Somewhere on every continent, people have quietly stopped waiting for the world to change and started building it instead.
In rural Scotland and urban Copenhagen, in Sri Lanka and Senegal, in Argentina and Germany — thousands of communities are already living the transition. The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) connects them.
Founded in 1995 and rooted in the Findhorn community in Scotland, GEN is today a network of approximately 10,000 ecovillages and related projects across six world regions, from NextGEN youth initiatives to the Council of Elders. The communities it links are extraordinarily diverse — intentional settlements and traditional villages, permaculture farms and urban neighbourhoods, spiritual communities and secular cooperatives — but they share a common thread: the commitment to live in greater ecological harmony, and to prove that this is not sacrifice but abundance.
What makes GEN more than a directory is its insistence on the whole picture. Ecovillages are understood as living laboratories across four dimensions — social, ecological, economic, and cultural/spiritual. 97% actively restore degraded ecosystems. 90% engage in carbon sequestration. And increasingly, GEN is a voice at the United Nations, with ECOSOC consultative status, bringing the wisdom of grassroots regenerative communities into global policy conversations. When bombs fell on Ukraine, GEN Ukraine’s 60+ ecovillages kept planting. The map keeps growing.
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