Editor’s Note: Resilience is a theme of the 2017 National Cohousing Conference where Charles Durrett will be a featured presenter.

In 2008, friend and author Bill Thomas asked me to critique the manuscript of his first novel, The Tribes of Eden. “Tribes” is the story of a near future collapse of the American government and all of the country’s institutions. What’s left is chaos and unmitigated fear. A young mother happens upon a “shire” (think: cohousing community), where she and her family take refuge and flourish amidst the trust and the cooperation.

Bill wanted me to critique the believability of the community, especially it’s resilience in the midst of disparity. One way to look at this story is that, while it might happen some day (Hitler lost twice before he won in 1933), cohousing is a solution. We strongly believe in promoting cohousing because we see how so many cohousers support the health of general society outside of the cohousing, in part because of what they learn living in cohousing.

Charles Durrett