California Dreamin'

California Dreamin'-- A Cooperative Experience By Ellen-Marie Winther

September 2007 I ventured to a new life, to live in the Golden State of California.

When my first-year flatmates would grumble random phrases about my hippie food and my time wasting activities, such as planting trees, I started thinking of living with someone more like-minded. After quite much ado – but not for nothing – I ventured on this fairy tale of an adventure to the Golden State – the state of vineyards, of rolling hills, of deserts, of humongous water-diversion projects, of droughts, of mountains, of Hollywood, of pollution, of surfing, of suburbia– of watermelons and tomatoes- and last but not least – the cradle of the hippie movement.

After my first meeting with the United States of America – a little small town in the middle of nowhere in the South Eastern part of Washington state, where the students eat vegan waffles with maple syrup and melon for breakfast, I took the train the 10 hours from Seattle to Davis, California. Davis is known – in Davis – for being the bicycle-town of America. (There is an obvious lack of experiencing the bicycle racks of any Scandinavian University town. Anyhow.). I was met at the wild-west looking train station by two of my new housemates in the beginning of September 2007. Davis Student Cooperative was to be my new home for the next 10 months.

Davis Student Coop is one of three cooperative housing alternatives on campus of University of California Davis. In the middle of campus stand three farmhouses with two big gardens behind two of them. They are as different as three individuals can be, mind you, three individuals belonging to the same group, e.g. Greenpeace. Davis Student Coop, Pierce Coop and Agrarian Effort all have about 13 people living in each house, and each house has about 5 to 8 sleeping rooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms a main and a kitchen entrance, and a living room. A normal house, that is. But 13 people in a relatively normal house do get crammed, but interestingly enough, I never had a problem with bathroom space.

Five days a week we had dinner at 7, made by two people in each house. I used to cook each Wednesday. Now you probably think – cook for 13 people?! How is that possible? It is actually much easier to cook for 13 that for 1, I tell you. A whole lot easier, in fact. However, the challenging part was to make a nutritious vegetarian meal out of hardly any fresh vegetables in the winter… many dinners were prepared with rice, re-fried beans, and fried pumpkins or some kind of squash with oil and rosemary. Looking back, I seemed to have managed quite well, gigantic pots with vegetable soup, Russian borsch from scratch, homemade buns, banana breads, zucchini-breads, a stir fry of some kind.

Many of the people that live in cooperatives in California, and in the rest of the world, live there because they believe in the principles of sharing resources, that cooperation makes people communicate and when you communicate you are forced to cooperate with each other. Another goal for many is to lower our footprint on the world we inhabit, all 6 billion of us. Is it right for every person to live in a big apartment, to use the heater just for yourself, to go shopping for yourself only and end up throwing away half of what you bought because you couldn’t eat it all on time? Is it right that many kids think that potatoes are grown on the supermarket-tree? Should we only consume-consume-consume? When was the last time you gave something back to the earth – even just your food-scraps?

My ex-roommate Derek is the leader of Project Compost while he is “Saving the World - One Compost Bin at the Time!” – he is handling, with a budget only student groups in York can dream of, 40 volunteers and over 1000 pounds of food matter every day that are picked up from around campus by two electric vehicles and placed in the compost facilities (you only need a little bit of field!) next to the Student Farm on campus.

Of course it is not all glory. It is hard to save the world. There are two organic gardens situated behind Davis Student Coop and one of the things that are expected of you if you are to live in the campus coops is that you should work in the garden. For some reason I found this exceptionally hard. The day of gardening was Fridays – when Friday came I was so tired from school and all the 39 people constantly around me (13 people *3 houses) that I just wanted to sit at a café and be quiet.

Everything in the coops is based on consensus. This means that a decision is not made until everybody agrees on it, and if not someone disagrees you have to find compromises till all parts are happy with the suggested solution or action. There are rules to this too, and although Model United Nations had trained me in motions and public speaking, this seemed much harder, and I was thrown quite unprepared into the process. Once a week my house had a meeting that would last from 1 to 3 hours after dinner. House matters, personal matters and organisational things were discussed and decided by “thumbs up” (everybody has to give Thumbs Up for something to be passed).

Living in a coop, you are a part of a community, a living organism that breathes and nurtures through your participation. If someone has difficulties communicating with others, or communication is neglected, the community suffers. This happened at one severe occasion, and my house was wounded as a community – it was time to rebuild trust and communication.

For me, it was time to sit by a kitchen table and drink a cup of tea in peace and quiet, growing my own herbs in my own little garden.

I am not done with the communal experience. I will continue to live my life closer to the Earth, but it is important to not loose oneself in the process.

Keep on planting those trees, challenge decision making through communication and recycle. Please. You are much needed.