Archive for February, 2009

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Wiser Earth, located at http://www.wiserearth.org/, is a fascinating community website.

First, what is it? It tells you on the homepage that it’s an online community space connecting people, nonprofits and businesses working toward a just and sustainable world.

They explain on the FAQ page that the goal is to encourage collaboration, provide people with the tools and resources they need, and thus also help reduce duplication of efforts, with the overall purpose of increasing the effectiveness of people working for sustainability and justice.

This made me think of a quote that I saw recently: Read the rest of this entry »

Back when the Voluntary Simplicity movement got started — that link takes you to the book of that name — I noticed that simple living was often more complex. Here are some examples:

• It’s way more work to make your own bread by hand than to buy a good whole grain loaf from a bakery or grocery store. (Now, with bread machines, this is less true!)
• It’s more time consuming to recycle… happily, this is less true now, but it certainly was then, when we had to drive our stuff to a recycling center that was only open on Saturdays.
• Shopping for all-cotton clothes and sheets may take more time than grabbing some part-synthetic items off the shelves. Read the rest of this entry »

Earthbag building is a new member of the family of green building techniques. We built our house in Colorado that way when it was a little-known method, and now it’s very satisfying to see the method spreading all over the world. Sometimes people say that earthbag construction is where strawbale building was a couple of decades ago.

So how do people learn to do this unusual method?

Read the rest of this entry »

Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter, by Lloyd Kahn, is a large paperback filled with two-page spreads of a wide variety of interesting homes from around the world. The earthbag-papercrete house that we built in Colorado is on pages 88 and 89, so of course I’m always pulling our copy out to show it to guests. And usually they starting browsing the pages.

I’m making the cover illustration really large so you can get a sense of the range of homes that Kahn discusses and illustrates:

Read the rest of this entry »

You may not have heard of the Transition Towns movement, but chances are you’ve heard of survivalists. What really are these two groups and how might it matter to your life?

Transition Towns are spreading throughout the world… that link takes you to an informative website about them, and I blogged about transition towns, with more links, recently. In a nutshell, transition towns (or cities, or islands, or whatever) come about when a group of people in a community get together to explore what can be done there as preparation for a world with less oil and different climates. This is a new but very vital movement and clearly one whose time has come!

I’ve been reading some about this movement, and late last night I happened to surf my way to the site for the United States transition movement: http://transitionus.ning.com/ Read the rest of this entry »

I first bought the massive Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery, over ten years ago. I kept it by my bedside for late-night reading because there was no pesky plot to keep me awake. I found it written in an enjoyable style, with lots of sections I wanted to read. I’ve cooked many recipes from it and several have become favorites. The title  is a bit misleading: this is not just a book for people living in the country, as anyone interested in simple living will find a lot of interest in the book. Read the rest of this entry »