Students study the relationships between humans and their natural environments, such as this 'Living Machine' ecological waste treatment center.

Living Routes' mission is to create opportunities to live and learn within human-scale communities that are consciously striving to live well and lightly. By offering positive visions and "stories" for humanity and the planet, ecovillages offer ideal "campuses" for students to explore possible futures, both in the world and in their own lives. Why do we think this is so important? Because through years of study, dialogue, experience, and reflection, we have embraced the following core assumptions:

We're in Overshoot
We are living in a unique time, not just in human history, but in planetary history. Ever more profound and rapid technological advances are developing faster than our collective wisdom and maturity. In other words, we currently know more about computers than about compassion -- or community. The evidence is clear that humanity's impact has overshot what the Earth can sustain and we are now hitting hard and fast limits to growth.

Humanity has been in overshoot since at least 1987

The Future is Fragile
With climate change and peak oil here now, a future with dramatically lower energy consumption appears inevitable. And yet, despite growing warnings and awareness, we seem ill prepared to respond to these global issues and most societies have lost resilience due to their increasing dependence on fossil fuels.

Systemic Change is Needed
We need to reinvent and transform everything we do -- and quickly. Businesses can not continue as usual. Governments must think seven generations ahead. And still, this is only a start. Top-level change will be weak and short-lived without a critical mass of understanding and commitment within the global citizenry. We each need to learn how we can reduce our ecological footprints while creating and maintaining high quality lifestyles. The question before each and every one of us is, "How can we live well and lightly?"

New Educational Models are Key
Our modern educational system was both the child and parent of the industrial era, but times are changing. We now need to educate leaders for a post-oil world - leaders who know not only how to run "green" businesses and governments, but how to heal the Earth and build durable economies and sustainable communities. But how? Einstein once said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." So we also need to move beyond the ivory towers of traditional academia and create campuses and pedagogies better able to educate for a sustainable future.

Ecovillages are Ideal Campuses
There exists today a growing international network of "ecovillages" -- communities striving to create high quality, healthy lifestyles and low ecological impacts. These ecovillages are developing and refining environmental and social tools such as community-scale renewable energy systems, ecological design, organic farming, holistic health and nutrition, consensus decision making, and mindfulness practices such as yoga and meditation. While not utopias, ecovillages represent some of the best physical and social laboratories in which we can experiment with integrated, community-scale solutions to today's most vexing problems. As such, they offer ideal campuses in which students can learn about sustainability, while actually trying to live it.