Nature, life, and ourselves while building strong relationships with each other.

What community resources will be available?

There will be a community headquarters, which will include meeting space and dining spaces, a small movie theater space, and commercial space residents can rent to provide services and goods to other residents, such as coffee/tea shop and general store. There will be a parking lot at the headquarters and residents will be encouraged to park their vehicles in the lot and transport themselves within the community by electric vehicle, horseback, foot, or bicycle. The layout of family domains will be thoughtfully designed to maximize walking enjoyment.

Community open spaces will include water features, hiking and horseback trails, community permaculture gardens, and forests.

The community’s children will choose the location to house their school facilities, and will design and build the school buildings mostly on their own.

We intend to provide some tools for use by nominal daily or hourly rent. These include a wood and metal shop, basic mechanics tools, a commercial kitchen, tractors and implements, backhoe, and other tools of popular shared use.

There will be some resources available for longer term cooperative rent, which will include irrigated or sub-irrigated pasture, permaculture-oriented farm land, horse facilities, milking facilities, leased rangeland and some areas for light industrial use.

What kind of school will there be? Would my children have to attend?

The school will have elements of Democratic Free Schools, Unschooling, Waldorf, Montessori, and more. The community will hire a visionary headmaster for the school who is experienced in these and other education methods, who will live in the community, and has a burning desire to create an education system that gives children complete freedom to explore and express their nature while pursuing their individual passions and mastering all the sciences. The school will be private, not receiving any state money, and children will have complete freedom to attend or not attend. We envision the school environment and instructors awakening every child’s passions to the degree that they eagerly spend dawn to dusk furthering their personal goals and the mission of the school.

Parents are free, of course, to home school also. Our shared intention is to raise children that will have higher abilities in all areas of thought than we as parents and grandparents have developed and we are open to any approach that may achieve that goal.

What is the purpose of the commercial land?

We intend to apply for rezoning for a portion of the community lands to commercial zoning or acquire a nearby commercial property for our community commercial district. This will be a master planned district with areas designed for the use of an eco-resort and small convention center, restaurants, farmers’ market, spa, healing center, public permaculture gardens and off-grid building demonstration site, art and artisan gallery, light industrial use such as small-scale eco-manufacturing, birthing, healing, an end-of-life center and more. We hope that this public part of the community will be a place held dearly in the hearts of many all over the world who come to Living Earth Village for the most important moments in their lives.

These businesses will be owned only by individual and groups of residents and their financial partners. The community itself is a non-profit and will not own any businesses. We encourage entrepreneurs within the community to create businesses that provide multiple layers of positive impact to the community, environment, and personal development of their partners and employees. Businesses that have any long-term adverse impact on the environment or residents will not be permitted. The commercial district will be an entrepreneur’s paradise and will provide excellent working lifestyle and stable employment for residents of Living Earth Village and surrounding communities.

What is the legal ownership structure of the land? 

The simple answer is Living Earth Village, a 501(c)(3) in formation, will own all the land and provide short-term, long-term and infinite-term leases to the land, depending on its use. More detail is provided in the Covenants, Agreements, and Intentions document, to which we will provide access once you have completed the form here.

How do I learn more?

Bookmark this page and check in with us as we will provide public updates here. If you want to learn more, click on the “Get Involved!” tab above, fill out the Non-Disclosure Agreement, and after we speak with you briefly to understand your intentions and answer your questions, we will send you the Covenants document. After you have read that document if you choose to get involved in the further development of this project, we invite you to complete the next simple step in our process, and to join our site selection committee if you choose to be involved in our site selection and development processes.