What was the last thing you wondered about?

I think making your own solar panels from scratch is not worthwhile, since there are very sophisticated ones now that you actually can just roll out on your roof like a nice flat little mat and it would be hard to make those like bread or pudding, but wind turbines are probably more do-able. 

Since we're working on not having a storage space in the future, I should soon find the plans for the greenhouse and also the article about the guy who greened his trailer in England and I'll scan both and send them to you. There's one of these greenhouses here (in Black Mountain) and I've seen first hand that it grows food year round, even in weather like today when it's 16 degrees. The key is slanting all the planting beds inside about 15 degrees toward the southern exposure, which gives enough light and warmth even in places as cold as Maine. The entire thing is built from readily available products from any building supply store and costs around $200 to put up. The man who designed them is a very charming retired pediatrician named John Wilson who is still managing a community garden well into his eighties and he's sent these greenhouses all over the world. 

I'm in favor of the wiggling and giggling and living large and smiling. I'm in favor of charm and have been wrestling with how a charming life balances itself with not having ridiculous amounts of stuff, ridiculous in my life meaning more than I can fit into a closet the size of a carry on bag in a house the size of a good sized van.

One of the things I keep coming back to is how living here in the US tends to make our vision a little skewed. It's hard to remember how relatively recently there weren't things like chemical fertizers and pesticides and cars spewing fumes and six lane expressways and shopping malls and fast food vendors, and whole amazing cultures were built with relatively low negative impact on their environment, and they weren't even thinking about that. But it's hard to remember that when the entire officially organized country you live in has been around for such a very short time. It's hard to remember that we don't have to keep making more and more new things when we don't have the perspective of how the old things work just fine and are beautiful and full of our history when our history is only ten minutes old. 

Those are such good questions.But…I've had the experience of standing in the grocery store looking at half a dozen different brands of recycled paper bathroom tissue and debating, this one is owned by a parent company that owns other companies that destroy rainforests…this one has a higher post-consumer recycled paper content…it went on until Adrian, who was around 15 at the time, grabbed a package of toilet paper, threw it into the cart and decided I was done. Sometimes I just have to stop asking questions and buy the toilet paper or my head will explode.But they are very good questions. 

Oh, in one of his books Stephen Levine talks about the “one bowl a day” practice that he and his wife Ondrea kept for quite a while. The one bowl was of foods that are the same sorts of foods eaten by most of the people on the planet, just brown rice and vegetables, and the practice was one of worldwide community as much as it was a meditation. I think I'm too much of a foodie to go quite that far, and I do tend to like a bit more than one meal each day, but I like the idea very much.

I've gone from being an opportunivore to only eating vegan recently, and the reason doesn't really have to do with being nice to animals although I do think that's good - but producing meat is so energy intensive, so bad for greenhouse emissions, so wasteful of grain crops that could be consumed directly, that it's seeming pretty untenable. I have respect for people who hunt for the meat they eat, but really, if it was me and a bunny on a desert island the bunny and I would eat salads together, so that just isn't me. But I'm still eating fish every now and then, mostly because I don't have a way to measure B12 levels and I don't quite trust supplements, but also because sushi is my favorite style of food ever and I can't quite commit to never eating it at all. Although there's no point in October and November as there's no uni… and just how far have I managed to stray from a single bowl of brown rice a day? Hmmm…

That sounds like a solar heat panel, not one that produces electric power? But maybe not, I don't know enough about them except that the really high tech ones look way beyond my skills. Let me know how it goes. 

I don't follow the 100 mile diet although I buy local as much as I can and do try not to buy anything imported from great distances, no matter how much I want a golden kiwi right now. I can't give up brown rice though, especially since I can't eat wheat. And I can't give up bananas even though I know they will never grow here. Another consideration though is that if we stop buying organic fair trade products which are actually supporting people in other cuItures and making it profitable to maintain rainforest (like shade grown coffee and brazil nuts), then it may end up doing more harm than good. It's complicated.  (And this is how I end up muttering to myself in the aisle of the store about which roll of toilet paper is morally superior…) Another consideration is that urban areas make great uses of lots of resources by concentrating people together and reducing the need for lots of personal driving, but urban areas don't usually produce enough food within 100 miles. Somedays I'm afraid my brain might explode trying to figure out where the least harm is. 

I think not consuming animal products and buying local most of the time makes my footprint for food pretty decent. I think buying organic is very important, not just because the food is less toxic (which is important), but because it supports growing practices that don't toxify the environment. I think it's good to buy used things and less things and fair trade things and things made by real humans - but my favorite jacket is a black Columbia jacket made out of material that has to be from outer space. Sigh.

I'm not as far along the “what is my footprint” question as you Dawn, but I've been wrestling with the whole simple living question for a while now. Farland posted a great article on a recent blog about a guy who lives on $5000/year because that's the cut off for paying taxes to the government. He wrote Radical Simplicity, which I had looked at before but bought yesterday. He's got a whole chapter on calculating your personal carbon footprint and the rest of the book on how to reduce it and live simply. And yesterday Laura wrote about this same question from the consumption angle. I was so inspired by her and Farland and you and all the beautiful Gaians that I vowed that Radical Simplicity would be the last book I bought in 2008. If you saw the piles of books in my apartment and my wish list at Amazon, you'd understand what a huge promise this is for me. Thanks for thinking these things through SFL!

Lil, I was so inspired too by those posts you mentioned and although I haven't committed to zero books I have decided that if the library has it or I can find it used I'll do that first. And I'm actually cutting down on the number of books I keep, which is really hard - the library of books I have is the only thing that survived all my moves, and I'm a re-reader. I am in longing for a Kindle but laptops are now available cheaper which seems crazy - if it were affordable I'd be right on that. And still, some of my most treasured books really need to be old school physical objects. I have to be able to touch them and smell the paper and feel the edges of the pages and tuck things in the pages. I don't know if I can give that up yet, but I'm going to read Radical Simplicity and think about it all.
I live really well on not too much, it's a lifelong skill, but part of doing that for me has depended on other people living with too much and casting it off so that I get to harvest the bounty of excess. I don't know how I would do if everyone scaled back, but it's odd - as the economy around me is getting closer to that, I'm getting rid of more and more things. So maybe I'll figure it out as I go, which is how I do most things.
Thanks from me too Dawn!