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The New Independent Home
by Michael Potts
from chapter 1 :
The Dependent Home |
The history of homes extends clear back to the beginnings of history itself. Both ideas, home and history, probably occurred to our foremothers while they huddled in a cave, waiting out bad weather. All forces radiated from the cave where these troglodytes conducted their lives, birthing and dying, preparing food, and sheltering in stormy times. Originally these were wanderers, and caves were the center to which they returned year after year, around which they developed the arts that gave birth to culture.
For millennia, we have elaborated that culture, but until quite recently, the home remained a closed system. Energy, food, clothing, and education were domestically produced from local resources; goods packed from afar were precious and rare because their supply was unreliable. In the twentieth century, the word troglodyte, which originally meant cave-dweller, has become a pejorative term for hermit, one who rejects modern life and embraces the oldest, most primitive values. Just in the last century, humans have moved unimaginably far from their cave-sheltering past, pretending to control the world for human benefit, unceremoniously taking its resources, bending all other creatures to human use. Accelerating mobility has enabled us to satisfy our needs from sources farther and farther away from our homes. My father vividly recalls the luxury of the first dandelion-green salad in the Colorado spring. Before 1920, lettuce was available for most of the year only in California and the far southern parts of the United States, but now several varieties can be found beside Peruvian peaches and Mexican melons in any season. Before 1930, getting energy from far away was impossible; factory and town sites were chosen first for local availability of necessary power. During the Great Depression, great public-works projects and a frantic undervaluation of resources made it reasonable to waste prodigious amounts of potential energy in order to deliver a trickle of electricity, oil, or lettuce to faraway places. There were so many trees, so much falling water and buried oil, and human yearning for prosperity was so immediate, that our predecessors never reckoned the eventual cost. Half a century later, most of us scarcely notice that such dependences utterly determine the way we live. But economic and planetary realities have changed, and once-abundant resources now dwindle because of population growth and heedless waste. Dependence is becoming horribly costly and even life-threatening.
[[graph: histogram of the distance our necessities travel
A dependent house is a forlorn extension of the global scheme of exploitation and dominion, cut off from its immediate surroundings, irrelevant or damaging to the local ecology, crowded onto convenient tracts, scarcely more than a place for laborers to recover from their exertions in service of the global consumption machine. "Civilization," in the form of television, commuting to anonymous jobs, the bombast of sensationalistic meaningless news, conceals from us the cost of lettuce in February: our independence. Dependent householders often have no idea of the origin or true cost of their food, their goods, or their power: At any given moment, the electrons coursing through their walls may have come from Quebec or El Paso, Diablo Canyon or Three Mile Island, generated with oil shipped from the Persian Gulf or coal stripped from Appalachia. Emissions from the power plants mingle with the exhaust of millions of cars to pollute the air we breathe, to dull once-clear skies, and to poison the rain.
Today, many of us are striving to reduce our dependence on fragile and distant resources. We worry because we see that our sustenance is extracted and brought to us from far away by means that are mindless, abusive, and likely to crash. We are loathe to surrender our luxuries, but we seek a happier, sustainable balance between dependence and independence. My life is enriched by chocolate and oranges, neither of which grow well where I live, and both of which I suppose I could live without. Energy, on the other hand, is essential in my life. Although energy falls freely from the sky here in Caspar, just as it does in Alaska, Vermont, Mississippi, Hawaii, and wherever the sun shines, most of my neighbors get theirs without a thought for the inefficiencies and inequities of its provenance. Why, since energy is so abundantly present in our environment, as evidenced by the rich natural bounty of life, should we be so eager to import it? Even when sunlight is feeble or absent (as it is north of the Arctic Circle in winter) the atmospheric phenomena the sun stirs, winds and falling water, provide clean and unfailing sources of energy. Do we have a right to live outside the budget provided by our local solar income? Through careful reduction and management of my needs, and a comprehensive energy-harvesting strategy, I can produce enough power for all of my household uses -- heating, cooling, lighting, pumping, washing, working, playing music -- with energy generated in my own yard.
An independent home is a very hopeful political statement, declaring that we believe it is possible to live comfortably and responsibly on the share of energy that comes to us naturally. Many who live in independent homes on the North American continent might also suggest that we have grown uncomfortable being counted among the most wasteful and selfish people ever to have lived. The global economic system under which we are situated so fortunately may persistently fail to redress obvious global inequities, but we pioneers have unilaterally elected to lighten the load by disconnecting from the system, providing for ourselves instead.
Along the way, we have rediscovered lost delights and an invaluable connection to the wonders of living in harmony with the Earth.
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