(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Throughout the country, people are planting seeds of innovation, harvesting a bounty of ideas, to help care for the only home we have: planet Earth.

In the second season of "My World Too", discover with our team, ideas and sustainability, both new and old.

From high-tech eco innovations to homegrown local solutions, we'll learn about sustainable trends in transportation, housing, energy, food production, climate change, carbon reduction, resource management, and so much more.

Join our field reporters as they explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to "My World Too", short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

Nick, and the "My World Too" crew, travel deep into the green rolling hills of Northeast, Missouri, to visit Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

This special episode provides a glimpse into the world of an intentional community with a focus on sustainability, fertilized by outreach, knowledge, and love.

♪ We give thanks for unknown blessings ♪ ♪ Already on the way ♪ We give thanks thanks ♪ For unknown blessings already on their way ♪ ♪ We give thanks for unknown blessings ♪ ♪ Already on their way ♪ We give thanks, we give thanks, we give thanks ♪ - [Male Speaker] Okay, thank y'all, so for dinner tonight, we have a giant pot of rice, long-grain brown rice, nothing special.

- [Nick] So Cob, can you tell me, where are we right now?

- [Cob] This is Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

We're an intentional community, maybe around population of 50, 55, including kids.

We have maybe one of the largest collections of natural buildings in the Midwest.

- Cob, one of the things I've noticed, walking around the village, is how diverse the homes are.

It seems that they all have their own personality.

- Well, they do, they reflect the personality of the individual who built them, that's the beauty of a hand-built house.

- My name is Alice, and I've lived here at Dancing Rabbit for about 12 years.

I really like natural building, I like all the different shapes, and geometries, and the tones, and the textures, that all come together, play nicely with the plants, the animals, whatever.

So this is the Gnome Dome, and it's a little earth-bag rental that I have.

It's also been sort of the, like, my starter project here at Dancing Rabbit.

One thing that I've been getting interested in, increasingly, is heating systems.

And so this is a mass heater, and like a lot of stoves, they're, you know, they're a cast iron stove, they heat the air.

They're a radiant heater, and this is covered in thermal mass.

So things that are heavy have a lot of mass, and they can absorb and soak up heat.

What that affords you to do is you can crank the fire, you can get it really, really hot, and all of that heat is gonna be absorbed and stored by this thermal mass.

And I think it's really important to get the functionality, you know, of thermal properties, and insulation of things that work.

And I think that really the skill is figuring out a way to do things with natural building, and with physics, so that you don't have to rely on some of those systems.

Coming up now around the side, the back of the Gnome Dome, this is the roof.

I actually, I really like living roofs a lot.

I think that they're sort of... can be an extension of our space.

You know, living roofs are pretty cool, because obviously they look pretty when plants grow.

They breathe, and when they breathe, it's called transpiring, and they're actually... it's an evaporative cooling effect.

And so you have things growing that are actually helping to cool the building in the summertime.

The earth is really conductive of heat, it's really heavy and dense, and so you'll actually get more insulation quality just out of the fluffy grass.

The living roof, I think, is a really great way to just create more space.

Now you have sort of vertical space, and you can sort of stack all these layers of meaning.

It's a blessing to be able to get to eat food right from your roof.

My roof, it's my garden, it's also like, my bedroom sometimes.

Had a little rain last night, I was away, didn't get over here to get the bed put away.

So now my mother gets to see what kind of squalor I'm living in, but it's a nice spot.

The rain sort of, you know, gets those sheets washed, finally.

Coming off the Gnome Dome, now we are in the tool shed, the summer kitchen, the living room, the bar.

I really like to live sort of like where the indoors and the outdoors meet and come together.

So we got the front of my house, obviously, a lot more natural building materials.

You got your stone, this is a cob, this is a clay plaster.

This is actually a little bit of lime-wash I put on here.

We sort of have this idea, like, I'm gonna put something in place, and I want that to stay there forever, I want this permanent strong house.

Natural buildings, they're not as strong as like, concrete, and so they do change over time, and they do interact with the elements.

And it's all about experimenting and learning as we go, what works, what doesn't work?

How can we amend those things?

And let's continue the tour inside.

All right, coming into the house, you know, living in the Ecovillage, you're building your house, you got some trees to plant, you gotta talk to the Visitor Program.

Maybe there's a film crew coming through, all these other things happening.

And really at the end of the day, for me, it's like, "Well, what's more important, I get my fruit trees planted, or I get some finished plaster on my wall?"

You know, it's all about redefining, like, what's important to me.

You know, I'm sort of okay with living in squalor for, you know, a little while.

So this is sort of my little living room area, it's sort of a cave of a house.

And so it can be very dark, and so doing things like putting a white lime finish, rather than like a dark wood, or like a heavy clay plaster, these things can sort of change how our spaces feel.

Let's go check out the bedroom.

This is where I sleep when the rain forces me off the roof.

I like having, you know, the window right here.

You can look out, watch the birds, look at the flowers, let the sunshine come in, wake you up.

It's a comfy, comfy spot, maybe a little too comfy sometimes.

I tear down buildings once in a while, and you get these really wonky boards, you know, out of 'em.

These are things that have weathered and warped.

And so like, you could try to like, make something straight out of them, or you could make something not straight out of them.

And it's just using what you have.

My outhouse, I love it, and if you'll excuse me, actually, nature calls.

(chuckles) All right, so this is my neighbor's house, Cat Cradle, and it's very round.

And I think that, you know, organic sweeping shapes appeal to us.

They're also grounded in physics.

And so you have a straight wall, and a straight-line wind hitting that wall, and that's gonna have something to really get against and push.

Now you compare that to a round building, and now that whole round building, this wall here, is gonna be braced by this wall on the sides.

And the wind's gonna also wanna flow around it.

But there's a challenge with circles, in that they're round, and so the areas around them, sometimes it's hard to like, integrate things into them.

And now when we have this sort of this curve coming out, now we're sort of defining a space that we can hang out in.

And we have the firewood shed, which is functional, stores our firewood.

But also that wind that's sort of drying the wood is also actually being mitigated by this firewood shed.

And so the whole idea with the organic shapes, and stuff like that, is it's whimsical and it's quaint, but it's also functional.

- This is an 850-square-foot roundhouse, so it shouldn't be square feet, it should be round feet, but it's 36-feet diameter.

The house was built over the course of about five years by a builder who lived here.

And I consider him an artist who built, not really a builder.

It's highly decorative, we have glass bottle walls.

I have 13 windows, a gorgeous solar tube to allow light into the central part of the house.

And it's very efficient in the winter, and it's very beautiful.

- We've got a house here it's made out of cob, clay sand, and straw, very strong, very strong material; the problem is it doesn't insulate very well.

And so you try to live in this house in the winter, you're just feeding that fire all the time, still 50 degrees.

You could say, "Hey, this is a failure, this is a problem.

We built it as a four-season house, doesn't work that way."

I like to offer sort of a contrasting view, which is like, "Hey, we are, you know, we're an Ecovillage.

People come through here all the time, we are here to teach, and to interact, and have a conversation."

And now we have, you know, a firsthand experience that we can use as an example, to teach people, you know, what works, but also what doesn't work.

And as such, I think this is a really great learning tool and therefore, like a huge success.

I love this house, I love how it interacts with its environment.

Now you got the grape vines, you got the burdock, the thistle, these are things that different animals like, but it also has a history of interacting with its surroundings.

And so, you know, this is clay, and sand, and straw, and the straw is just grass, you know, this right here.

I could use this in this wall.

The clay, we have a heavy-clay soil, which gardeners hate.

I like it as a natural builder.

I can dig it up from the foundation, and use it right here on this very wall.

So this clay right here came from this ground, right here.

It's this cohesive beautiful unit.

- Oh, this house is designed to be a communal house with shared resources, which is an important principle here at DR, we're building a house that has all the bells and whistles, a fully-equipped kitchen, shower, to share with the neighbors that are nearby.

And the reasoning behind this is that we're hoping that people can build simpler, cheaper houses of their own, for their own space.

And then they come in here and they use the resources here.

- The idea is to build homes that are fully functional, that don't have as much of the toxicity.

Natural building is a style of construction that uses primarily natural nonsynthetic materials.

This is a straw bale house.

So the walls, if you notice, they're very thick, and that's because they consist of stacked straw bales covered with an earth and plaster.

- We are following guidelines established here that our materials should be local, natural, or reclaimed.

- So clay is a really amazing resource, but we've got wood in our repertoire as well.

Ask my little shingle shed, it's where I like to hang out, make some shingles, maybe drink an afternoon beer when I don't have another project.

These are white oak that are gonna go on a roof.

You know, as what's done traditionally, they're very strong, I'm told they last 80 years.

I won't be around to tell ya, but split 'em, you gotta dress 'em up with our little draw knife and shaving horse.

Just slice those wood grains, make that a little bit straighter.

And now that I'm here, I'm realizing, I think I better be working on this.

If you'll excuse me, I gotta...

I have a village to build.

- [Nick] As I walk around the village, it's a really unique place.

Can you just sort of describe to me, what's it like living here?

What can the residents of the community expect?

- Well, it's a funny thing, you arrive to Dancing Rabbit in this sea of soybean and corn fields.

And then all of a sudden this little sign says, "Welcome to Dancing Rabbit."

And you pull in and everything looks different.

(laughs) And then you emerge into this almost like, a little storybook village, with handmade houses, and gardens, and people walking around, and taking time to talk to each other on paths.

But in the midst of doing their other daily chores and activities.

- What is the mission of Dancing Rabbit?

- Oh my gosh, well, the mission... (laughs) It starts with creating a society, the size of a town or a village, that is not only meant to allow, but encourages members to live sustainably.

And so when you hear that, it's pretty simple, like, just allow and encourage people to live sustainably.

But when you think about how most people are living in our country, and in many parts of the world now, the systems that we're plugged into are not meant to allow us to live sustainably.

And so the founders of Dancing Rabbit went back to square one, and they were like, "How can we actually start from the ground up, by building sustainable systems, as much as we can, for this village?"

- But one of the things that really drew me to Dancing Rabbit, and why I've stayed here, is this was not a group of people just running off to try to create their own little utopia, and shut out the world.

This is very much about trying different things, demonstrating different things, and sharing what we've learned.

There's a very strong, outward-facing educational focus.

And that aspect really added a sense of purpose to just living my normal life.

- And there's this beautiful consciousness around a little bit about what's going on for everybody, because we're all bound up with each other.

So as you walk through the village, you see dozens of different houses that have been built over the years, different sheds, and tool... you know, tool shops and different things.

And then you start to move out to the edge of the land, and there's agriculture, there's both animal, agriculture, there's some vineyards, there's, you know, different food operations being planted and underway.

And all of it is on this 280 acres of our shared land.

- [Female Speaker] My morning chores consist of... One of us starts off feeding the chicks and letting them out, the little ones who are up in the yard.

Then I head out to milk the goats, maybe move some fence.

And then I move out to the cow pasture and milk the cows over there.

Then we go to the kitchen, and do the dishes, about an hour of dishes for an hour of milking.

- I get up about 5:00, make some coffee, I'll feed everybody.

Then I'll usually go scythe between trees, or clear down stemmy areas of the pasture, just to try to get a better swarth of grass growing in some places, try to give the trees some room to breathe, or even just to make mulch for the garden.

I usually scythe for about an hour every morning, get less than a quarter-acre mown before I'm tired.

Then I go to the garden, and then I start mixing feed, and give everybody lunch.

(laughs) - My name is May, I live here at Dancing Rabbit.

I manage the animal side, primarily of the dairy co-op.

We are milking currently seven does, goats, and two cows.

And then we have their associated offspring that we also raise for meat, doing management-intensive rotational grazing.

- My name is Ben, I kind of primarily handle the poultry and pastured pork side of things here.

I regularly have to move different groups of animals, and so May focuses on moving the goats and moving the cows.

I often am the one that's moving poultry and pigs.

Okay, we're down at the edge of our one-acre fledgling food source for chickens and pigs.

I got my two most important tools for pasturing, which is a good dog to make sure that we're not... we don't have problems with predation.

Before we had livestock-guardian dogs, our only option was to either let 20 chickens get taken in a night by a fox, or to have to, you know, trap, you know, wildlife and kill it.

And that's not the way we wanna do, we want to kind of farm with nature, not against it.

And so dogs are a way that we can coexist with predators, and keep them on our land, just away from our flock.

My other favorite pasture management tools, this is a Austrian-style scythe.

I use this to mow down grass around trees, so I can... and create mulch for the garden, I'm able to make hay.

I can take this and cut pathways, you know, for laying out the electric fence, in a way that it won't short out.

And it's a really meditative way- (rooster crows) to spend an hour every morning, listening to bird songs, and thinking about my life.

When a cow drops a cow pie, it just sits there, and it creates what's called "a zone of repugnance", I believe that's the scientific term, and the cow won't eat anywhere near that for like, three years, is what they say.

But if you get a chicken out on that field to kick that cow pie in every direction, it breaks the parasite cycle, so we have fewer flies out in the pasture, pestering the cows, and then that fertility is spread.

So we don't need to buy a manure spreader like a lot of farmers do, we can do much of our work without machinery.

Cows take the first bio-grass, the pigs will be right there to take the second bio-grass, and the poultry will be behind that, to spread their manure around and break the parasite cycles.

And so what this is, is a cascading series of interactions between plants, and soil, and livestock.

Oh, this is our latest version of an outdoor kitchen.

We kind of had a bigger one that... - [May] We had an awesome one.

- [Ben] Yeah, we had a great one that burned down last year, but we were able to throw this together within a couple weeks, and it's functioning well for us.

In order to keep our straw-bale homes cool, we don't cook indoors this time of year.

There's no disconnection from nature, you know, we have to react and respond to weather events.

- [May] We live outside, we spend pretty much all of our time outside, from when we wake up, until we go to bed.

So we eat outside, we cook in this sheltered space, we do the dishes with rainwater.

When the bucket underneath the sink is full, we gotta go dump it somewhere on the ground, and see that it runs away; don't pour it in a bad spot.

All of our activities are very weather dependent.

I wanted to live a life in alignment with my values.

I thought that it would be possible to grow my own food, build my own house, and not have some sort of negative impact on people so far away, that I didn't even know.

- And I just don't fit in out there, honestly.

(laughs) I think that 9:00 to 5:00 doesn't do it for me, but the 5:00 to 9:00 is pretty great.

- How often are you getting new residents, and how often are residents leaving, is it... - Oh, all the time.

- All the time.

Dancing Rabbit is no different from any other town or city in the US, people come, people go, for any number of reasons.

It could be work related, it could be love related, it could be just... - [Female Resident] Family-related.

- [Male Resident] Family-related, environment.

It's like, you know, "Oh, the winter was great, but now it's hot and humid, I don't like this."

- [Female Resident] Yeah, right.

- [Male Resident] You know, there are as many different reasons as there are people.

So we're no different in that way.

- We are different in the sense that, in order to move to Dancing Rabbit, we request that you come to a Visitor Program.

We have a number of programs that folks can attend to do, we've got building workshops, the Women's Retreat, Ecovillage Experience Weekend.

But the Visitor Program is meant to really give people a sense of what it's like at Dancing Rabbit.

It's an immersive two-week program, you really get to taste all the different flavors of Dancing Rabbit.

- Because Dancing Rabbit does not have a buy-in fee... You know, many communities, when you take the step of becoming a member, you gotta put down $10,000 per adult, or something in that range.

We don't do that, we want to be much more financially accessible.

We therefore have a much broader socioeconomic range of members and residents living here.

- Here at Dancing Rabbit, unlike some other intentional communities, we don't share income.

We're all responsible for making our own financial needs met.

- If Nick, if you were considering moving to Dancing Rabbit, we wouldn't say like, "Well, yeah, sure, just come on in," we'd say, "Come to a Visitor Program so we get to know you, and you get to know us."

- And you get the three-hour workshop on how we make decisions at Dancing Rabbits.

(everyone laughs) It's not just a five-minute soundbite.

- Right, right.

- When you live here for a while, you're touched and changed, for better or for worse, because sometimes you move back, and you wanna forget about the impact of what this... what it does when you turn on the light switch, and what it does when you flush the toilet, and how many gallons of potable water goes down the drain.

- [Nick] Right.

- [Female Resident] But then after living here, I mean, those people have been touched the most.

And so even though a lot of people come and go at Dancing Rabbit, those people that go are taking this awareness with them.

And so it's not a failure when people leave.

In fact, it's just a different sort of, you know, internship program, you might say.

- There's Dancing Rabbit locally here, in the middle of the prairie, and then there's Dancing Rabbit worldwide, where people have taken what they've learned, either about how we do things physically, or things they've learned about themselves.

And then they take that to wherever they are and make changes in their life.

And that is just as valid a part of the expression of our mission, to influence the world in these positive ways.

- Yeah.

- So when I'm looking around this home, I do see plugins, I see electrical items, so are you... is the community connected to the grid?

- Yes, yes we are.

It's a choice, you can build- - And it wasn't always that way.

- That's true.

Back in 2012, we built... we developed an internal micro-grid.

And that does have connection points with the external power grid.

But the way our homes are built and designed, is they require a lot less power than the average home.

There are a lot of passive heating and cooling, a lot of winter heating is done with locally-sourced scrap wood, or compost wood from our land.

Usually with high-efficiency appliances to reduce wood smoke, and those sorts of things.

But yes, we are connected to the grid, many homes have solar panels on them, and generate their own power.

Sometimes it's enough, or sometimes it's not, they need to bring extra power in.

As a community, we are committed to exporting more power than we import.

And we generate power here through wind, solar, and the... And we are net-exporters of energy, we essentially are using the national grid as battery storage- - [Nick] Okay.

- that's one way to think of it.

- [Nick] Okay.

- I think there are three washing machines?

- [Female Resident] In the whole village, yeah.

- [Male Resident] In the whole village.

One is at the bed and breakfast, one is at the Sky House, which is the boarding house.

And there's one in the common house that anyone can have access to.

- [Female Resident] Yeah.

- And you won't see any dishwashers, other than these, these are dishwashers right here.

- [Female Resident] Yeah.

- What else, there are no clothes dryers, everybody puts clothes out on the line, just- - [Female Resident] Yeah.

- just like they used to.

- [Female Resident] Yeah, that's right.

- [Male Resident] Yeah.

- [Female Resident] And it connects you more to the cycles of the Earth when you do those things.

I mean, there's a beautiful thing about when I hang my laundry up to dry, I'm connected to whether it's rainy or sunny that day.

And, you know, starting to notice, "Wow, it's a lot rainier than it was last year."

Or, "Oh gosh, there's a lot more storms than there were last year."

It connects us back to what's happening with the Earth and the Earth cycles.

And that is so easy to get disconnected from, especially if you're in an urban or city environment.

As a community, we can have a much bigger impact.

And that's part of what we're trying to do at Dancing Rabbit is bring folks into that awareness of, "How are we part of something bigger?"

And at Dancing Rabbit, part of the bigger that we're apart of is bringing hope back onto the planet.

But every intentional community is meant to answer the question, "How can we do better?"

So we're really exporting hope, is what we're doing.

Even though you see critters, you see goats, you see cows, a lot of what we're doing, at the end of the day, is letting folks know that that little voice inside themselves, that says, "There's gotta be a better way to live..." How many people wake up and say that, or, you know, get home from their jobs and say, "I can't believe I'm living this way..." - "What's the point?"

- Yeah, what's the point?

- "Why am I doing this?"

- Right, there's gotta be a better way to live.

And the voice of Dancing Rabbit says, "There is, there is a better way to live."

And just come and find it.

(energetic music) - [Narrator] Share your sustainability story, or learn more about sustainability and earth-friendly innovations at myworldtoo.com.

(energetic music)