So, it's been an amazing process for me. You know, coming from a fairly mainstream American background to start realizing that these really simple, low-tech, and really good, effective techniques for living really high-quality lives, using fewer resources and less energy are out there. The techniques are out there. We know how to build good natural houses. We know how to heat ourselves efficiently. We know how to make electricity from the sun and the wind and the water.
So, part of the question becomes, how come we're not doing it that way? How come we're still, for the most part, if you look around, you see people consuming really vast and unsustainable amounts of resources, and especially of energy. And I think that's really one of the key questions, is not How do we do it? Not how we do it, in the technical sense, but how do we do it, in the cultural context. How are we going to actually change our cultural context to embrace this way of living?
There are some pretty significantly different aspects to living a more sustainable life, especially because it takes a lot of time. Building your own house, growing your own food, cooking good food from ingredients that you grow, or that you buy in bulk, all that takes a lot of time. One of the things that becomes clear, when you start looking at that issue is, it's a very, very difficult thing for any one person, or any one family, to do by themselves.
And there are certainly exceptions. There are certainly very committed individuals or families who move out into the wilderness and make their living off the land by themselves. They have to work extremely hard to do that. And it's very isolating. Because that's not what's supported, for the most part, by most of the messages we get from our culture. So I really think that finding a supportive group of other people who are interested in living their lives that way, too, is pretty critical. And I've found that in my own life.
Working in a group context where people share a set of values and a set of goals makes it a lot easier to act, I think, in concert with those goals yourself. Because there's some peer pressure, frankly!
People are kind of paying attention, on some level, to each other's choices and resource usage. And we're going to hopefully gently question and challenge each other on that. I challenge when I see people buying a lot of tropical fruit, including bananas. I say, do we need to do that? You know, can we find a local source of fruit that's going to meet our needs better? Can we grow our own?
So, I think when you're trying to do something that's a departure from the cultural norm, it's incredibly helpful to have a group of people to do it with, for all kinds of reasons.
Another key, one of the most key factors for me in choosing to live in community is just, in and of itself, the act of living with and sharing with a group of people reduces your resource use and your energy use. A simple example: Here at Emerald Earth, we have, let's see, we have about 6 different households, or family units, and between those 6 households, we have a single washing machine. That's an example. We have a single set of power tools in our shop. There's a lot of other things like that. You know, a single lawnmower. A single truck that we share.
So, as opposed to the very isolated and dispersed nuclear family lifestyle where every family needs its own complete set of all the acoutrements of our culture, here, even if we want those things, we want to have a television, we want to have a DVD player, we want to have a chainsaw, we can use fewer of them per capita, just as a result of sharing that stuff.
There's also economies [of scale] that show up around things like food production. I think it's a lot more efficient for a group of 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 people to collectively create a sustainable food source, as opposed to a single family trying to do that. Likewise with buildings, with natural buildings, specifically. As we reduce our reliance on high technology and fossil fuel energy, the thing that's tending to step up to take that place is human labour.
So most of these low-tech techniques actually require a lot of time and a lot of physical effort from a lot of people. It's really, really nice to have a group of people to draw on for moving heavy objects, or mixing a lot of cob, or digging a big hole, that sort of thing. So there's a lot of different pieces in it for me.
In terms of the social aspects, I think: You know, living rurally, we're out at the end of a 5-mile-long dirt road. And it can be pretty challenging, in those kinds of circumstances, to feel like you're getting your social needs met. Now I think the different people who live here have different experiences around that.
But for myself, for the most part, with the combination of the people who live here year round, and a lot of visitors coming through for workshop, work parties, to be here as apprentices or interns for periods of time, I find that I get most of my social needs met that way. If I was living as part of a single family, in the same context, in the same physical context, that wouldn't be true. So that's another piece for me.
And another piece is the kind of spiritual and psychological growth that seems to be a necessary component of living and trying to make decisions together with a group of people. So, we're a very, very ego-centrical and individual-focused culture. In contrast with more tribal cultures, and even cultures where family is much, much more important than it is here in our culture, we grew up without being taught a lot of the skills that are really necessary to get along in a group of people. And for me, I think even more important the technical skills of how we're going to build our houses, how we're going to create our energy, how we're going to grow our food, that's I'd say the key, in terms of having a sustainable future, is figuring out how to work together.
You look around the world, and you see conflict, everywhere. And a lot of that conflict comes from competition over scarce resources. A lot of it comes from differences in ideology. A lot of it comes from greed, and people wanting more than their share, or wanting more power, wanting to control other people. It think that one of the advantages that living and working in a group of people like this has, is on this very tiny microcosm scale, you get to see those forces, and you get to see that inside yourself.
You get to see that coming out, my need for control, my irritation when somebody isn't doing something my way, my fear that other people are going to use up all the olive oil, or some other resource that I'm attached to. But, because it's a safe context, and a group of people that are really committed to living together and working through problems together, there's a lot of encouragement for all of us to express that stuff, to get it out on the table, to talk it through, to negotiate, to come up with good solutions that are going to work well for everybody.
One of the main tools that we use for that is the consensus decision-making process, which is, in contrast to a voting type of a model for doing decision-making, where, in a straight majority vote situation up to a half of the people could be really unhappy with any decision that's made, in a consensus decision, every individual has to agree for the group to come to a decision.
And that can take a lot of time. More than time, what it takes is trust. It takes a trust that everybody else in the group is not working purely from, or primarily, even, from their own self-interest. But everybody is holding the interest of the group, and of each other. And with that trust present, I find that for the most part, consensus is a pretty effective and efficient decision-making process.
So, part of the model of what we're creating here at Emerald Earth is, we're trying to be very deliberate about balancing the needs of individuals and families with the needs of the whole group. And we're trying to, in the development of our infrastructure, building our buildings, designing our common spaces, et cetera, we're doing a little bit of social engineering. We're thinking, How do we want this community to function in the future, and let's create an infrastructure that supports that.
One of the things that's really important to us is that this doesn't become a suburb of people withdrawing to their individual homes, living completely separate lives, and getting together only occasionally for social functions, or something like that, but that the communal aspect of what we're doing here continues to be important in everybody's lives.
And one of the main ways that we come together, we come together a lot in meetings and decision-making, we come together for parties and dances and rituals, but probably the most important way that we come together on a daily basis is in meals. At this point, every lunch and dinner, every day, is available for people to eat together, communally, in the common house.
And it isn't expected that everybody's going to come to every group meal. But we've chosen to develop really substantial and ample cooking facilities in our common areas, and not in our private areas. In our private homes, which are very, very small, there's usually a pretty minimal kitchenette, with a sink, a couple of burners for heating tea, or leftovers, or making toast, or whatever you want to do, a little bit of counter space, but it's not a full kitchen.
And so, that's partly to encourage the group to come together and share at meals, and it's partly a resource-usage issue. The fewer things that the homes, the individual homes, need to accommodate, the smaller they can be. Which means less resources that they use in the construction, and the less energy that needs to go into heating them, and keeping them comfortable.
So, in general, any function that we can take out of the individual homes and put into a communal space, we've chosen to do so. So we thought, What are the really important things? Why are people going to their separate homes?
We have not been interested, like some other communities do, in building one giant house that everybody lives together in. That doesn't work for us, kind of on an emotional level, because most of us here like a little bit more privacy than that, we want to have a space that we can retreat to, that we have control over, that isn't going to be full of someone else's screaming kids, or somebody else's music, or even somebody else's cooking smells; but we can go to, we can relax, we can put on our own music, we can read a book, we can do work, if we need to do quiet work, we can have our family interactions, and our interactions with our children out of the kind of fishbowl that you get in the common house situations.
So we've created homes that are basically going to give us the privacy that we need for retreats, and serve that way, but that aren't going to usurp a lot of what the common functions are going to be. Again, that's for social purposes, and for the purpose of reducing the resources that we're using.
So, up until this point, we also haven't chosen to put bathing facilities, or bathrooms, into any of the private structures. Those, we have a couple of showers that are in our common house, plus we have a bathhouse / sauna complex that has a couple of showers in it. I'd say, you know, if somebody designed a house, and they wanted to have a shower or bathtub in it, I don't think that'd be a big deal. I think that would be fine.
But, I'd say the main reason why we have chosen not to, is once again the resource usage, specifically having to do with the hot water. Actually, with one exception, the homes are plumbed with cold water, they're plumbed with electricity, but they don't have hot water. It takes a lot of energy to heat up water. Wherever you're using a lot of energy, it makes a lot more sense to figure out how to use that as efficiently as possible.
And say, for example, we're going to heat up a lot of hot water, we're always going to have hot water in our common house. That's going to be available for cooking, for washing dishes, for laundry, for showers, and that's going to get frequent usage throughout the day with everybody taking their showers there. If you separated it and had hot water in everybody's separate houses, we would definitely be looking at an on-demand hot water system, which is certainly possible, either a gas-powered on-demand system, or there's some pretty inexpensive, pretty effective wood-fired on-demand systems, which I've actually been interested in getting a couple of here.
But it's expensive. So, any additional expensive item that you don't have to duplicate many times in individual homes, and you can just have one or two or three for the entire group in a centralized location, just makes sense, from a financial and an energy standpoint.
Water, and the usage of water, also has a lot of other issues associated with it. One of which is, What happens to the water after you use it? Again, there's kind of an economy of scale issue. We have grey water systems that are developed here to use our waste water from our common house and from our common bathing facility quite efficiently. And it's worth putting the energy into developing those systems and making them work really well because there's a fairly high flow of water through those systems.
Our individual houses with their sinks that get, you know, maybe somebody uses them for brushing their teeth a couple of times a day, or washing a few dishes -- there's just not much throughput of water to make it worthwhile to put a lot of energy into reclaiming that. Most of us have very, very simple grey water systems from our houses. The water does get used, for the most part, for example, directly onto some trees that are right outside the house. But there isn't a very efficient usage of that water.
And another great example of this would be bio-gas digesters and methane production. We know people who design and install very simple low-tech techniques for composting waste and making gas that can be used for cooking, or other kinds of usages. The thing is, that it requires a lot of material to make that work.
So, for example, in China, my understanding is, one of the ways they do that is, they'll have a communal toilet for an entire village of hundreds of people. Maybe a few toilets that all go into a single tank. The tank is then digested and composted, and all that gas is used, it's collected in one place, and then redistributed from that point out. As opposed to having to have a separate bio-gas digester in everybody's homes, people wouldn't be able to afford it, for one thing, and it would be very inefficient, in terms of using the material.
Because a lot of what I'm here for, it feels like, to me, is to create a relationship with the place where I live. And I have a pretty developed relationship with my home, with my structure that I built with my hands, that I sleep in, that I know every single detail [of]. I know for the most part where every board, and where every piece of wood in my house came from. Most of them I cut down. A lot of those were within sight of where my house is now. And I can look at a pole in my house and say, Oh, yeah, that used to be growing over there.
So, one of the things that we're deliberately designing into our lifestyle here is that we spend a lot of time outdoors. Because our toilet facilities are outside of our houses, our shower facilities are outside of our houses, our common house, which is our primary cooking and social gathering place, is separate from our individual homes, we, at the very least, spend a lot of time moving back and forth between those different structures.
Also, just a lot of our livelihood here, our gardening, our crafts; we're increasingly hoping to have a lot more interaction with the forest, and sustainable forest management, and that sort of thing; all of that stuff is outside. Almost all of our recreation in the summertime is outside: swimming in the pond, playing games. In the summertime, we eat outside almost exclusively. And what that enables, I think, is a much richer relationship to develop between the people and the place where they live, as opposed to in a circumstance where we spend a lot more of our time inside our homes.
