An exploration of four ecovillages through the ecoresilient lens of spirituality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ecovillages worldwide continue to develop processes and solutions to face the known and unknown, social and ecological, climate-related challenges confronting communities. After a review of resilience concepts, the term ‘ecoresilience’ is defined. This research explores ecovillages through the lens of ecoresilience, specifically, the under-studied aspect of spirituality. Spirituality is framed as the simple conviction that there is more to life than we can materially observe. The exploration of four ecovillages develops through mixed data collection methods of site visits, interviews, guided tours, and a historical review. A case study approach comparatively evaluates and analyzes the ecoresilience of the four ecovillages La Cité Écologique in Quebec, Whole Village Ecovillage in Ontario, The Park at Findhorn in Scotland, and The Federation of Damanhur in Italy. A significant finding uncovered how spirituality positively impacts ecovillage ecoresilience. Beginning with the purpose of an ecovillage, and continuing through individual and collective activities, spirituality supports and builds spiritual capital in communities. Spiritual capital creates a shock absorber to help community members manoeuvre through adverse events. The case studies displayed many unique examples of building spiritual capital through the three spiritual themes, including connection to the web of life, engaged spirituality through social-ecological efforts, and the arts. Spirituality ensures a strong connection to the web of life, builds community cohesion, and both are essential ingredients for future ecovillage ecoresilience. Other mainstream lessons gleaned from this research are intergenerational governance, cooperative living, low-impact lifestyles, nature-based education, the ability to adapt to change, and the importance of individual and communal spiritual activities to ecoresilience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".