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What is an experimental intentional community? Surely every intentional community is an experiment? So why does Wurruk'an merit that adjective?
I'm in beautiful rolling green hills a couple of hours east of Melbourne, Australia, with a group of enthusiastic young, would-be communards. However, it is cold and windy, and I'm hungry and thirsty, helping to lay a timber floor at Wurruk'an. I need to plane the edge of several recycled boards to make them fit, but not one of their three planes works! This epitomises the good and bad of life in this dynamic, new "experimental" intentional community.
In 2013 Dr. Samuel Alexander, from University of Melbourne's Simplicity Institute, wrote a book entitled Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation. This utopian novel envisioned a radically simple and satisfying life emerging on a South Pacific island after the "Great Disruption" brought on by climate change, i.e. economic and environmental meltdown. In writing this book, he felt driven "to expose and better understand the myths that dominate our destructive and selftransforming present, and to envision what life would be like, or could be like, if we were to liberate ourselves from today's myths and step into new ones. We search for grounded hope between naive optimism and despair. Without vision and defiant positivity, we will perish."
Much to Dr. Alexander's surprise, soon after publishing Entropia he was contacted by a family who offered eight hectares (20 acres) of land on which to develop an experiment to test the utopian communal lifestyle which his book had posited. Being a true scholar, Sam accepted the challenge and set out to create what we now know as Wurruk'an, an experimental intentional community.
We finish working on the floorboards just on dark; a lovely meal of homemade vegetarian lasagne and homegrown salad from their abundant gardens awaits us, along with a glass or three of local red wine. All my aches and pains-and frustrations about planes-slip away and I enjoy the evening with these charming and committed young people.
Members ask about my research with intentional communities around the globe-what works and what doesn't. They fully realise that communal living can be tough, and want to make the best of it.
I mention that in the late 19th century there were several...