Ecotopia

A 1973 ad touts Village Homes in Woodland’s Daily Democrat. (Image courtesy of the Judy Corbett Archive and the UC Davis Design Museum)

TThe first time I strolled through Village Homes on a visit to Davis 10 years ago, the pastoral charms of the unique neighborhood stirred feelings of nostalgia I couldn’t immediately place. Rambling down its peaceful pathways, one storybook scene after another unfolded: a garden plot in this yard, a whimsical sculpture in that yard, here a fruit tree, there a swing set, nary a car in sight. It was, I soon realized, a near-perfect evocation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire, the hobbits’ bucolic homeland, where jolly creatures lived in harmony with nature and one another. Only fitting, then, that every street in Village Homes—like Rivendell Lane, Oakenshield Road and, yes, Shire Lane—is inspired by a place or character in The Hobbit  or The Lord of the Rings  trilogy.

As a child raised in the ’60s and ’70s counterculture movement, The Hobbit  was my favorite bedtime story—my poor mother would nod off nightly reading it aloud, and I’d shake her awake, begging for more. By day we tended our garden, and by night, as the doomsday clock’s hands crept ever closer to midnight, my childhood fears of nuclear Armageddon were allayed by the gentle hobbits’ triumph over world-ending evil and their back-to-nature happy ending. The same environmental consciousness that led the 20th-century’s counterculture to embrace Tolkien’s vision of the peaceable Shire also led a young married couple named Michael and Judy Corbett to design and build their own version of a garden paradise—called Village Homes—right here in the fast-growing college town of Davis, California.

But there’s far more to this Eden than meets the eye. Peek “under the hood” of Village Homes’ pretty vistas and you’ll find a raft of novel building techniques, radical technologies and social engineering practices that were practically unheard of at the time, like passive solar heating and cooling, drought-proof natural drainage (no ugly concrete storm drains here), and shared public greens to promote social life, all embedded within a bountiful “food forest” that’s the polar opposite of an urban “food desert.”

All the street names in Village Homes were inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien, whose fantasy works were wildly popular with the 1970s counterculture idealists.

Village Homes—widely acknowledged to be the world’s first solar subdivision—was so innovative when construction began in 1975 that the world quickly took note: Visitors over its first decade included first lady Rosalynn Carter, French President François Mitterrand, folk legend Pete Seeger and movie star Jane Fonda, drawn in by magazine articles and newspaper accounts from around the globe

The first residents moved in 50 years ago, in April 1976, and the UC Davis Design Museum is celebrating the unique community with a new exhibit this spring. Today, climate change is the looming threat keeping us all awake at night, but the lessons Village Homes imparts feel just as valid as they did in the ’70s, and a walk through these 245 homes on 70 acres offers an intimate, living vision of what an environmentally friendly world could look like—nay, should  look like.

To see how Village Homes is faring a half century on, I meet up with Judy Corbett one morning in November 2025 at its community center, quite coincidentally, right in front of a bronze plaque thanking her and Michael.

Village Homes’ matriarch is energetic in head-to-toe athleisure wear, with the lithe figure of an ageless forest nymph. “I have incredible longevity genes,” she says with a mischievous laugh, politely declining to state her age. “I’ve looked 10 years younger than I am for my whole life, so I’m used to being ‘the little kid.’ I still feel like that.”

We duck into the Plumshire building—another clever nod to Tolkien’s Shire—and head to the community dance studio for the Monday “gentle barre” exercise class. There, we join half a dozen more women of a certain age who are all just as fit and rosy-cheeked as Judy, all longtime residents, chatting about pets and grown children. Judy’s genes may be supplying the nature, but Village Homes is clearly providing the nurture, to judge by this micro sampling of its longtime denizens. It’s a glimpse into what all of our lives could look like if we spent 50 years living in a sustainable paradise, eating fruit picked straight off the vine and communing with our neighbors. Because long before anyone coined the term “Blue Zone” to describe a hot-bed of health and longevity, Michael and Judy instinctively identified the keys to optimal living: an active lifestyle, a healthy diet with lots of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables, and deep community ties—because research out of Harvard’s School of Public Health states that meaningful social connection is as essential for robust health as olive oil.

Many homes in the world’s first solar subdivision are now outfitted with rooftop solar panels.

Strolling the greenways after exercise class, Village Homes doesn’t at first glance look all that different from other residential townscapes in California, with its eclectic mix of façades clad in casual, rustic finishes—think Mediterranean stucco, Sea Ranch-style redwood plank siding, silvered cedar shakes—that would feel right at home in Marin County, Santa Cruz or the Oakland hills.

But one of four original “sod houses”—with earth berm walls and a green roof that looks a lot like a hobbit-hole—still sits nestled among its above-ground neighbors. And quirky DIY details are everywhere: a coop full of colorful parakeets, a rock-climbing wall, fairy gardens, gnomes and painted rocks peeking out from under foliage. Cars are hidden in back-alley cul-de-sacs so there’s no automotive through-traffic, and the only way to move through Village Homes freely is on foot or bicycle. Instead of the hiss of tires on pavement, there is only birdsong.

We pause at a common area where dozens of cleverly carved pumpkins left over from a Halloween parade a few days earlier line the pathway. “My intent was to make a place with a strong sense of community,” Judy says, “but man, they’ve done it up in spades.”

She and Michael divided the homesteading duties when creating their modern-day Shire: While Michael focused on developing eco-forward innovations like creating natural drainage and harnessing solar power, Judy concentrated on environmental psychology, including how to group the homes to maximize social interaction. While studying for her master’s in ecology at UC Davis, she learned that eight was an optimal number when it came to social interaction, so she decided that groups of eight homes would be the Goldilocks “just right” arrangement. Some clusters have planted their shared space with gardens, while others have chosen to install play equipment or picnic tables for potlucks. The only thing not allowed in those common areas? Fences.

Judy gestures to a stately grove of olive trees as we head that way. “The olive harvest is next Sunday, where we all pick olives and get them ready for pressing.” Anyone who helps with the harvest gets a precious bottle of olive oil.

Cheyla Selena, a resident of the Sunwise Co-op at Village Homes, tends to her household’s garden. Industrious villagers can save on grocery bills by growing their own food or participating in community harvest days.

We pass by the last house built in Village Homes, that of Michael and Judy’s son Chris, born in 1974. The Corbetts moved into the enclave in 1976, in time for Chris to grow up surrounded by nature. Chris, an architect, wanted his own children, now 14 and 4, to have some of that magic too, and he and his family relocated to the community in 2024.

Michael and Judy divorced in 1999—they had raised two children and one village, and found they wanted different things in life, so Judy kept the family house, while Michael went on to develop easier-to-manage micro projects with just a handful of homes in downtown Davis, where he now lives (he still owns a half-interest in a 10-unit Village Homes apartment building, so he visits the neighborhood almost daily).

The last stop on our tour is the house Judy and Michael built. The stucco exterior is mostly concealed by foliage, but inside, it’s a lodge-like space—at 2,400 square feet, it’s one of the larger homes in the development—to accommodate the many gatherings the Corbetts regularly hosted. Judy designed its aesthetics after her favorite building, Yosemite’s Ahwahnee hotel, with rustic wood beams over lustrous tile floors and a soaring cathedral ceiling in the living room. A photo from 1979 shows Rosalynn Carter sitting in this very room, bathed in light from the ceiling’s capacious skylights while deep in conversation with Michael and Judy about the home’s passive solar heating technology: Winter sun floods in, striking a row of water-filled metal columns seen behind the sofa, heating them by day to radiate warmth back into the house all night long, while massive shutters on pulleys slide in place to block the summer sun. Carter and Michael then rode Schwinn bikes through Village Homes as neighborhood children stood by grinning and gaping. A mere three months later, President Jimmy Carter hosted a dedication ceremony commemorating the installation of solar panels on the White House roof and the Corbetts were extended an invitation to attend. “And idiots, so busy with other things, we turned it down,” Judy remembers with a rueful laugh. But every year since, the family Christmas tree in that living room has been decorated with a White House ornament the Carters sent them.

First lady Rosalynn Carter (center) sits with Village Homes founders Judy and Michael Corbett in their living room—featuring solar-heated steel tubes that warm their house in wintertime—on March 20, 1979. (Courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)

As a result of technologies like this, utility bills at Village Homes have always been low, and remain so today. Judy’s electric bill averages just around $40 per month, while the average California household pays around $200. Many Village homeowners have removed their passive solar columns during renovations over the years, as rooftop solar panels became cost-effective. The Corbett house has added solar panels as well, along with an efficient mini-split heat pump and air conditioner, but Judy has left the architecturally beautiful passive system in place.

Carter isn’t the only boldface name to visit Village Homes in the ’70s and ’80s, when the project was frequently in the news (in 1977, Newsweek  named Davis “The Thriftiest Town of All” on the strength of Village Homes’s energy-saving techniques, and in 1979, The New York Times  called Village Homes “the epitome of Sun Belt suburbia,” while academics from MIT to Oxford launched laudatory studies). Actresses Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve’s Superman, and Pam Dawber, who played Mindy opposite Robin Williams’ Mork, both visited and even spent the night at the Corbett home (young Chris gave up his childhood bed for them). Jane Fonda and then-husband and state legislator Tom Hayden were family friends and frequent guests. Folk star and environmentalist Pete Seeger came too.

In 1984, French President François Mitterrand arrived via helicopter. As Michael tells it, the Reagan White House wasn’t keen on Mitterrand visiting, but he had read about Village Homes in the French newspaper Le Monde, and insisted. When Mitterrand landed, the children of Village Homes were lined up waving French flags, and Michael greeted him with a single red rose, “which was a symbol of socialism,” Michael says with a twinkle. “From what we heard, this drove the White House nuts.” There followed an intimate reception for 50 in the Corbetts’ backyard, with good California wine and French-style chèvre cheese the Corbetts sourced from Capay Valley.

With so much fanfare, it’s interesting to learn that Village Homes could easily never have existed at all. It all began in May 1972, when Michael and Judy Corbett, then in their early 30s, set up a booth at UC Davis’ Whole Earth Festival—Judy was pursuing her master’s in ecology at the school—to recruit like-minded souls to brainstorm a solar-powered eco-village. The two starry-eyed dreamers had no bankroll and little to no experience as real estate developers. Success was so unlikely that in 1999, when Time  magazine included the Corbetts in its “Heroes for the Planet” cover story, heralding the project as “one of the world’s best examples of sustainable development,” it noted that “the ideas behind the project were considered so radical that it almost didn’t happen.”

“It was all about luck,” Michael says when I catch up with him a couple of days after visiting Judy. Michael Corbett, 85, doesn’t look like an older hippie, but more like a gentleman farmer with a vibe out of the pages of an Eddie Bauer catalog. “Well, two things,” he adds. “Not giving up. And luck.”

Michael Corbett (left) greets French President François Mitterrand during the latter’s 1984 tour of California that included stops at what the French leader saw as two crucial hotbeds of innovation: Silicon Valley and Village Homes. (Courtesy of Michael Corbett)

As a young boy growing up in Seattle, Michael was steeped in nature. “My parents fished, so I grew up playing along rivers,” he says. “My [maternal] grandmother picked blackberries along the Green River, and I would go with her.” The family moved to Sacramento when he was 10, settling in Hollywood Park, but he spent summers with his paternal grandparents in rural Oregon, on the Deschutes River in Bend. “I had this really close relationship with nature,” he says. Visiting those places as an adult, he was devastated to find them largely paved over—so add righteous anger to his slate of motivations.

During his formative years, Michael read Thoreau’s Walden  and John Ruskin’s The Poetry of Architecture. And Tolkien? Not so much. The Corbetts happened to be visiting Judy’s mom when they needed to finalize the street plan for Village Homes. “Judy’s mother suggested we pick street names out of The Hobbit. I had never read it,” Michael says with a laugh.

Neither had Judy. “We were camping with my mom on an island in Oregon, and she was reading the book,” she remembers. “We were saying, ‘Jeez, we’ve got to come up with a bunch of street names. What can we do?’ And that was her suggestion.” But Tolkien’s idealist vision of the triumph of nature was so prevalent in the zeitgeist that the Corbetts didn’t have to have read it themselves to realize it was a perfect fit for Village Homes. “It resonated with people,” Michael says. “In fact, some people have called it Hobbitsville.”

Michael and Judy met at McClatchy High in Sacramento (her family had moved here from the Bay Area when she was 8) and married as undergrads—he at Sacramento State, where he majored in architecture, and she at UC Davis, where she earned a biology degree to pursue a career as a medical technologist. The game plan was for Michael to continue his studies at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, but Michael clashed with faculty there and didn’t finish. So in 1964, soon after their daughter Lisa was born, the couple moved to the Bay Area where Michael worked as a draftsman for San Francisco architecture firms and built the family a house in rustic Marin County.

Co-founder Judy Corbett, who has lived in Village Homes since 1976, made a 30-year career of promulgating Village Homes’ life lessons to help make communities around the world more livable.

For her part, Judy found Michael’s interest in architecture piqued her own curiosity. “I wondered how one building made me feel good, while others made me feel terrible,” she says. In 1967, the family moved to Davis so Judy could attend grad school to study environmental psychology.

Michael meanwhile had decided on a calling more practical and down-to-earth than architect: master builder.

“This is what we had prior to a couple hundred years ago; we didn’t have architects,” he says. He began by crafting one-off custom homes in the Greenhaven neighborhood.

“Mike had a big vision of what the world could become—and what it may still become. He’s this kind of builder-socialist,” says Adrienne McGraw, executive director of CSU Chico’s Gateway Science Museum.

McGraw has co-curated the new Village Homes: A Radical Plan  exhibit at the UC Davis Design Museum with her husband, Timothy McNeil, a UCD design professor who serves as the museum’s director. While books, stories and scholarly articles have been written about Village Homes, the show—which opened in late January and runs through June 19—is the first museum exhibition devoted to the development, where, incidentally, McGraw and McNeil live.

The display includes over 1,000 artifacts and images from the Village Homes’ well-documented history, as well as excerpts from student-conducted oral history interviews with residents. The exhibit’s wow moments include a constructed cross section of a house showing the ingenious passive solar system, as well as a laser-etched and 3D-printed model of the entire neighborhood.

“Many students walk through Village Homes but don’t realize its significance. It’s invisible ecology,” McNeil says. He points out that the energy crisis in the 1970s—when gasoline was rationed across the country, resulting in long lines at the gas pump—was different from today’s concern over climate change, but the solutions that Michael proposed are as relevant today as ever. “Saving water, using the sun, smaller footprints, more greenspace, less heat-island effect—it’s all about saving energy,” he says. “It all goes back to Mike’s vision of a post-petroleum future.”

By 1972, the city of Davis was trying to figure out how to grow to accommodate an exploding population driven by the university’s growth—enrollment had surged to 15,000 from just 3,000 in 1960—and was entertaining development proposals. So that year, Michael and Judy found a 70-acre parcel on the then-outskirts of town and secured a three-year option by raising $100,000 via investments from friends and family. They put the best of their ideas for a sustainable community into a proposal, and submitted it to the city.

Michael Corbett is writing a new book on how the ideas nurtured at Village Homes and his subsequent projects can address contemporary issues like climate change.

Davis prided itself at the time on being an innovative city. It had installed America’s first bike lane in 1967 and implemented one of the country’s first curbside recycling programs in 1970. But the Village Homes proposal challenged even Davis’ civic imagination. For instance, the only streets in the development were to be narrow cul-de-sac alleys, 20 to 26 feet wide, leading to carports. The city objected, citing the need for wider streets—the standard exceeded 30 feet—to accommodate fire trucks. So Michael and Judy set up traffic cones in a parking lot and invited the fire department to test-drive their layout, proving it worked. The plan also lacked a typical system of concrete storm drains. Instead, Michael designed “swales,” contoured creek beds lining the common spaces between groups of homes, designed to fill during rains and soak in, replenishing groundwater, instead of channeling water into the city’s drains. Michael remembers a contentious hearing on the topic: “The city engineer told the city council, ‘This flies in the face of everything I learned in college.’ I said, ‘You’re right!’ ”

The city approved the natural drainage system on the condition that Village Homes put up a half-million-dollar bond to retrofit with concrete should it fail. Four years into the project, an epic rainstorm overwhelmed the city’s storm drains, flooding downtown Davis. And Village Homes? It handled the extra water neatly, and even absorbed the overflow from neighboring streets. The city agreed to release the bond.

The obstacles to approval were so numerous, Village Homes probably wouldn’t have materialized were it not for another piece of serendipitous luck: the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1971, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. This changed the political landscape in Davis. College students were about to have a very large say in the upcoming city council election.

“Sometimes I just wonder, maybe it was meant to be, no matter what,” Judy says. “The story is that a bunch of us psychology graduate students and a few people from the community started meeting on Sundays [at our house] to put together a plan for the future of Davis. Then it was like, ‘OK, so how are we going to get this implemented?’ And Bob Black, who’d been the student body president, said, ‘Well, I’ll run.’ ” 

Instead of concrete storm drains, Village Homes was built around naturalistic “swales”—shallow, grassy channels that replenish groundwater, making the neighborhood uncommonly drought-resistant. (Courtesy of the Judy Corbett Archive and the UC Davis Design Museum)

Black, a Sunday night regular, was a popular figure on campus when he served as president from 1966–67, having famously established a student-run campus bus system, importing red double-deckers from London, some still in use today. Davis voters elected Black to city council, and two other forward-thinking candidates swept into office easily. With this changing of the guard, Village Homes won approval, and ground finally broke in late 1975.

Common practice then and now was for the developer of record to build and sell all the homes, but while Michael built plenty of the houses himself, including the Corbetts’ own (although they weren’t the first to move in), he also helped a fair number of DIYers tackle self-builds, in order to foster cultural and economic diversity within the community. He helped several migrant construction workers he had hired to buy their own lots and build homes for their families. “It created a nice mix,” Michael says.

At one point, when Michael hit a wall finding financing for a group of 10 small homes he intended to build, Jane Fonda stepped up quietly and made the loan herself. In 2022 at the Greenbuild International Conference in San Francisco, Fonda heaped praise on Michael and Village Homes during her keynote appearance. “I’ve never talked about this until now,” Fonda told an audience of green-building leaders, innovators and academics from around the world. “I learned so much when I went to Village Homes in Davis, California. There were gardens growing, and there were mixed-income people. And all of the homes were solar. It was amazing!” Fonda then went on to detail how she and Hayden commissioned Michael to build them a cutting-edge, entirely off-the-grid house in Santa Monica.

In December, I return to pay a visit to Village Homes’ most famous longtime resident, science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, 73. In 2008 Time  magazine also labeled Robinson, similarly to the Corbetts, a “hero of the environment” for his work related to climate change (his writing is so concerned with climate that it’s sometimes referred to as “cli-fi” rather than “sci-fi”). In his 2020 best-seller, The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a near future in which cooperative humans narrowly avert climate disaster, so it’s fitting that he lives in the world’s most progressive eco-community.

The pastoral paths and greenways at Village Homes (seen here in the late 1970s) lend the development a bucolic vibe, inspired in part by England’s suburban “Garden Cities.” (Courtesy of the Judy Corbett Archive and the UC Davis Design Museum)

Robinson first came to Davis in 1978—where he met his future wife, Lisa Nowell, then a grad student at UCD—during a brief leave of absence from his literature Ph.D. program in English at UC San Diego. After earning his doctorate in 1982, he returned to Davis and the couple married, then lived variously in Washington, D.C., and Switzerland before returning permanently to Davis in 1991, when Nowell accepted a job as a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Sacramento. When the couple came back, they chose to settle down in Village Homes. “We were charmed by the Tolkien names when we arrived, and feel like they add to the vibe of the neighborhood as a small English village,” Robinson says. “For sure there is still a Shire-like vibe here. Biking into the village from the ordinary suburbias surrounding it is always like crossing a little boundary—it’s village life with a slight fantasy tinge to it.” Within Village Homes’ embrace, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author has crafted a unique writer’s life that Tolkien would certainly have approved of. In a corner of Robinson’s tree-lined front courtyard is a blue tarp hanging from some branches, shading a wrought-iron table and an IKEA Poäng chair. This is Robinson’s outdoor home office, where he writes his books.

“Around 2005, I had been writing for 30 years, working indoors on the Green Earth  trilogy and getting sick of it,” Robinson explains. He considered giving up fiction writing entirely, he says, but then one day, on impulse, he took his laptop out to this corner of the yard and began writing there. The first time it rained, he threw up a blue tarp and kept writing. When winter came, he ran an extension cord for a heating pad and bought fingerless gloves. “I really got serious about it,” he says. “All [book-length] work since 2005 has been done out there. That’s seven or eight novels. So that’s the office, and it’s a Village Homes story,” he says. “The village is a special place.” The birds, he says, have become his friends. Sometimes they even land on his feet.

As we wander down the path in back of his house and onto the greenway, Robinson gestures to a wild-looking plot. “Here’s my garden. I’ve got a good winter crop of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. My summer crop is tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and basil—I do a caprese salad,” he says. “My lunches pretty much come out of this land. I get roughly 25 percent of my calories from it during the summer.”

Resident Dorte Jensen feeds the flock in the Village Homes chicken coop, one of many cooperative features of village life, along with a vineyard, olive grove and community orchards and gardens.

Continuing on, we come to a grassy clearing. “I like to call this the environmentalist green,” he says, reeling off the surrounding residents’ occupations: a couple of environmental lawyers, the founders of wilderness preserves and the California Wilderness Coalition, the founder of UC Davis’ Nature and Culture program. There’s a weekly potluck that’s been going for decades, where Robinson might drop in after a typical day involving gardening, writing outside, then an hour of frisbee golf where, he says, “I turn into a dog for an hour. And that’s my life. It’s healthy and fulfilling.”

One resident of “the environmentalist green” is Rob Thayer, who was among Village Homes’ first residents in 1976. Thayer started his career as an industrial designer for Grumman Aerospace during the Apollo missions in the 1960s and eventually came to Davis in 1973 as a professor. “I was teaching landscape architecture. And I focused on renewable energy, water conservation, open space and all those good things,” Thayer says. “So I decided to move into Village Homes to practice what I preach.” For the next 40 years, Thayer led his students on regular tours of the neighborhood, along with visiting scholars, architects and developers from all over the world. When the Corbetts published their book, Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning from Village Homes, in 1999, Thayer supplied the foreword. “Buzzwords such as solar age, appropriate technology, sustainability, new urbanism and smart growth have come and, in many cases, gone,” Thayer wrote then. “But this community keeps on serving as the reality anchor to each.”

Both Judy and Michael have continued to promulgate Village Homes’ influence in various ways. UC Davis professor of human ecology Catherine Brinkley has hosted Michael as a guest lecturer in her classes and recently worked with Judy when they both served on Davis’ Downtown Plan Advisory Committee. “Cities and counties are starting to adopt the innovations that the Corbetts put in place 50 years ago,” she says. “The work that Judy’s done to institutionalize this is incredible.”

Every group of eight homes has communal green space for shade, growing food and a healthy dose of natural beauty.

In 1979, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden introduced Judy to then-Governor Jerry Brown, who hired her to helm what soon became the Local Government Commission (LGC), an organization she ran until retiring in 2013. It carried on the work started in those Sunday gatherings, just on a much bigger stage. In 1991, Judy hosted the inaugural LGC conference for local elected officials at The Ahwahnee hotel in Yosemite, where she presented the Ahwahnee Principles, a set of guidelines for sustainable development that would eventually be adopted by cities like Pasadena, Riverside and Fresno after their mayors attended the annual event. So if you enjoy how walkable and livable those towns have become in recent decades, you probably have Judy Corbett and Village Homes to thank for introducing those ideas to the mainstream.

For his part, Michael Corbett won a seat on the Davis City Council in 1986 and served as mayor from 1988 to 1989. Today he is writing a new book and works as a consultant. But a half century later, the lasting influence of Village Homes endures: He tells me of a call he recently received from Fonda, who was raising money and marshaling resources for victims of the 2025 L.A. fires. “Jane asked me if I could help, so I sent them a bunch of designs for small, affordable houses and offices,” he says. “She said, ‘We need to rebuild it like Village Homes!’ ”

I pause for a moment to picture in my mind a future—maybe another 50 years from now?—where the scarred communities of Los Angeles have been reinvented as a series of lush, eco-friendly, human-scaled enclaves. As the Corbetts have so thoroughly and persistently demonstrated to us over the last 50 years, all it takes is a village.