Jules is a member of the Intentional Community Twin Oaks situated in Virginia, US. Intentional Communities consist of people who choose to live together based on shared values or ideologies, and here there is a strong focus among members on living sustainably and cooperatively. Twin Oaks has been around since 1967 and is one of the biggest and longest-running social experiments like this in the world. The community has its own political and economic system that is meant to assure as much equality between members as possible. Leadership roles are voluntary and rotated regularly.
This community’s environmentalism comes to fruition through many experiments. While running a farm the community shares all resources equally among themselves. This allows for them to exponentially reduce their carbon footprint, while being more resilient during times of crisis or high societal or economic pressures. The political system, based on an experimental form of direct democracy, allows for the community to stay flexible and resilient through crisis and hard times. For example, the community cultivates heirloom seeds while experimenting with climate resilient varieties They use minimal impact farming methods, and sometimes work with regenerative methods. The community also delivers energy to the grid via their solar panels.
The member Jules has learned many skills in the community but has on their own developed and impressive knowledge basis of the biological diversity in the area, functioning as a citizen scientist. They were motivated to do this kind of work through gaining interest in mycology, the science of mushrooms. This is turning out to be more than a hobby for Jules, who has been commissioned to write various rapports on biodiversity and educates others about mushrooms during workshops and via social media. By doing this kind of work, Jules has discovered for instance that there are pests moving further North in the country due to climate change and increased heat patterns that have not been seen this far North in the country before. This kind of research is pivotal to understand the complexity of climate change as it is happening around us, as changes as be left undiscovered or underreported. The butterfly effects of that can be detrimental for biodiversity and can affect things like food security. By involving citizens, we can get a bigger data set for evolving our understandings and increase and climate crisis resilience.
Compiled by the Western Norway Research Institute
