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ECO VISTA COMMUNITY
Taking The Community Of Isla Vista Into The Future

Our long-term goal is to establish an ongoing, multigenerational, student-led community development project for an equitable and just transition in Isla Vista.

We aim to encourage and inspire the foundation of an eco-village in Isla Vista through renewable energy, a flourishing and regenerative agro-ecology of public urban gardens, cooperative, affordable eco-housing, a circular eco-economy based on solidarity and meeting the real needs of the inhabitants, a vibrant web of visionary cultural creativity, radical self-governance, and community priorities determined by all who reside here.

We hope that Eco Vista can become a model for other sustainable communities!

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Eco Vista is … a promise, a pledge, a dream, a future.

The promise of Eco Vista is that together we might create a place that is life- affirming for all its inhabitants and that might inspire others elsewhere – particularly young people in their own communities – to use their imaginations to create the innovative future communities we all want to live in, right now!

Our pledge to you is to co-create, imagine, dream, and transform our community into a place that matches the name of Eco Vista. We want to dream and make manifest this vision together with you!

The Eco Vista dream is a communal, shared, joyful adventure – may it transport us to a place worthy of the love we feel for it.

The future of Eco Vista is … well, that’s what we hope and aim to find out!

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Community values and principles

We are inclusive.
We are democratic.
We are non-violent.

We work collectively whenever possible, and all are free to organize their own activities and projects.

We are open to all points of view that are aligned with these values and supportive of the Eco Vista Mission.

We act and live out of love for the dignity of all living beings, and base this love on social and climate justice, and on radical hope.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES INITIATIVE (EHI) fosters and consolidates the diverse environmental humanities programing that takes place at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). Our website provides information about our innovative graduate and undergraduate degree programs, courses, faculty, research, campus events, and much more. Begin scrolling down for brief overviews of this programing and links to in-depth material.

This EHI also provides an introduction to the environmental humanities. Not sure just what the environmental humanities are, or what they involve? This website supplies a range of resources that may be used in the classroom or by anyone interested in learning more. We have selected a number of books, films, and artworks, many of which can be sampled directly from this website, that are of special interest from the perspective of the environmental humanities.

THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE PROJECT at UCSB is a force for supporting, encouraging, and launching a range of efforts on and off-campus, locally and globally that link research, teaching, service, and action for environmental justice. Environmental justice is the integration of social justice and human rights with efforts to secure ecological sustainability. The GEJP supports faculty, students, staff, entrepreneurs, artists, film makers, EJ advocates, and community leaders in their efforts to explore new ideas, questions, and possibilities for studying, learning about, communicating, and promoting environmental justice.

THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CLIMATE ACTION AND THEORY (IICAT) is a public-facing climate-focused transformative knowledge network, research collaboration forum and media hub. The website is our research archive — like a public file cabinet with which we share our sources and publish our work.

Our Mission begins with the better understanding of global warming, climate change, and the ensuing international struggle to institute the just rule of law in defense of planetary ecology and its constituent peoples and species.

Toward that end, we work to render climate science, economic history, civil society (including its constituent social movements) and the institutions of emergent global economic and environmental governance accessible to the general public—while also striving to make such lay-knowledge available and useful to a wide range of interdisciplinary scientists, NGOs, scholars, theorists and activists.

IICAT Director Richard Widick holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is currently teaching GER 43A / C Clit 43A, DREAMING REVOLUTIONS: Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Before moving to the Orfalea Center in 2009, he lectured on theory, culture, media, globalization, social movements and environment at UCSB’s Department of Sociology from 1997 – 2008.

He is the author of Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), an ethnography, cultural analysis and 150 year social history of the US colonization and industrialization of California’s northern redwood region—a history of the Indian wars and labor trouble that set the legal, social and ecological conditions for converging peoples, labor and environmental movements in the present era of globalization.

In new research aimed at further integrating global studies and cultural sociology with media and environmental theory, Widick scales up his institutional analysis of US culture to the international scene of western modernity and the UN climate negotiations (Climate of Empire).

Widick publicizes his climate-related work at iicat.org, including his current 5-year research project with John Foran, Human Rights & Climate Justice After the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

UC-CSU NXTerra is a Knowledge Action Network (KAN) and digital platform for climate educators, developed by faculty across the University of California and California State University systems.

Recognizing the severity of the climate crisis, we are driven by profound and renewed belief in the power of education to help reimagine and build a better, more sustainable and environmentally just world, or “next Earth.”

Although the scale of the problem demands that academia, the sciences, business, government, and the public quickly begin acting in concert to achieve the best possible outcomes, decades of inaction rooted in interest-driven policy disagreements have ushered in a new era of environmental and climate policy crises.

The range of possible results includes widely divergent “next Earths” and any number of paths forward.

As University of California and California State University-based educators focused on climate change, critical sustainability, and climate justice studies, our responsibility could not be greater to our students—the generation that will forge the ideas that will determine which “next Earth” will be our home.

To that end, NXTerra produces, curates, and delivers climate change, critical sustainability and climate justice education resources for educators of every discipline—from the arts and humanities to the human and social sciences and the natural sciences—with a vision of sharing resources to accelerate climate education and action in California and beyond.

College-level educators in all fields who wish to enable their students to apply their knowledge in innovative ways to real-world problems will find here many resources to support them in teaching and collaborating with their students in an ambitious and wide-ranging project—imagining and creating “a just transition to the next Earth”—by reshaping our relationships with each other and the systems and institutions that determine the quality of life today for our own communities and communities around the world.

By foregrounding the work of University of California and California State University educators, NXTerra seeks to further the goals of the Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP).

This is an attitude of “putting our heads together” and getting to work.

Our combined efforts are aimed at driving the deep culture shift both inside our two university systems, as well as outside, in our common broader global civil society.

NXTerra will launch publicly in the Fall of 2019

NXTerra emerged in 2019 from the work begun by the UC-CSU KAN in 2017-18.

NXTerra follows the UC-CSU KAN in starting from the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4, as defined in the 2015 UN publication of Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development:

Target 4.7 – “To ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.”

Like the UC-CSU KAN before us, NXTerra its our approach to confronting the pressing social and existential challenges of the climate crisis on the foundational perspective of climate justice, seen as a global issue and a universal right of humanity and of nature generally.

READ MORE ABOUT OUR ORIGINS HERE >>>

NXTerra PUBLIC LAUNCH FLYER – November 18, 2019 (download)

NXTerra GLOBAL LAUNCH EVENT POSTER, UNFCCC COP 25, Madrid – December 3, 2019 (download)