Союз Экопоселений и Экоинициатив

Dear friends, (GEN ambassadors, ecovillage members, activists and correspondents to be),

Thanks to your help the first GEN News was successfully sent out in January to 10 000 addresses. The second will reach even more! GEN News is a vital communications medium to share the most important developments unfolding in Ecovillages around the world.

With this in mind, we ask you to share GEN News with all of your networks, journalists and interested people you work and live with.
You can find it online: http://ecovillage.org/news/GEN_International_Newsletter_1_2013.pdf

Please encourage all interested people to subscribe the GEN Newsletter directly at the website: http://gen.ecovillage.org/newsletter.html

This will make our database grow and with this our outreach.

And then again: We ask you as members of ecovillages, networks, activists or ambassadors to share the news about your work.

Again, we hope to have one or two stories from every region of GEN: North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia/Oceania and one story from Next Gen. It can be stories in the field of ecology, economy, social sustainability, technical solutions, culture, the Arts, Spirituality…anything that is inspiring, informative, newsy!

The newsletter is also a medium which is sent to international press and interested journalists. Some stories from the first newsletter were already re-published in different magazines. This is why we won´t so much share the internal stories of GEN — meetings, decision making processes. We will still share these stories on our websites.
Some writers´ guidelines:

What did you find interesting in the last weeks — from your ecovillage or from an ecovillage that you travelled to?

Where are technical solutions, inventions, activities, new stages of the development?

Where and how did you go public and make more people in the mainstream aware of this different way to live?

Write news stories as precise and short as you can — or just give us the idea. Don´t worry about bad English or lacking writing skills — we will edit the stories. We will use them either for the newsletter or for the website.
The story should not be longer than 300-500 words.

Please add one to three photos.

Send them to: news@ecovillage.org

Watch out: The deadline is 10th of March. We want to send the newsletter by the end of March.
Thank you, namasté and salaam

The Newsletter Team
Kosha Joubert, Lara Kastelic, Leila Dregger, Ulrike Schimmel, Jenefer Marquis, Barbara Provost —

_____________________________________
Lara Kastelic

Global Ecovillage Network — Europe
Volunteer

Announcement:
Global Ecovillage Network Conference 2013 — Connecting Communities for a Sustainable World, July 07-12, 2013 at Schweibenalp, Switzerland — Information & Registration

Written by representatives of the movement of ecovillages of Russia, united in the Network of ecovillages and eco — initiatives, member of the Global Ecovillages Network

1. To qualify the ongoing movement of ecovillages on the global and national scale as a new forward looking trend that provides the growth of the life standards and as a way to overcome the arising environmental and social catastrophe.

2. To draw attention of the upper federal authorities of our country to the fact that now clean environment: incontaminated soils, fresh water sources and remaining forests worldwide are becoming the most precious and already rare resource.

3. To define conservation of this invaluable wealth of Russia as one of the key priorities for the legislative and executive bodies on all the administrative levels. For this, the following activities must be implemented:

• To accept the elaboration and the adoption of nature-conserving environment-friendly sustainable technologies in all the industries and businesses as a national priority.

• To set firm standards of preserving the cleanness and the fertility of the soils for all agriculture producers and landowners.

• To facilitate the access to the landfields and to provide a favorable policy and state support to the organizations and citizens that are practicing an environment-friendly organic agricultural methods which assure the rise of the natural fertility of the soils and of the landscape biodiversity.

• To restore in the national legislation the form of the land-use concerning the dedication of the land and forest plots to organizations and citizens for the permanentenvironmentally sustainable use. To create an effective scheme of restitution of the lands back to the national stock and their redistribution, if the use of the land causes the environment’s degradation.

• To accept conservation and proliferation of the forests as one of the national priorities. To develop more strict and sustainablestandards of forest utilization, with focus on selective logging and the total prohibition of extensive methods of industrial forestry.

• To develop and introduce the «Ecology» (« Nature Conservation») subject as a prior discipline on all the levels of national educational system, from primary school to the universities, to provide continuous environmental education and formation of environmental awareness in Russian citizens.

4. To introduce in the National Forest Code the category of the «social forests». The Social forests include the local forests surrounding rural communities. These forests are the backbone element necessary for sustainable life and development of these communities (indigeneous people communities, traditional rural communities, ecovillages). Within the borders of the «social forests» the particular order must be set on and maintained, assuring access of the above mentionned communities to the forest resources, restoration of the accustomed right of local social forest management, the support of the traditional non-exhausting symbiotical use of natural resources.

5. To provide a propitious climate and governmental support to intentional rural communities: ecovillages and other forms of intentional communities that are already practicing environmentally-friendly agricultural methods, soil fertility restoration, biodiversity rising, reforestration. To accept that these new rural intentional settlements are today an experimental pilot zones for the approbation of the sustainable living and economic activity models as well as an educational clusters for progressive development of environmental awareness of Russian citizens.

6. To provide state support to the existing traditional rural settlements for the purpose of conservation of the acquired skills and practices of environmentally-friendly non-exhausting agriculture and forest utilization, developped during many centuries of sustainable sedentary living on the same territories, that insured the transfer of the surrounding soils, subsoils, air, water and forests from one generation to another in their safety, integrity and suitability for a sane and wealthy life in the foreseeable future.