A fundamental element of creating sustainable community is the outreach and visioning effort that ensures valid local concerns and ideas are integrated into the design process. A persistence and determination to engage with community members willing to help craft a better Ecovillage is now in its third year and continues. Many people have stepped up and offered suggestions, helping to achieve a self-supporting community design that raises the ecological bar for a 21st century model of livability without sacrificing the rights of future generations.
Property owners frequently seek zoning changes and land uses that ignore environmental concerns and the locally important social culture. Quite the opposite is true in the Ecovillage. A long list of environmental protections and socially just enhancements has been introduced into the Ecovillage as a result of community input. Patience and an unshakeable belief in the sustainable development process is now yielding wonderful benefits in the creation of a community that features much of the best and brightest thinking for living in better balance with the world around us.
The Process
The Angwin Ecovillage visioning process commenced in the summer of 2006. Pacific Union College asked the local community of Angwin and the greater community of the Napa Valley to imagine a small, new neighborhood that embraces the seven Guiding Principles put forth by Pacific Union College. These Principles include balancing local jobs and housing and providing local goods and services; mandating green building programs; transitioning from an auto-centric to a pedestrian, bicycle, and transit-friendly environment; creating and supporting a large, local organic farm; preserving 90% of its land in agriculture, woodlands, and public open space; protecting clean air and water by reducing pollution and substantially increasing recycling efforts; converting systems to renewable resource energy supplies, particularly solar for electricity and geothermal for heating; and introducing a permanent eco-literacy learning component into primary and secondary schools, as well as the college itself, to educate students of all ages (and their parents) of the essentiality of reducing our ecological footprints. Curriculum changes will focus on impact awareness affecting future generations, and respecting this planet as the only home for all Earth’s living creatures.
The Recommendations
A partial list of the recommendations from participating local citizens and County officials that has been integrated into the community plan includes:
- A rebuilt Village Square that features a large public commons for farmer’s markets, community events, and social engagement.
- Community serving local retail shops that prohibit by covenant any chain retail or tourist-oriented changes in use.
- The preservation of hundreds of acres of potential vineyard land as public woodlands and habitat, with an extensive public trails system for hikers and bicyclists.
- No exchanges of any agricultural zoning and, in addition, the reduction by roughly 80% of the allowable zoned development for housing.
- Significant cosmetic improvements to the existing campus faculty, student, and administration housing, without the complications of relocation.
- The addition of a retirement center adjoining the Village Square for senior citizens desiring to reside in Angwin.
- Housing configured to preserve the view and open, rural feeling upon entering Angwin.
- Substantial funding for local schools to mitigate for student impacts and to upgrade programs.
- The inclusion of an upgraded Community Activity and Teen Center, as well as a new Sheriff’s substation.
- Funding for fire station enhancements and additional equipment.
- The preservation of the college’s locally serving small airport.
- The re-establishment of historic college farming practices.
- A request, now achievable through innovative reclamation efforts, to limit the Ecovillage’s and college’s cumulative potable water use to not exceed historical usage highs.
- Outdoor “down-lighting” to minimize impacts to night sky views.
- Safe pedestrian and biking paths and traffic calming along Howell Mountain Road, ensuring “Safe Routes to Schools” are achieved.
- All “scenic corridor” and campus trees to be permanently protected.
- An annual mitigation monitoring program that will guarantee success for impact mitigations or the community’s development process will be delayed until targeted results are achieved.
The existing local and regional community activists and concerned citizens helped to define this extraordinary neighborhood. When 21st century historians look back on models of sustainable growth that helped to redefine ecological sensitivity and quality of life for this and subsequent generations, it may very well be the Angwin Ecovillage that raises above all the rhetoric and proves once and for all it can de done.