Sustainability 2.0

Permaculture Activist Andrew Millison On Creating The Modern “EcoHood”

EcoHood, n: permaculture retrofit of a mid- to low-income neighborhood with a high potential for ecological sustainability.

What’s wrong with the 1960s vision of moving toward a more sustainable lifestyle by growing your own food and raising kids with a few (or a few hundred) of your closest friends? Only one thing, says Andrew Millison: “The idea that you have to leave society to do it.” A Prescott College instructor, landscape contractor, homeowner and self-described permaculture activist, Millison is helping to spearhead a community sustainability initiative in the Lincoln-Dameron Street district of Prescott, AZ (pop. 45,000) that’s become increasingly known as “the EcoHood.”

Permaculture (a combination of the words “permanent” and “agriculture”) was first developed in Australia in the 1970s as a design system for local self-reliance based on patterns found in nature. Combining principles of homescale agriculture, environmental stewardship and community design, permaculture has captured the imaginations and energies of a new generation of environmentalists worldwide in the years since its inception. With an undergraduate degree in Ecological Design and Sustainability and a Master’s in Horticultural Preservation, Millison has taught permaculture at Prescott College for the Liberal Arts and the Environment since 2001.

What is Prescott’s “EcoHood”? It’s a mid- to low-income neighborhood situated around the floodplain of nearby Miller Creek that encompasses roughly two blocks, two apartment buildings and thirty houses, the majority of which were built in the 1930s. Fifty percent Hispanic/Native American, it’s also home to a significant number of retirees and college students. The district now has six systems that reuse household graywater for irrigation in the landscape, two rainwater cisterns, five organic gardens, 25 heirloom fruit trees, and (at last count) 57 chickens.

“I’d always thought of this area as a prime location for an eco-village,” says Millison, a Dameron St. resident on and off for the past eight years. “But I still had this idea of a community out on the land somewhere.” Managing the organic farm at Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti Urban Laboratory for two years had shown Millison the challenges inherent in a traditional “back to the land” scenario. But it wasn’t until he purchased a home 20 miles outside of Prescott that the concept for the EcoHood began to emerge.

E magazine