Rainbird Village wants to build a modern commune in Utah: The community-owned village will be powered by advanced technology.

• Author: Mumford, Jacqueline

"WE'VE BEEN LIVING IN THE CLOUDS," says Colleen Dick, nutritional biochemist and co-founder of the Rainbird Village project. "We take so much for granted: food, clothing, housing, even basic materials. We assume that it's always going to be here. We think we'll always be able to go to the store. Really, no, we won't!"

That's why Dick is working to establish the Rainbird Village, a cooperative in rural Utah where residents have fractional ownership in the village as well as stock in the local businesses.

CREATING A COMMUNITY

"I've lived all around the United States," Dick says. "But I spent a lot of my life driving back and forth between Utah and Ohio. When I was young, the Midwest was full of little towns. The last trip I made across the country, I saw that most of those towns were gone."

Her vision with Rainbird Village is to rebuild company-owned communities like these.

"When we stopped localizing industry, we lost those communities," she says.

How does something like Rainbird begin to take shape? It's all based around Dick's one-word motto: regeneration.

"We're localizing the basics in an upgraded form," she says. "Automating what we can. Delegating repetitive things to machines so that humans can go back to doing what they do best: being creative."

Dick's pitch for the village envisions an ecosystem where people live where they work.

We're thinking in terms of this question: How do we support the people who are then going to support the land? It does very little good to go out someplace and build lots of housing if there isn't work to support the people living there, right? Instead, we're people-focused.

Dick plans to put serious emphasis on all kinds of automatization.

"We'll use drones that can go out and check the property lines," she says. "We want to use that kind of technology in ways that streamline the day-to-day lives of our residents, but that also respects their privacy and autonomy."

The goal of the village is, ultimately, to give people control.

"The whole idea of living a purposeful life is important to us," Dick says. "We see that feeling as the core of what makes people happy."

She's not alone in this mission--this pitch attracted people from all over the country to help Dick build her vision.

"This question of building regeneratively is what my career is all about," says Alan Booker, founder and executive director of the Institute of Integrated Regenerative Design. He's also the engineer and community designer for Rainbird, tasked with guiding the building plans for the project. Booker is confident he can see the project through--he's done it before.

"I've done lots of smaller projects like this," he says. "Most recently, I'm consulting on a rebuild of an Indigenous community in central Alabama. Guided by these same permaculture principles, we're building with locally sourced items. Literally 90 percent of our materials are from within a few miles of the site. We're engaging the local ecology to feed into nature's cycles. Rainbird isn't the only place doing this; it's just the biggest attempt."

Right now, Dick says three locations in Utah--all rural or semi-rural land--are up for consideration. The standard village model would include homes, greenhouses, farmland, and established...