Culture's Edge

Earthaven: Rooted in Resilience — Earth Day (April 22) to World Environment Day (June 5) —$44,000 in 44 days for Climate Resilience

Last fall, Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina with devastating impacts that are still being felt. Earthaven Ecovillage came through it better than most — because we have been building resilience into our community for decades. But we took some heavy hits to our roads, bridges, creekbanks, and other infrastructure. Our vulnerabilities were laid bare — and so were our strengths. As a living laboratory and educational seed bank for a sustainable human future, we have a calling to not only rebuild, but to design for climate resilience, to regenerate this land, to fulfill our educational mission by offering our learnings to a world in crisis.

Earthaven Ecovillage invites you to support Rooted in Resilience, our fundraising campaign to uplevel our recovery plans from rebuilding to regeneration and resilience. As we rebuild, we aim to experiment, learn, model, and share climate resilience strategies that can help other communities fare better in the climate events — storms, wildfires, floods — that are becoming the norm.

The Rooted in Resilience campaign runs from Earth Day (April 22) to World Environment Day (June 5). Please help us raise $44,000 in 44 days to support our post-hurricane ecological restoration and climate resilience at Earthaven Ecovillage and beyond. If 1,000 people donate $44 each, we'll meet our goal.

Your donation supports:

For 30 years, Earthaven Ecovillage has been evolving as a living experiment in regenerative culture. We've learned to live more deeply in relationship with the land and one another. We’ve harvested sunlight for solar and creek currents for hydroelectric power. We’ve grown and preserved much of our own food. We built our homes on the gentle slopes instead of in the floodplain. We’ve built a participatory democracy and communities of care. We’ve deepened our capacity to live in conscious, compassionate, and celebratory relationship with each other and the earth.

These practices served us well in Hurricane Helene. We were able to mobilize quickly, cooperatively, and effectively, not only for our own well-being but for the surrounding communities as well. Only one home was seriously damaged. Even though we are mostly off-grid, and the roads into town were blocked by landslides and treefall, we never fully lost power, water, or food. Our networks of extended community helped us and we helped them. These are resilience factors that other communities can cultivate — before a crisis.

Earthaven has always aimed to be a living laboratory—a place where we try things out, learn together, and live into the questions of our time. Our response to Hurricane Helene is an extension of that mission. Just as Earthaven has joined together in a community of care and common cause to live regeneratively and resiliently on this land, so other communities can find ways to become more resilient to the changes ahead. It's part of our mission to support that.

The solutions are clear, but they’re not cheap and they’re not easy. Do we reroute the road (our only access and egress) out of the floodplain? Rebuild the bridges on higher ground? Do we devote ourselves in earnest to riparian zone restoration and forest management? These are the kinds of climate resilient pathways that balance the needs of human communities with respect for the land—and ultimately serve our human needs better.

It's better than rebuilding. It’s renewal. It’s regeneration. It's resilience. And it’s born out of our greatest source of resilience: the living, breathing culture of care that held us through the storm.

Not everything we try works. But we believe in sharing the journey. When we do, we not only survive—we thrive.

How to Support:

The Earthaven experiment matters most when it helps others become more rooted in their own places, cultures, and purpose. We hope you’ll be inspired to learn, tend, adapt, and share what you discover. And please also donate to, volunteer for, and innovate climate resilience projects in your home and community.

Click the small-type "Read More," below, to view our full story, and click "See Older Updates" to learn more about our response and recovery efforts.

Earthaven Ecovillage suffered severe impacts from Hurricane Helene. With 22+ inches of rainfall in 2-1/2 days, Hurricane Helene is the biggest storm this land has seen in Earthaven’s 30-year lifetime and well beyond it.

Hurricane Helene brought some of the highest rainfall, highest river levels, and most severe flooding ever observed across the region.

The damage in the region is extensive. Lives have been lost. Lots of homes, businesses, farms, and infrastructure are destroyed. Lots of ecological destruction. Lots of suffering. Many in Western North Carolina have lost everything.

The good news for us at Earthaven is, no one in our little mountain village was injured, and all of our residents are safe, fed and housed.

The heartbreaking news is, the creeks overflowed so much, so quickly, and with such force, that they wreaked damage on our ecovillage that will take months or years, and resources we do not have, to recover.

The flooding took out many of our roads and destroyed or severely compromised all three of our bridges. We've had damage to our water systems, off-grid power systems, and agriculture infrastructure. The ground became so saturated that huge trees fell, many of which blocked our roads and pathways, and some of which severely damaged one home and moderately damaged several others. Footbridges washed away, including one connecting a neighborhood to the Village Center, which was battered by rushing water into a pile of sticks and piled against a collapsed cement road bridge. Our Free Store for resource-sharing was displaced from its foundation and will need to be dismantled. Trees and landslides on both of the two roads leading to the ecovillage have limited our access and egress.

As we do, we have come together to organize and mobilize efforts towards restoring access, making sure everyone continues to have what they need to maintain health and safety, and assisting others in the surrounding community.

Admidst the devastation, people throughout the region are coming together around this shared experience, transcending ideological and other divides, to ensure the safety of all. We are seeing extraordinary examples of selfless service, rescue efforts, and strength within our local communities.

We are humbly reaching out to broaden our web of connection and support in this time of great need.

We need funds to help with the restoration efforts of basic access and systems (roads, bridges, and utility systems, agriculture repairs, buildings), as well as emergency response costs for food and supplies, and improvements to secure our access and off-grid utilities in preparation for future weather events. The infrastructure damage is unprecedented, and will take months of work to repair and upgrade for greater stability in future weather events.

While our roads, bridges, and other infrastructure are in disrepair, a primary source of community income — our in person workshops, retreats, tours, and venue rentals — must be canceled. This has major impacts on the ecovillage economy, since our educational events provide employment for a number of our members. Other sources of individual income — lodging rentals for temporary visitors, our plant nursery, and certain agricultural operations — are also interrupted. This limits the ability of our members to finance recovery work from our own resources.

We humbly ask for your support.

For updates on how your support is resulting in progress, please visit our facebook and sign up for our newsletter. If you prefer to donate through other means, you can do so on the donation page of our website. Supporters have asked if they can donate by mail, and the answer is now YES. Mail services have resumed. Checks can be made to Culture’s Edge and sent to: 5 Consensus Circle, Black Mountain, NC 28711.

We send our love and compassion to all those experiencing similar difficulty, challenge, and loss right now. May everyone have the support they need to navigate these wild and unprecedented times.

Our deep, abiding gratitude goes out to all who are working to provide assistance to those impacted by this extreme climate event and to those working on longer term climate change solutions.

Please share this GoFundMe to help Earthaven rebuild. Thank you!

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Earthaven is an aspiring ecovillage of 100 people, clustered in 14 neighborhoods, within 329-acres of mountain forests near Asheville, North Carolina. We are dedicated to caring for people and the Earth by learning, living, and demonstrating a holistic, regenerative culture.

Culture's Edge is a nonprofit organization based at Earthaven since 1996 and dedicated to supporting, demonstrating, and catalyzing the development of healthy, sustainable, and regenerative culture.

This fundraiser ended when Hurricane Helene necessitated canceling the Remembering Retreat. By Sept 26, the rising creeks were swelling several inches over our first bridge, making it unsafe to drive in and out of Earthaven. Friends are now supporting our Hurricane Helene fundraiser at https://www.gofundme.com/f/earthaven-recovery

The impacts of the hurricane on Earthaven were severe: roads turned to raging rivers and several stretches of our stone and gravel roadbeds were washed out. Our hydroelectric system was damaged. Large trees fell across roadways, yards, and creeks, and one home was severely damaged. The roads between Earthaven and towns were temporarily impassable.

We will return to offering in person events when our infrastructure allows it. Any donations made here will be used for scholarships to future educational events offered by our School of Integrated Living.

If you feel inspired to support our recovery from Hurricane Helene, please donate and share here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/earthaven-recovery

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The world is in a crisis of lost connection -- to our inner worlds, one another, and the Earth. This loss is at the root of epidemic levels of loneliness, depression, division, and alienation from the foundations of life, from meaning, and from love. Help lay the groundwork to restore the sense of connection and belonging that underlies our personal wellness, our social cohesion, and ultimately, peace in the world. Please donate to our scholarship fund to bring more people to a transformative experience of the art of belonging, compassion, and sowing the seeds of peace.

Along the way toward freedom and individuality, and in the name of progress, humans have inadvertently had our inherent connection to all of life severed. This has resulted in a collective sense of not belonging – to oneself, to each other, to lineages, to place, to this life, and this Earth. The lostness and emptiness that we feel without these vital connections is devastating! It lies is at the root of epidemic levels of loneliness, depression, division, and alienation from the foundations of life, from meaning, from sanity, and from love.

When the disconnection is widespread, it comes with consequences to community well-being, political stability, ecological balance, and human survival on the planet. Feeling that we don’t belong ends up eroding empathy for others and leads to rising violence, insecurity, nihilism, and hopelessness. When we do feel our belonging, it assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence.

Thankfully, there are places where the art of belonging is being remembered, cultivated, and practiced. Places where we can re-learn to coax, weave, and tend to the roots of our separation, and restore our membership in belonging. When we do – and we help others gain these competencies – we sow the seeds of peace and expand our capacity to respond to the world in soulful and heart-centered ways.

From September 26-29, 2024, Culture’s Edge and the School of Integrated Living in Black Mountain, North Carolina will host The Re-membering Retreat: Cultivating Home and Community From the Inside Out.

This transformative experiential retreat helps participants remember what it really is to be human and to belong to ourselves, one another, and the world. The learning integrates ancient and cutting-edge skills from traditions and innovations in personal and collective healing, relationship repair, emotion regulation, communion with the Living Land, and other important practices that tend our hearts, our relationships, and our ability to support positive change in the world.

Bringing this learning to more people is an important step to living in more compassionate, peaceful, and safe world.

Earthaven Ecovillage is a living laboratory for regenerative, compassionate living. It is located in the woodlands of the Appalachian Mountains, with abundant streams, vital forests, and naturally built spaces to serve as the classroom for this work.

The facilitators for the retreat, NikiAnne Feinberg, Chloe Lieberman, Mirna McWilliams, and Natalee Facey, collectively bring over four decades of experience and deep expertise in transformative learning journeys.

Learn More: https://www.schoolofintegratedliving.org/re-membering-retreat/

The world needs these skills now more than ever. Won’t you help grow a scholarship fund to deliver this learning to passionate and talented leaders with potential to restore belonging in their communities? Consider donating all or part of the cost for one person to attend – or gifting a registration to someone you know whose attendance would benefit your community.

You can also choose to support the School of Integrated Living generally, and all of Culture's Edge and Earthaven's programs to build a regenerative future, by donating here or at our website: https://www.earthaven.org/donate/

Donate any amount, large or small, and if you’d like a guideline, here are some ways your donations help:

Donate one attendee’s tuition and meals: $575

Donate at the low-income rate: $250

Donate three nights of housing: $200

Donate a ride from the airport: $90

Donate a meal: $25

Donate a little (it adds up): $10

Your tax-deductible donation goes to Culture’s Edge, the nonprofit that delivers the educational programs of Earthaven Ecovillage. Culture’s Edge is dedicated to supporting, demonstrating, and catalyzing the development of healthy, sustainable, and regenerative culture.

Paul Caron is a founding member of Earthaven Ecovillage and a pillar of the community. We are friends of Paul who are dedicated to helping him realize his cooperative visions. As a woodworker and craftsman, he designed our Council Hall and other buildings on the land. Following his vision to turn the forest into homes and community buildings, he built a woodworking shop early in Earthaven’s life that many builders have used. We are called to return his generosity by supporting the Village Arts Building.

The Village Arts Building is an experiment in natural building, constructed with timbers from the surrounding forests. Paul envisions the building as space for an artist studio cooperative based on the Mondragon model. The building has been in process for over 15 years. And it’s time to finish the roof and get rid of the tarps!

We will use the funds to finish the outside wall of the turret and complete the remaining roof. Paul is providing the materials, and some builders are volunteering for this project. We’re raising funds to support our community builders who need the income to support their families while they work on this project. Three to four builders per day for two weeks will make significant headway.

If you are called to contribute in other ways – by donating food or cooking lunches for the crew – contact Carmen.