Archive for November, 2008

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Several years ago, Kelly built a solar car and we used it quite a lot. When we left Colorado, we included the car in the deal when we sold our house to friends. It needed some repairs, and I’m not sure if it’s back on the road or not. It didn’t need license plates or any paperwork. You can see details about it and photos on the small website Kelly has: www.sunvee.com

By a solar car, I mean one that runs completely on solar power, with no electricity from the grid. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend just emailed information about transition towns to us. I think it’s a really exciting concept. Here is some of that email…

Here are some excerpts from http://www.transitiontowns.org/:

What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?

It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges and opportunities of Peak Oil and Climate Change? Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, food! One of life’s pleasures, and sometimes one of its perplexities. It’s been a happy surprise for me to realize that the way of eating that naturally flows from simple food is not only a very economical way to eat, but is also very health-promoting.

Eating a diet of grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables, with occasional (if any) meat or fish, and relatively little added fats, sugars, preservatives, etc., is how many people eat today in other parts of the world. And they often have much lower levels of heart disease,cancer, osteoporosis, and other ailments, than Americans and Europeans do. Read the rest of this entry »

Pressure cooking has changed a lot lately — there is a whole new generation of pressure cookers that are said to be foolproof. No more stories of the canner exploding and spewing its contents around the kitchen! If you are a good bit younger than I am, maybe you never even heard those stories.

Why use pressure cookers? They can cook food faster and thus save not only time but fuel. Beans, a mainstay of many simple food systems, are much tastier and easier to digest if they are thoroughly cooked, and this is where a pressure cooker  excels. You can even cook beans in a pressure cooker without soaking them for hours beforehand. Tough cuts of meat become very tender in a pressure cooker too. Read the rest of this entry »

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes is written by Mark J. Penn and Kinney Zalesne, pollsters who have solid numbers to back up all the trends they describe. Each trend– and there are more than 70 — gets its own short chapter. I found the book very readable. I would pick it up to read one trend and would find I’d read 4 or 5 before I tore myself away.

Quite a few of the trends, like long-term couples now being more likely to live apart, are not examples of simple living. But here and there throughout the book, I saw glimpses of possible futures. One of the main points that Penn makes is that now a trend that just attracts a very small percentage of Americans can still have quite a large influence on our society.

Some of the trends that are at least loosely related to living simply include: Read the rest of this entry »