Hildur Jackson, who died in the autumn of 2015, was cofounder with her husband Ross Jackson of Gaia Trust, the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and Gaia Education. As a legacy of her passion for ecovillages, Hildur wanted to make a beautiful coffee table book about best-practice designs for ecovillages. To that end, she made a list of 20 veteran ecovillage projects and new innovative ones.

This book celebrates the work that all ecovillages do to alleviate climate change, reduce social conflict, and heal environmental damage. Ecovillages have already achieved within a very short time the climate goals that all of us need to reach, and they have done it by making practical lifestyle changes. These lifestyle changes promote peaceful and joyful coexistence among people and between people and nature. Far from being ascetic choices, these changes provide healthy homes, delicious organic food, playful interdependence, a new spiritual connection to our living planet, and a better quality of life. Ecovillages demonstrate how we can live lightly on the planet, in all climate zones and cultures, by embracing and enhancing the tradition of village living to address the critical challenges of our time.