Who’s Writing This Website?

The internet can be so impersonal that I want to give you a bit of my background…

Simple Green Living since the 70s

My husband Kelly and I met in the 70s when he was living in a remodeled school bus  on a friend’s land by the ocean in California, and I was a librarian in Santa Rosa. Not only did I fall in love with him, but also with his alternative lifestyle. I soon moved into the bus and took up gardening in a parachute that cut out the persistent coastal winds, making homemade bread, and other simple living joys. I was hooked, and it’s a good thing because Kelly has always been independent in how he thinks about things.

Fast forward past the intentional community at Sunshine Camp in Forestville, where we lived with two of his sisters and their husbands, kids, and dogs, for about seven years. Fast forward past Kelly’s and my years of llama ranching in the mountains outside Ashland, Oregon, where I began self-publishing books and Kelly began creating videos on llamas and on citizen diplomacy with Russia. Fast forward past our city years in Olympia, WA, where I gave talks on voluntary simplicity and wrote a walking guide to the area.  Fast forward past our years of living and traveling in a former Gray Line Hawaii bus that Kelly turned into a fabulous home.

Green Home Building and Mexico

The bus took us to Crestone, Colorado, where we–okay, mostly Kelly–built us an earthbag-papercrete house.  During this time, he became passionately involved in natural building which led to his creating several websites on different aspects of this topic. A couple of his main sites are greenhomebuilding.com and earthbagbuilding.com.

I had a bee in my bonnet to spend time in Mexico, where I had first gone when I was a child. After several trips there early in this century, we sold our earthbag house in Colorado. That got us debt-free, which has been lovely, I must say! Later we came across a sweet little two-room cabin near Lake Chapala, Mexico, with a tropical garden of banana, lemon, guayaba, lychee, pistachio, and other trees. We bought it and added a sunroom and several year-round organic vegetable garden beds.

That was home until we returned to Colorado in the spring of 2010. Then in 2015, wanderlust struck again.

We moved in July 2015 from Crestone, Colorado, where the elevation was 8,000 feet, the community was wonderful, and the climate was mighty cold and windy, often with snow that lingered. We now live in Silver City, NM, at 6,000 feet so it’s warmer. The change is partly because we take our gardening seriously–always have–and are busy transforming our quarter-acre lot. Being able to feed yourself, even if just in part,  is a really useful skill in these times, and it doesn’t come all that quickly. We’ve been gardening off and on for over 40 years and we continue to learn a lot.

We are also enjoying living in a relatively larger community, compared to the population in Crestone of about a thousand. Silver City and its environs must be about 20 times that. Meeting people, walking to the food coop and downtown area, taking our dogs out into the countryside for walks… we are liking life here.

Rosana “Zana” Hart