Living Sustainably: Lessons from Ecovillage Ithaca
A Winter Sampler
Learn what goes into reshaping our relationship to waste, transportation, and community in order to live more sustainable lives. In the webinar we will cover:
Recycling & Re-using with Ithaca EcoVillage founder, Liz Walker
Electric & Alternative Fuel Cars with Cornell professor, Philipp Kircher
Intergenerational Community Living with Ellen Friedman & Julia Ellis
How complicated is recycling? What is it like to live as a family in an intentional community? What infrastructure do you need to drive an electric car? A panel of EcoVillage residents will share their insights on these questions and more.
Liz Walker is a passionate advocate for creating sustainable communities. In 1991, she co-founded EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) with a colleague. Liz dedicated her full-time work for the next three decades to bring this internationally acclaimed project from vision to reality, managing the development of each of its three cohousing neighborhoods, and founding and leading its educational arm, Learn@EcoVillage (now called Thrive EcoVillage Education Center.) EVI is now the largest cohousing community in the world, with 100 households.
Philipp Kircher is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell and Researcher at UC Louvain, and previously held appointments at the London School of Economics, Oxford University and the University of Pennsylvania. Philipp has a deep personal interest in sustainability and alternative energy. He brings a unique perspective to these topics, drawing upon his expertise in economics and industrial engineering.
Ellen David Friedman and her husband relocated to EcoVillage five years ago - after 50 years in Vermont - in order to help in the raising of grandchildren (now 5 and 2 1/2 years old). She has spent her entire adult life active on the left and working as a union organizer, grounded in the values of participatory democracy. The goal of collective community engagement - sharing of ideas, resources, life experience, embedded in humanistic values - led her to the community. She observes that the rare social solidarity present in co-housing creates extraordinarily rich opportunities for the young ones being raised here, their parents, their grandparents, and the wider circles of caring neighbors.
Julia Ellis moved to Ecovillage six months ago with her husband, five year old daughter, and mother-in-law. She spent the previous 8 years living in a community house in Oakland, California, with 11 other adults and kids--experiencing the joys and challenges of living in community and raising children together. Julia and her family fell in love with Ecovillage when they visited, and made the huge decision to leave their beloved home for a more sustainable life in upstate New York. Julia is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Expressive Arts facilitator.
