Last updated 9.22.23. Newest updates in blue.

This model variation consists of a rural land-based community located in areas at LOW risk of climate damage and LOW social unrest.

Not everyone can or should migrate to the low-risk climate change zones. If you are over 50 without small children, we do not usually recommend migrating to a climate-safer area. Instead, we should save those minimal climate change-safer lands for younger people and their children so that they can live the longest and most securely.

That being said, individuals who choose these rural, land-based eco-communities could live separately in private homes, either near or even with each other in some form of communal housing. This type of rural land-based eco-community could also attract and build a large enough off eco-community site membership in the nearby area to be capable of exerting enough positive collective influence on its surrounding population as to gain some level of political influence and independence from the local rural culture and its economic and political activity.

To the surrounding larger rural community, these new eco-communities would appear not unlike any other "immigrant" or newcomer community with its own culture and social and commercial practices. For example, consider the many religious groups who are conspicuous because of dress, holiday observance, religious schooling, etc. While adopting many cultural changes in their newly relocated areas, these individuals will not appear any more out of place to the surrounding population than the range of existing immigrants or current norms. Instead, they would be well integrated into the fabric of the local community. These individuals would occasionally still be participating in the essential activities of the community surrounding them.

Wherever possible, they can use repurposed existing structures rather than building from scratch to minimize environmental impact and get started quickly. 

To view a fundamental social contract for this eco-community model, click here. This eco-community model creates its application process using as much or as little of the advanced eco-community application as found on this page as described in the introduction on this page.

What happens in this CSV rural model

A major and first part of your CSV member time will be involved with assisting your CSV community's and other members' efforts to prepare for and adapt to climate change and the 11 other worsening global crises. To do that effectively, this CSV community model will find ways to support and motivate each other in executing the many parts Parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) of the Job One for Humanity Climate Emergency and Resilience-Building Plan.

The comprehensive Job One Plan has taken over a decade of research to develop, and it covers everything that needs to be done. While it is not everything that can be done or should be done in any of our CSV models, it is always the first thingthat any CSV model must start and get done as soon as possible to protect its members from what is coming.

Here is a quick overview of the critical parts of the Job One Plan to help you improve the probability that you, your business, and your children will survive and thrive for as long and as comfortably as possible:

1. Part One covers all of the needed emergency catastrophe and recovery preparations, including how much space or land you will need for your essential food growing needs.

2. Part Two covers the necessary lifestyle and livelihood resilience-building adaptions that will be required.

3. Part Three covers all of the crucial climate change remedial actions our governments must execute now and that they should have started 60 years ago. 

4. Part Four covers what our politicians must do to force our governments to finally act. And,

5. At some point, the urban/suburban CSV community must reach out and help educate local politicians and government agency officials on the city areas they must address to build full local community climate change resilience. Click here for the list of critical whole local community-level resilience-building issues that must be completed before more major climate change tipping points are crossed.

This means that either mutually as a group or through your local CSV village coordinators, you will collectively and individually decide which actions within Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the Job One for Humanity Plan you want to start first, second, third, etc. Each local ClimateSafe Village will have different situations, priorities, and resources; therefore, they may work on different Parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) of the Job One for Humanity Plan in different sequences and ways.

How long does it take to become climate change resilient in an urban or rural CSV community?

In general, if you are working part-time on the necessary emergency preparations and adaptations (described on this preparation page and this adaptation page), it will take 2 to 3 years to make your home or business in an urban CSV climate change-resilient. If you are building a rural CSV, you could easily be looking at 3 to 5 years. 

If you do it full-time, it will be quicker. Many things, like using permaculture to build high-quality food-growing soil, will still take several years to complete.

Construction companies are extremely busy dealing with the housing shortage and repairing climate change damage. Many of them will put you on a waiting list for up to six months or even a year or longer before they even start your remodeling, upgrading, or construction project.

What these additional long build-out times mean is that there is a real urgency to get started on your emergency preparations and adaptations today because after we cross critical climate change tipping points from 2025-2031, things will get much worse very fast. They also will continue to worsen from 203o to about 2050, which also means emergency and adaptation supplies will steadily be harder to get. And their costs will continually rise far faster than other commodities. 

This time-sensitive issue does not mean you should ever panic. You have adequate preparation and adaptation time before the worst consequences occur. This time-sensitive issue only means get busy today while you also "Keep calm and carry on."

How to join a Rural Land Based CSV community model:

1. If you have not done so already, join this "survive and thrive" ClimateSafe Village by clicking the Join link on this page. This will also start the process for you to gain access to our private CSV discussion forum, help you locate a CSV location and model option right for you, and allow you to join one of our CSV advisory committees to add your knowledge, experience, and perspective.

2. Please fill in the following survey by clicking here.

3. Learn more about us by reviewing our CSV online guide table of contents here. Be sure to read at least our CSV quick overview page here.

4. If you have questions not covered in our CSV online guide, please also check our CSV frequently asked questions FAQ here.

5. Next, please email [email protected] to let us know:

a. which model of CSV do you want to join: the rural, urban, only virtual community or the Bellingham headquarters CSV,

b. that you want access to the private CSV group discussion forums and 

c. let us know about your skills and experience, which would most apply to the CSV model you selected.

d. if you have remaining questions.

6. In your email to us, tell us that you agree to our online communication rules found here, and you agree to the principles found in our social contract found here. After we receive your email, our ClimateSafe Villages support team will get back to you within three business days or less with your next steps and possible other connections. In addition, they may ask for additional information before accepting you as a member, depending on the information you provide in your email. 

7. Become a subscriber on the Job One for Humanity website by going to the Sign-in link at the top left of every page and creating a new subscriber account. Then, go to your personal profile area as a new user and fill in as much information as possible. This unique profile information will be kept confidential and will help us connect you with the right support team. The Job One website will provide the latest climate change news and alerts.

8. To view a basic social contract for any CSV model, click here. 

Please note: We have also created a special online team project collaboration tool called BaseCamp for all members and CSVs. It is open to individuals actively helping to create any CSV community model. 

Here is the new cost estimator we are continuing to develop for the Bellingham Rural CSV. This cost estimator can be easily adapted to other rural or hybrid CSVs.

How to get a Rural CSV model started in your local area

1. Realize you are the coordinator and leader you have been waiting for. If you do not step forward as your area's initial or temporary local coordinator leader, the local CSV you will eventually need may not happen.

2. Contact your potentially interested friends or promote to other individuals in your area who you think could be interested in the many support, knowledge, and other advantages of co-creating a rural CSV. Do not forget to look over our individual member qualities list on this page to help focus your recruiting on the most ideal initial members to target for your recruiting.

3. Set up a relaxed in-person or Zoom-based "meet and greet" for these individuals to connect and see how they interact. (If you email [email protected] and give us a week's advance notice, we can search our many thousands of Job One for Humanity subscribers for people in your local area and forward your first "meet and greet" event promotion details only to those local individuals from our email lists who also might be interested.

4. Once you have a core group of people interested in working together and supporting each other, at your next meeting, collectively decide on which actions within Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the Job One for Humanity Plan you want to start first, second, third, etc. Each local ClimateSafe Village will have different situations, priorities, and resources; therefore, they may decide to work on different Parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) of the Job One for Humanity Plan in different sequences and ways. (These Job One Plan first actions are strongly recommended for every CSV. )

5. Use what you have learned from our CSV online guide table of contents here and in our CSV frequently asked questions FAQ here to continue to run and manage your local urban CSV. Do not be afraid to be creative and flexible in finding new ways to create and motivate your local CSV to stay on course and still enjoy their lives.

6. Stay connected in the CSV private discussion forum and virtual CSV projects to get support for yourself and to network for new knowledge, tools, etc.

7. At some point, review how the detailed launch steps and other actions and policies found on the Bellingham CSV headquarters page here might help further expand the success of your local CSV. 

Every CSV model will require learning, experimentation, tinkering, and adaptability to the local human resource quality and availability, and other local resources and conditions. No two CSVs will ever be exactly alike. Continual mutation in new localized experiments is a good thing in evolutionary terms for long-term survival capable of surviving ever-evolving conditions.

Do not be afraid to bring your own ideas and style into your new CSV. Experiment, listen to the feedback, and adapt quickly.

How to finance a Rural ClimateSafe Village (CSV) or your own climate change resilience-building home or business upgrades.

There are many ways to finance the often costly emergency preparations and other adaptations you will need to do, even in an urban CSV, to become individually and collectively climate change resilient and well prepared for the many intensifying climate change consequences. (Not all of the items on the list below will apply to individual home or business upgrades.)

Here are a few of them:

1. Use your savings.
2. Put a percentage of your income into this action every paycheck.
3. Get a bank loan or loans from others, 
4. Crowdfunding, 
5. Get a loan from the slowly growing Slow Money Movement.
6. Green energy efficient mortgages (There are numerous green energy efficient mortgage types offering different benefits.) 
7. Get a government-backed loan and special tax credits. (There are such things depending on what you are planning to do.)
8. Form a non-profit and apply for grants,
9. Get a group of people together and share the costs of buying the land, building the structures, or upgrading and equipping existing structures and locations. To do this step safely and wisely, you must have clear cost and use sharing contracts and member contracts if you are in a rural or urban CSV. And if this is a collective land building purchase, you will need to have some legal/corporate structure that is capable of holding the land or buildings for the common good, like a nonprofit organization or conservation land trust. (We are currently working on creating all of the contracts and forms needed to do option six. At CSV, we believe that option six may be the fastest and most likely way to fund a new rural or urban CSV.
10. Some combination of one or more of the above funding options layered together as needed.

Please feel free to make additional suggestions for funding. At this time, we do not believe that turning the creation of rural or urban CSVs into any kind of profit-making investment scheme is wise. Humanity is facing the greatest existential threat to its existence and its history, and trying to profit from this with investment schemes that often go wrong or attract shady promoters is not anything that the CSV would want to be associated with.

Additional land, Home, and Building Flexible Design and Purchase Options for Rural CSVs

The Importance of Wise Cooperation with and between Urban, rural, hybrid, and Virtual ClimateSafe Villages

It will be wise for urban, rural, hybrid, and virtual CimateSafe Villages to maintain good communication and intelligent cooperation with the most isolated rural villages. The reason is simple. Urban and virtual village members may eventually become unsafe in many locations worldwide from 2035-2050. This is when climate change and other global crises are predicted near peak levels, and their members may eventually have to migrate to new, safer areas.

If urban and virtual CSV members have maintained good relations with the most isolated CSVs, at the minimum, they could have plenty of duplicate emergency supplies pre-stored there when needed. They may even be able to migrate to the more isolated villages if they had prearranged such agreements and had made all of the appropriate reciprocal exchanges. (For remote villages, these cross-village financial exchanges and services may also allow them to fund themselves better and grow even quicker.)

We are facing severe challenges and hardships that humanity has never encountered before. Maintaining good relations with other ClimateSafe Villages will be essential to "hedging" the longest-term survival for many ClimateSave Villages located in urban areas, close to mass migration routes, in highly populated areas, or for online-only members.

Please note: Some rural CSVs will collectively purchase land in two climate-safer locations simultaneously when they are being established. The second land purchase is almost always a more isolated rural location that would serve as a backup location in case some emergency would cause the CSV members to temporarily or permanently relocate to a fully prepared, safer, and more isolated location. This is an additional security strategy beyond creating a mutually beneficial bug-out relationship with pre-existing, more isolated rural CSVs. 

CSV Member Safety Application Tip

The Bellingham, Washington, the new CSV headquarters member application process found here, is particularly applicable to use in reverse to help you determine if you want to join a specific ClimateSafe Village. Before joining any CSV model anywhere in the world, we strongly recommend you use the applicable member application questions found here to interview the coordinator/leaders of that village to find out how well and how much they have screened their current members for potential problems or issues. The quality of individuals living cooperatively in any CSV will be a major factor in that CSV's long-term survival.

You could also use the CSV frequently asked questions list or the critical topics in our online guide table of contents to ask how that village will or is handling the issues you are most concerned about because every village is slightly different and runs itself. It may or may not follow some of the values, principles, and actions of the Bellingham headquarters CSV.

It is entirely in your hands to do your proper due diligence when investigating any legally independent CSV model or location as a possible place to join or relocate. Treat this evaluation process as one of the most important decisions you will ever make because it may well be as climate change and other factors worsen. 

Homes in rural CSVs

You will be able to build your own home, lease a pre-existing home, or hire an approved contractor to build a home on CSV-owned rural land.

More Potential Income and Ongoing Funding Sources for the ClimateSafe Villages and Their Members

Failed intentional communities and eco-villages did so most often because those communities did not have reliable and steady income sources for themselves or their members. Therefore, all CSVs must generate sustainable, fair exchange-based income for themselves and their members. This does not mean that building or running CSVs should ever be treated as an investment opportunity or a property development scheme for the profit of a few early-entry individuals. 

Most income sources within CSVs should be co-ops or community-owned and managed except for those individually owned businesses brought to or created within the community that are sustainable, eco-friendly, and meet that community member's approval and community standards. All co-ops or community-owned businesses within the community should also experiment with the new economic models of fair exchange and merit and responsibility-based incomes.

Here are just a few of the ways ClimateSafe Villages can fund or support themselves either before or once established and operational, but always in fair exchange and community-value congruent ways.

Income for CSVs:

1. Selling online educational courses on many community-related subjects and skills.

2. Selling online climate adaptation and resilience courses.

3. Selling at the eco-community on-site courses and day-long, weekend, or longer sustainability and organic gardening retreats.

4. Selling surplus organic food to the surrounding community.

5. Selling community and sustainably made crafts, art, and other products to the surrounding community.

6. Individual members running their on-site businesses, which are value-compatible with eco-community values.

7. Allowing retirees who want to live in net-zero homes within the community to contribute more significant amounts to help build or maintain the community because they may be unable to provide as much labor to help run the community.

8. Rural CSVs allow visitors to stay in their RVs for several weeks to experience CSV living. (They would have to build approved RV spaces, which could be a substantial income source. These rural CSVs could also offer organic meals to short- and longer-term community kitchen visitors.)

9. Housing leasing payments for homes, apartments, and dorm rooms constructed in rural CSVs on community-owned land.

10. Rural CSVs can lease agreed upon secure storage space or even vacant living spaces to urban or virtual CSV members for storage of emergency backup supplies and temporary or permanent occupancy during an emergency.

11. Community members might also develop climate change resilience-building consulting services or resilience remodeling services for the communities surrounding that CSV model.

12. Some CSV members might create small businesses to help other CSVs with their initial construction, remodeling, speciality survival equipment (solar, water capture, etc) or food-growing operations. They would temporarily move to a new CSV location and live there while helping that CSV get started.

13. Some CSVs might create a community-owned business that could provide other products like speciality survival equipment (like EMP shielding kits,) unique greenhouses, prefab homes, vertical hydroponics kits, dried food products capable of surviving years on a shelf, etc. These businesses could be driven from the advanced and always evolving CSV climate change, climate change resilience building, and food growing knowledge base, and could employ numerous community members.

14. Create a service that reviews and rates only the products that will be used in worldwide CSVs. This service could become highly-trusted because it would be executed with the integrity and thoroughness of a Consumer Reports type company.

15. Receiving donations from individuals who want to see our eco-community goals succeed. We are still working out our policies and possible exchanges to wisely accommodate the contributions of individuals who make considerably larger donations to get our eco-communities going, being maintained, or expanding. 

We understand and value that some wealthy individuals are ethical and honorable and see their wealth as a generational responsibility to use wisely to improve and protect humanity's well-being and future.

Things currently being considered for the larger donor start-up eco-community funding and contributions are as follows:

a. If the individual eco-community is a registered non-profit educational organization, large donors can be offered the standard donation tax deduction for that country. (We anticipate these eco-communities will be registered non-profit educational organizations. Each eco-community will determine its best legal structures as appropriate. 

b. Awarding large donors a week or longer for several years to live at the eco-community as a guest.

c. Allowing large donors to put their name on an eco-community structure or piece of equipment they fund.

d. Allowing large donors to join the eco-community and build a net-zero home for them and their children, but on the same terms applied to every new member.

e. We are also currently working on ways to be in fair exchange with any individuals or members who connect us to large donors and funding sources that help provide the seed finances to expedite the creation of any of the four models of eco-communities.

We can offer wealthy ethical individuals the safest place to have a home or apartment for themselves and their families as the anticipated large-scale extinction and collapse occurs. This is because they would be a part of a well-prepared eco-community with deep shared values, a commitment to mutual support and quality of life, and protection that could be relied upon, is something that money alone can never buy. These rural and hybrid eco-communities would also be located in the areas with the best survival probabilities for our current worsening global crises.

Helping to create these new eco-communities and having a home there is the ultimate insurance policy. So please click here to read about why many emergency survival plans used by the ultra-wealthy are not realistic and will likely fail.

When taking any large donations from the ultra-rich, we will carefully review their business history and past charity actions to see if they were, in general, ethical and reasonably compatible with our eco-community values and worldview. If you are fundraising for your eco-community, the wives, x-wives, children, and other relatives of an ultra-rich individual, who are also ultra-rich through divorce or inheritance, are usually better aligned with our values, worldview and can more easily pass our ethical donation review.

And finally, individuals who make large donations will be treated as any other eco-community member and be expected to participate in everyday shared community actions when they are residents in the eco-community. Great wealth or celebrity earns you no special treatment. We are evolving new social and economic systems that value merit but do not continue the economic distortions or imbalances of the past that have also contributed to our current 12 crises. 

"Only the wisest, most cooperative, and best-prepared individuals, families, and businesses living and working in highly value-aligned eco-communities with a deep and common worldview, which will give them the additional needed emotional and psychological resilience (in addition to the eco-community's physical resilience) will have the best possibility of surviving the worsening 12 global crises we all now face." Lawrence Wollersheim

16. We are also exploring and open to other eco-community value-compatible income sources for members and the eco-community. One such way is for younger adults to have their parents sponsor them and their initial expenses for building their net-zero homes in these new eco-communities. This is a common practice because parents often help their children enter their first homes. It is even more critical in this case as parents typically want to see their children survive and live longer lives. Another area we are exploring is crowdfunding apps like Kick Starter.

17. If we raise enough funding, as a community, we may pre-build all net-zero homes or apartments and long-term lease them to members or exchange their leasing fees for ongoing services rendered to the eco-community. Our ideal funding situation is to buy the land, build all of the necessary eco-community infrastructure, and simultaneously build all of the net-zero homes from the initial funding.

18. All members will be obligated to regularly contribute (most likely monthly) to fair, adequate, or, where appropriate, means-based financial support for the community. These membership payments will have clear guidelines for covering the costs of community administrators and for all reasonable administrative and related community costs required to maintain their CSV community model so that it can securely and continually forward and sustain the community's well-being.

Please also note that retired individuals or other individuals who cannot continue to work productively within these eco-communities will be allowed membership on a case-by-case basis. However, their initial and monthly financial contributions to the eco-community will be substantially larger than individuals who can provide the ongoing needed services to the eco-community.