Click to read photo caption.

Earthaven Ecovillage, in the mountains southeast of Asheville, North Carolina, runs off-the-grid—solar power, compost toilets. People there build their own homes, garden, do woodworking and other crafts, and teach workshops on sustainability. They’re well-buffered by three hundred acres of forested land, but they’re also within striking distance of the small town of Black Mountain.

Click to read photo caption.

They’re a little shy of the media, Jacki Huntington says. She didn’t know that in the beginning, so she went right ahead and asked for what she wanted: permission to live at Earthaven and make a multimedia documentary about the community of sixty people for her senior journalism thesis.

Click to read photo caption. all photos by Jacki Huntington

The word ‘journalist’ there—” Huntington pauses. “I don’t think I realized how unusual it was for them to give someone the level of access that I had. The woman who was doing media relations at the time saw something in me, I think, that resonated with her.” Huntington lived in Earthaven for a month, did long interviews with its residents, and filmed them as they went about the business of trying to build an environmentally sustainable way of life.

Click to read photo caption.

Usually when journalists write about ecovillages, Huntington says, they take an isn’t-this-odd approach, which is easy to do when you’re writing about people who live outside the mainstream. “I wanted to get away from that bemused tone those pieces have,” she says, “and get into the issues and the life there a little more deeply.”

Click to read photo caption.

When she arrived at Earthaven, Huntington expected to find that the biggest challenges of that way of life were physical, such as not having shower facilities in individual homes. “But I found that none of that is an issue in the face of the day-to-day realities of community members having to solve problems together, make decisions through consensus, and get along with each other,” she says.

Click to read photo caption.

She decided to make a series of short pieces about individuals that would capture the diversity of personalities at Earthaven. After successfully defending her thesis this week, she’s getting her work ready to publish online (see a sample below). The website for Another Way: Seeking Sustainability Through Community will launch in May.

Jacki Huntington


Jacki Huntington is a senior journalism major. Her project was funded by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship and the Eugene L. Roberts Jr. Prize.