About a year and a half ago, Zaida Amaral, one of my ecovillage cohorts came home from Findhorn Foundation on fire to do something she’d been fantasizing about for years: bring the Global Ecovillage Network’s Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) course to the United States. The irony is that Zaida is Brazilian, and something about that interesting beginning captures the spirit of teaching EDE.

EDE has been delivered all over the world, but here– in the belly of the unsustainable beast– it has been slow to catch on. We are halfway through delivering the first course– a month-long certification program that we are delivering in four chunks spread out over a year. We’ve spent hundreds of hours in meetings, talking budgets, publicity, curriculum, staff relations, the importance of varied voices and perspectives, time management, roles and responsibilities… in short, it has been a two-part deal: figure out how to best teach a course no one has ever taught in the US, and start an organization at the same time.

Zaida and I are dear friends. We met years ago in an intentional community in Missouri, have taught numerous classes and started an ecovillage project together, and Zaida is the adoptive mom of my birth-daughter, Ananda. We do not have an untested relationship. And yet, EDE has been the toughest thing we’ve ever done together.

When you live in a different culture from the one you were raised in, everything is challenging. How you talk, how you make decisions, what you think is fun (and funny) are all just a little off, and it makes it hard to relax. I never understood this until I spent time in India and then in the Meditteranean. And I never understood how hard it was on Zaida until we got into EDE together (though truthfully, I’m not sure I’ll evere REALLY get it). Zaida is the overall director of this project– managing a bunch of incredibly competent and well-meaning Americans, with our share of the cultural training that goes with being life-long residents in the richest (and some would say most arrogant) country in the world. We know we need EDE to not just be the usual Americanism, and yet what exactly does that mean? Sticking to our standard way of doing things in the US is not the way out of the environmental challenges we are facing. And what is it like to represent another way in a critically important role, alone?

It is one thing to say, “We have to change our ways,” and quite another to be faced, under the stress of developing a mammoth new undertaking, with what those changes mean. If it means that I don’t know, as the Course Lead Teacher, what is going to be taught until the last minute (and my blood pressure sky rockets) but we end up with a more creative and in-the-flow course that feels more at home for our working class, Hispanic and Indigenous students, is it worth it? (Oh, how I want to be able to graciously say yes, and yet that hasn’t been easy; the programming dies hard.)

All of this is complicated by the fact that everyone involved in producing this course is well aware that hardly anywhere in the world is this new way being lived. While we clearly need to shift away from American consumerism, is Brazil’s way of life universally better? These kinds of questions have plagued Zaida (who appreciates the relatively calm driving behavior of Americans and a different kind of respect for women here, for instance) and made the process of learning how to teach EDE that much more complicated, and rich.

We are all doing a life review.

It has been humbling for me, after teaching sustainability classes for almost 20 years, to suddenly have to do it differently, as a team effort. I’m having to embody more fully than ever, the thing I teach during consensus classes: this radical notion that someone other than me has something valuable to say about territory I think I know. The best news is that, even as we have a seemingly endless conflict in management styles and a seemingly endless relearning of how to communicate, we also have a deep well of love and respect: for each other, the EDE materials and the process.

One of the best lessons of EDE for me has been that friendship is a powerful force in the world, and in the small sphere of my life. It may yet be the saving grace of humanity, if we will just stick with it.