The Hut Hamlet Neighborhood at Earthaven Ecovillage. An Origin Story.

Written by Courtney Brooke on April 16, 2021. Posted in Hut Hamlet, Natural Building.

Transcript from video

Paul: I’m Paul Caron and I’m a resident of the Earthaven neighborhood which is called the Hut Hamlet

The reason why it’s called the Hut Hamlet… It was originally called the neotribal village, there’s a story behind all that that I’m not gonna tell right now.

Basically when we bought the Earthaven land we had an agreement not to all go off and build our own houses. First, build some community infrastructure and do a site plan and be responsible for our land. So, this started taking a lot longer than we thought it was going to take. People got antsy. They were like “but we have to be on the land how will we ever develop anything if we can’t be on the land?”

So we made a compromise with ourselves. We picked an area and decided to build a kitchen and house for everyone to share. Then build huts around that kitchen and bath house so it’s like a big house with grass and trees in between all the rooms basically. As things went on, we thought “Oh well build these huts and we’ll live in them until the community center is built. Then, we’ll move on to our all on to our personal sites.” Some people actually did that. Then the huts will be available for rental that’s what we thought. But most of the huts got bought up by other people who just wanted the hut style of life, including me.

So what it is, is it’s kind of a prototype, of a unique solution to the affordable housing crisis. That is the way that I put it. Like this house that we’re that I’m sitting on the front porch of is a is a 16-foot yurt. It was a canvas yurt and the canvas sat around for so long that it rotted off and the frame was left. I covered the frame with insulation sheeting which was industrial waste and put some permanent windows and such in it. I’ve been living here since 2003. Basically I think maybe I spent five thousand dollars counting my own time to build this house. So that’s affordable housing eh?

Affordable Housing, Paul Caron

Courtney Brooke

Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live. Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing. Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between. Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.