Prefiguring sustainable living: an ecovillage story

Ecovillages are utopian communities that simultaneously critique the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) and prefigure alternative systems of production and consumption in everyday life, reconfiguring sustainability as both embedded in social structures and everyday practices. The paper explores how individuals navigate personal and collective meaning within interstitial spaces. Focusing on an Irish ecovillage, we analyse participants’ accounts of the ecovillage’s origin myth revealing nuances in their stories. While accounts coalesce around the significance of prefiguring sustainability, each telling also reveals particular aspects that are more personally meaningful for each participant. The paper has implications for policy and research that seeks to understand sustainability beyond both anarrow focus on individual behaviour and an abstract focus on macro-level structures, highlighting the role of experimental and discursive spaces where sustainable society is imagined and practised.