Gardens

This is a historic moment on Planet Earth. Life as we know it is about to change dramatically as global climate change accelerates, and as we reach “Peak Oil,” when demand outstrips supply for fossil fuels that are increasingly hard to extract. As we look toward a future in which our traditional energy sources are severely depleted, cohousing neighborhoods have an increasingly important role to play in modeling a greener lifestyle.

Year One: We waved goodbye – and good riddance – to the last of the construction trucks. For more than a year the vehicles had used for their staging area what the architects had neatly labeled the "community garden" on our blueprints. Dump trucks, pick-up trucks, 18-wheel delivery trucks, piles of lumber, stacks of pipes and industrial-size garbage dumpsters had squatted on our scraped dirt field during the building of our community. Now they were gone and we could begin to reclaim the land.