Not one more winter in the tipi, honey

[marmar]

from Grist:




Not one more winter in the tipi, honey

by Michelle Nijhuis
15 Jul 2011 7:00 AM


Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing.


There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people -- myself included, but I'll get to that in a minute -- go on a carbon diet by purchasing some cheap land, rigging up a few solar panels, and getting off the grid.

Most of these people are well-educated, well-meaning, and idealistic, determined to build and garden their way toward some version of a better future. But after living here for more than a decade, I've noticed a disturbing susceptibility among these modern homesteaders. I'll call this recurring disease Not One More Winter In The Tipi, Honey (NOMWITTH).

Here's what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather's good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.

But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person -- inevitably XX -- splits town for a fully furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/green-home/2011-07-15-not-one-more-winter-in-the-tipi-honey

[XemaSab]

1. When my mom was a little girl

her whole family camped out in the Sierras for a summer while my grandpa was working on a project up there.

One day my grandma decided she was going to bake a pie over the campfire. SHE ACTUALLY DID IT. The pie was cooling when feral horses came by and ate it.

I think most people have no grasp of how much work having a modern kitchen and access to a grocery store really saves.

I've baked bread and made pies from scratch, but it's certainly not something I'm going to do more than a couple times a year, and I'm going to do it for fun, not because I have to.

[TheWraith]

5. Feral horses?

If I'd gone to all that work and feral horses ate my pie, we'd then be having Horse Pot Pie for dinner.

[XemaSab]

7. Yes

Feral horses. :D

[rubberducky]

2. I laughed until I cried! I was one of theseNOMWITTH way, way back in the day.

[MineralMan]

3. Interesting article, but limited.

Focusing on the female perspective, it misses some important other elements. Guys, too, are really surprised at just how much hard work goes into living that lifestyle. Cutting firewood is a helluva lot easier with a chainsaw, but that's not environmentally sensitive. Then there's splitting all that wood, especially in a cold winter climate. Again, a lot easier with a log-splitter, which has the same drawbacks as the chainsaw.

In most cases, those who set out to live a low-carbon-footprint lifestyle have lots of enthusiasm, but less knowledge than they should have. A non-technological lifestyle is far from a gentle lifestyle. It's damned hard work. It soon palls for most people, and you seldom find people who have been living that way for more than a couple or three years. Folks have been heading out, away from the city, since the late 1960s. Few of them maintained that choice for very long. Some, notably, did so, but most bailed and returned to a more comfortable and less strenuous style of living.

How do I know this? Well, I was one of those folks. I wrote for Mother Earth News back in the late 70s and gave the whole thing a good shot. Turned out I liked writing a lot better than sawing wood with hand tools and splitting with a sledge and wedge. It was a fun challenge for a while. The fun went away, but the challenge remained. The solar still had a habit of getting blocked up. The primitive solar hot water heating system sprung a leak. Stuff fell down.

So, I moved into a tiny little house in town with my wife at that time. We still lived simply, but not as simply. We enjoyed it more and got do do what we really wanted to do, instead of keeping up with the challenges of living as our great grandparents had lived.

[susanr516]

9. Both my parents were reared on farms

No electricity, no indoor plumbing, cooked on wood stoves, made their own soap, slaughtered and smoked their own hogs--after hearing some of their stories, I had no desire to live off the land.

[MineralMan]

10. Yup. Nothing like a bit of reality to help a person understand what

that life was like. I heard it from my grandmother.

[GliderGuider]

4. It's one thing when you have a choice to pack it in and go back to civ.

It's something else entirely to have to do it with no escape hatch.

Even as a 60's hippie I never bought the "back to the land" thing. I'm well aware of my own limits in terms of knowledge and needs. A high school friend went to northern BC in 1975 and built an off-grid geodesic by hand, with solar electricity, wood heat and an outhouse. He finally put in a gas line five years ago, and now he can leave the house for more than 12 hours at a stretch during the winter... I have tremendous respect for him, and the hard work it's taken for him to live that way (mostly alone) for the last 35 years.

No matter how hard you swing your bat, Mother Nature always gets another turn.

[bananas]

6. Nothing new - 1966 opening theme to Green Acres tv show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbk81X6WHA4

[Karenina]

8. Thank you much for that, bananas!

:rofl: