Living Otherwise: Practices of Sustainability and Prefiguration in Gaia Terra

Ecovillages represent significant contemporary laboratories for experimenting with alternative forms of living, social organization, and ecological practices. Situated within the field of Environmental Humanities, this thesis examines ecovillages not as utopian solutions to the socio-ecological crisis, but as prefigurative spaces where material practices, cultural imaginaries, and forms of conviviality intersect to generate possibilities for the present. Drawing on one month of participant observation at Gaia Terra, an ecovillage located in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy), the research investigates how this community enacts everyday strategies of low-impact living, self-construction and natural building, creative reuse of materials, alternative waste management, resilient approaches to energy and water systems, and a vegan, local, organic food model understood as both a political practice and a critique of the industrial agro-food system, embodying a lived ecology that does not separate environmental concerns from social and communal dimensions. The thesis further addresses the question of transferability: to what extent can the practices observed at Gaia Terra be adapted to wider and different contexts? It argues that the value of ecovillages lies less in offering a comprehensive model to replicate, and more in demonstrating how concrete, place-based practices can inspire broader processes of ecological and social transition, offering tools, imaginaries, and methodologies applicable beyond intentional communities. By combining ethnography, political ecology, and Environmental Humanities perspectives, the thesis shows how Gaia Terra provides a situated example of how everyday practices can contribute to imagining and enacting more sustainable and socially connected ways of living.