When we started Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage back in the day we spent a lot of time talking about theory. Why start an ecovillage? What impact can we hope to have? Why not some other project – something urban or working within politics?

In my youthful zeal and naivete I would throw around phrases like “saving the world” or “fomenting radical change” with the full expectation that our efforts would do just that. Soon I realized the egotism in such statements, thinking that I (or we) would have such a huge influence seemed a bit self-indulgent.

And yet, I wouldn’t be doing Dancing Rabbit if I didn’t think it would change the world. I love my day to day life and am truly happy with the life I have chosen, but I also seem to have an unflappable urge to feel like I am contributing — doing my part to make the world a better place.

So how is Dancing Rabbit changing the world?

There are so many ways and I’m sure I’ll write about more of them but today something caught my eye while reading fivethirtyeight.com that gives a name to one of the concepts we’ve always thought DR embodied.

We often described DR as radical which for some was an off-putting word that brought up images of molotov cocktails and militants. To me radical always meant getting at the root of the issue as opposed to just making minor changes within the system.

But we always knew that if we were too radical we would never really speak to the mainstream, and maybe never even attract new members.  So we wanted to get out on the fringe but not over the edge.

And we knew that in pushing that limit we weren’t expecting that some day everyone would live in places like DR.  Even if it were physically and geographically possible we knew that the teeming hordes wouldn’t come flowing out of the cities to replicate our little village.

But one thing we wanted to do was shift the debate or as fivethirtyeight called it “shifting the Overton window“. Overton described how there is a range of what people considered possible and that one could shift the window of what was considered possible by discussing fringe ideas, so that less extreme ideas seemed more palatable. In politics this is often done by the more extreme pundits who then make the actual politicians seem sane by comparison. Its done by kids who say “Mom can I get a flamethrower? No, how about just a motorcycle.”

We often talked about how DR was doing this same thing, but not just with talk and spin but by actually pushing the envelope. As we expanded the debate and got out there on the fringe, it meant that less radical notions came to seem more mainstream. Veganism makes vegetarian seem normal, radical ecovillage makes cohousing look such a minor and easy shift, giving up private cars makes driving less and getting better mileage seem like a breeze.

So has it worked?

I’d love to have DR take all the credit for the mainstreaming of green. Not sure why they gave Al Gore the Nobel prize really. But seriously we probably have done our tiny part in making green a more mainstream thing. Not radical green yet, but the window has been shifted.

Sometimes I joke that we will know that Dancing Rabbit has succeeded when we start seeing people starting even more radical eco-projects with their founders poo-pooing us as old-school and mainstream. Then we’ll know that the envelope has gotten bigger and we will suddenly find ourselves less on the fringe and more in the range of the norm.

In some ways we’ve already seen it happen  — things like rewilding or the neo-amish make DR start to seem so normal. Other times I am reminded of how extreme DR is when you can hardly get someone to change a lightbulb much less ride a bike. Even if edge is pushed away from us, the world will still need changing.