Ecovillages: Charting a Course for Facilitating Humans to Survive and Flourish

Through dedicated work in regenerative farming, ranching, green construction, and other roles, ecovillage residents can heal land, sequester carbon in the soil, and build purpose-driven, activist communities focused on planetary restoration.

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Ecovillages can demonstrate effective ways to combat the pandemic of metabolic illnesses—overweight, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and increased abdominal girth. The prevalence of these is alarming; in the US, overweight and obesity alone in the US affect about 73.1% of American adults and 35.4% of US children, Ecovillages could provide tangible models for healthier lifestyles that can counteract these devastating trends.

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The Levels app: empowers individuals to understand their bodies through AI-powered habit tracking, including diet, exercise, sleep, water intake, mindful time, cold plunges, saunas, comprehensive lab testing, and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). Membership in a climate-reversing ecovillage would involve participating in the Levels research protocol and taking daily action to optimize metabolic health.

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The Levels research protocol aims to:

• Fill Gaps in Knowledge: Characterize "normal" glucose dynamics in the broader, non-diabetic population.
• Investigate Lifestyle Impacts: Understand how lifestyle factors like food, exercise, sleep, stress, age, and sex affect glucose levels.
• Identify Predictors of Health Complications: Analyze continuous glucose monitoring and logged data to identify glucose variations that might precede conditions like prediabetes and Type 2 diabetes.
• Develop Personalized Insights: Provide objective data to help users connect health to daily choices and make informed lifestyle decisions.
• Support Product Development: Improve the Levels software to better guide users toward improved metabolic health.
• Contribute to Broader Research: Make anonymized and aggregated data available for academic and medical researchers.

In essence, Level's research is designed to build a comprehensive dataset of continuous glucose levels in non-diabetic individuals to gain unprecedented clarity on glucose dynamics, lifestyle impacts, and early metabolic issues, ultimately empowering individuals and advancing metabolic health science.

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Furthermore, as a volunteer collaborator with the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), I developed a multiple regression equation to model the relationship between food intake, physical activity, age, current body mass index (BMI) and gender to estimate future BMI. This formula could serve to estimate future BMI from Levels app data (diet, physical activity, and other metrics). This could greatly benefit individuals inside and outside the ecovillages seeking optimal health within a supportive atmosphere.

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If the connection were made to ecovillages modeling the net sequestration of CO2 into the ground, it could also attract significant funding from the US Department of Health and Human Services, other government agencies, and private donors.

By fostering cultures that promote healthier lifestyles, ecovillages can contribute to saving the US economy trillions of dollars annually. The American Action Forum analysis estimates the economic cost of just four nutrition-related chronic diseases among 18 to 64-year-olds at nearly 9 percent of the US gross domestic product, amounting to approximately $2.63 trillion in 2025. The Milken Institute e further estimated the total costs of various chronic diseases in the U.S. at $5.84 trillion per year.

Many urban dwellers face high costs of living—encompassing housing, taxes, and general expenses—while daily stressors like traffic congestion, parking difficulties, strained public transportation, and pervasive noise and air pollution are common. Ecovillages can draw climate activists and individuals concerned with optimizing their health by offering an environment that supports personal well-being, actively contributes to reversing climate change, and fosters lives enriched by meaningful work and purpose.

My research has explored and modeled the global warming reversal potential of diverse activists uniting to create templates for net carbon-sequestering rural communities. These communities would emit less carbon dioxide (CO2) than they sequester through renewable energy generation (solar, wind, geothermal, small hydroelectric, etc.), organic/regenerative farming, ranching, and other land regeneration practices.

Equally important as net carbon sequestration is the quality of life for all ecovillage residents, as they define it. Striving towards a social environment that fosters optimal human metabolic health—eliminating overweight, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and excess abdominal girth—will be an ongoing commitment. The widespread adoption of tools like the Levels.com app, co-created by Dr. Casey Means (a prominent voice in metabolic health), could greatly benefit this endeavor.

Metabolically healthy activist ecovillagers could then guide ecotourists and health-enhancement tourists, contributing financially, socially, and ecologically to the success of these global warming-reversing ecovillages. Initial successes could foster a viral proliferation of more climate activist groups seeking existentially important work, optimal health, social engagement, economic viability, and a joyful life.

I asked Google Gemini, "Looking forward, how many global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) per year would allow for a livable climate for future generations?" The answer was clear: "For a livable climate, annual global GHG emissions need to be on a steep downward trajectory, reaching roughly half of current levels by 2030 and net-zero CO2 emissions by around 2050, followed by net-zero for all GHGs. The longer the world delays significant reductions, the more severe the future impacts will be regarding atmospheric carbon dioxide, species extinction, ecological degradation, and socio-political instability."

No one said that reversing global warming and preventing human extinction would be easy or non-disruptive to the status quo. However, it is a mathematical possibility! With climate activists’ launched ecovillages doubling every two months (32 doublings in 5.3 years) there would be over 4 million ecovillages with 4 billion ecovillagers globally in 2030. Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would be reduced from about 53.0 gigatons CO2e in 2023 to about 26 gigatons CO2e in 2030. By 2050, they would be near zero.