Eco-lessons from “The City that the Earth Needs

Two million trees planted to transform a desert. Gift economy restaurants serving lunch. A method for sun-baked bricks that’s rebuilding Afghanistan. These are just some of the amazing things achieved by Auroville.

Auroville is an experimental city in south India that just had its 41st birthday on February 28th. Auroville is a living role model for planetary sustainability. Aurovilians seem reluctant to testify of their accomplishments, lest they draw even more lookie-loo tourists. However, I feel that the world need to be inspired by Auroville’s example of vision and design, and so I intend to spill the beans about this truly amazing, real life ecological city.

Auroville has the benefit that it already exists. As the eco-proverb says “it’s not impossible if it already exists.” Auroville role models a good example and a scout forward into the New World that we should seek to build.

Auroville began with the vision and will power of a French spiritual teacher called the Mother. She was the head of spiritual community centered around the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in south India, in the former French colony of Pondicherry. The Mother was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator and successor after he left his body in 1950. The long story of these great teachers can be started at Wikipedia and deepened with the book Beyond Man, (or Beyond The Human Species, in gender-neutral American editions) by Georges Van Vrekhem, an Aurovilian resident.

The Mother envisioned creating “the city that the Earth needs” to model human unity and right relationship to the Divine Consciousness. To live as an Aurovilian, no special religion or creed is required, only that people agree to be “Willing Servitors of the Divine Consciousness” as they perceive it. “It’s important to be ‘willing’. We are all servitors whether we know it or not, but getting to understand that and then surrender to It, and being willing to align to It, that is what is required for the New World” comments Bhavana Dee, an American who came to Auroville in 1973, one of Auroville’s 2000 full-fledged community members.

Perhaps Auroville’s most useful lesson is in the power of a vision to manifest. Auroville probably seemed unlikely to succeed at the beginning. Yet, 41 years later, here it is. So I offer the Auroville Equation for success of a vision: Strong vision, plus time, plus dedicated workers, plus Divine Support, equals fulfillment.

Auroville’s clearest victory has been the marvelous job at reforestation. Two million trees have been planted, restoring the forests clear cut by the British and French Imperialists. When Auroville began, the landscape was a desert. Erosion caused huge gullies. Auroville sits on a plateau that tilts slightly towards nearby sea, and all the topsoil had long ago washed into the Bay of Bengal. Today Auroville is a green oasis in the India subcontinent still plagued by desertification. The trees keep Auroville a little cooler than neighboring areas, though it still tropically hot most of the year.

During my first trip to India, I stayed in Auroville for a month. I assumed that all India was blessed with trees and Nature. Later, traveling throughout India, I was repeatedly shocked by denuded landscapes, dusty and rocky ground, the trees gone, the landscapes picked clean by goat herds and impoverished humans. Goats nibble down to the root, killing off the plants with an toxin in their saliva. Only pricker bushes make it, creating a dry, un-diverse, thorny ecosystem.

Aurovilians planted many trees and gardens in the beginning only to see the goats pass through and chew up two months work. So they developed methods for dealing with this problem, such as capturing a goat and charging a fee to release it to the owner, hiring local people as watchmen and fencing properties with thorny bushes. They even tried weaving baskets around each baby tree! Auroville’s successful reforestation and ecological restoration offers a role model to the world, showing that humanity can stop and reverse the planetary trend to desertification.

Aurovilians invented a new kind of brick that doesn’t need firing to harden. Instead, to the mud 5% cement is added and then the bricks are compressed at high pressure and then left to sun-bake until rock hard. This low-carbon technology has been exported widely, particularly into Afghanistan.

Auroville is experimenting with different economic models like gift economies and collectivism. The Mother said that Auroville should have no money. Aurovillians have struggled to embody this vision, and have obeyed the spirit of the law, though perhaps not yet the letter. To run a complex economy, to allow outsiders to visit, money is needed. There is an Auroville account system which acts as a debit card. For example, I paid in $80 dollars, got an account number and a card, and then was able to pay for events, guest house bills, yoga classes, and espresso at Solar Kitchen’s cafe from that account.

A gift economy is a really delightful idea whose time has come. Here’s an concrete example of a gift economy. I ate lunch at the Indus Valley Restaurant. There was a donation box and people gave what they could or felt was the right amount. There was no waitstaff or menus or checks. Workers put the food was put out buffet style, and I served myself a delicious meal of spicy Gujerati Indian vegetarian food. I gave a 100 rupee note, about 2$. A similar meal cost me 30 rupees days earlier at another restaurant. This made me a profitable guest. Leaving I saw a hungry looking Indian young man eating who I imagine gave much less. But we balanced out, and the restaurant has been running successfully for four years.

Another example of the gift economy is the Tsunamika project. After the 2004 tsunami, an Aurovilian design unit created an economic project to help traumatized women from the local villages. They trained the women to make little dolls call Tsunamika, which they gave away, gift economy style. They’ve made over 2 million dolls and given these women financial stability and purpose in their lives. Tsunamika founder tells of a Paris fashion company who wanted a large quantity to put one Tsunamika with every garment they sold that year. In aggressive emails, he wrote trying to barter for a good price. She responded, you don’t understand, you can have as many as you want, for whatever you want to pay. Eventually, the fashionista got clear on the concept, they agreed he would pay for shipping, and he got thousands of dolls. Months later he showed up, with awe, a changed heart and a big check in his hand and said to the founder “I’ve negotiated all my life, but you really took the rug out from under me.”

Auroville also offers a solution to the eco-problem of energy inefficient McMansions. Here the houses are modest, yet beautiful. Yet people have a vibrant community life, and so can live well outside their private home. The private house doesn’t need to be as big if the public space is inviting.

Some of Auroville’s innovations are less material though no less useful. Auroville was created with the idea of actualizing Human Unity. Today Auroville is populated by people from around the world. There are hundreds of Europeans and Americans. There are lots of Koreans both living here and coming as guests. 45 nationalities are represented. Founded at the height of the Cold War, Auroville forged a brave path outside the divisive framework of nationalism and geopolitics. Today, progress toward world unity has been made because of the Internet and global trade and issues of planetary survival. But long before the Internet, Auroville was saying “We are One Big Human Family.”

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual ideas were Earth-positive. Many religions view the Earth as a second rate stopover on the way to the big Pie-in-the-Sky. Some Hindu philosophy says all this Earth is illusion, only Brahman is real. Sri Aurobindo said that the Earth is Brahman too, that Matter is also part of the Oneness. There is no running away. The job of humanity was to make the Earth and ourselves reflect and become the Divine. We are to bring Heaven onto Earth. This philosophy empowered hundreds of industrious spiritual people to work for 40 years in south India to create heavenly Auroville.

To look at the pictures of the early days, one gets a sense of dedicated spiritual hippies beautifully in-shape from working hard in the sun. Handsome bearded men construct palm-roofed buildings and women carry babies in slings. An Aurovilian challenges my use of the word hippie, saying “Not everyone was a hippie by any means. The Indian devotees and businessmen, the engineers and architects. Many were ‘straight’ and the hippies became straight quickly as they worked to settle the land.” Still, there is an Aquarian vibe that’s part of Auroville’s DNA. Auroville is on a visionary adventure to build a New World based on Love, Consciousness and World Unity. Sounds good, I say! Bring it on!

So if you want to join the Auroville community and be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, you can. Check out Auroville.org. Or visit as a guest in the Dec-Feb when the weather is best, though also busy, so book reservations. Or visit in Sept-Dec, when it’s quite wet with monsoon rains, but still interesting. Or visit in July-Sept when it’s hot and humid, but there is a distinct sense of actual community. One can participate in the ecological restoration by volunteering to plant trees at Sadhana Forest. College students can visit and earn credit with the Living Routes program. Auroville does have a problem of Indian tour buses unloading on weekends swarming the Visitors Center. So while guests are welcome as an integral part of the Aurovilian economy, there is ambivalence to living in a fishbowl. Hence Aurovilian’s desire to “lay-low” and not testify to the planet of their achievements. I encourage guests to come if they can promise to be polite to the locals and be receptive to their higher spiritual selves

Perhaps Auroville’s greatest attribute is an activist willingness to step boldly forward into the task of creating a New World. We need this spirit of creative innovation of design and intention. Auroville is an living example of the ‘bright green environmentalism, advocated for by Worldchanging.com and described in the following article from What Is Enlightenment magazine.

“Bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than “the tools, models and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions. As Bruce Sterling said in his first Viridian design speech, “The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”

Indeed, the future is already partially built in Auroville.

I will close with an Auroville-style prayer. May Auroville’s good example inspire planetary transformation. May the Divine Consciousness swiftly and easily manifest a New Age of sustainability, truth and beauty.