Day 5: Sustainable Living
ai731 has asked me to talk about my plan for living more sustainably when I move. There are still ten or so slots available for the tell me what to write about meme, if you're interested.
I apologise in advance for the fact that this entry is likely going to be more disjointed and a lot less comprehensive than previous entries. Mostly I'm writing it because I committed to writing these posts every day this month, and because I'm trying to distract myself from yesterday's really horrific trauma. Needless to say, the distractions aren't working all that well so far. However, I figure trying to write an LJ post is better than siting on my bed and crying, so that's what I'm going to do. Subsequently I'm going to go through with my original plan of cleaning up the basement.
When I was a little girl, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you at exactly what age this started, I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to live on a farm. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I was probably overly influenced by Beatrix Potter, and the notion that living on a farm would resemble living in an idyllic little English cottage covered in roses and with a garden full of peas and carrots and cats and rabbits living in harmony.
*cough*
Yeah, okay. So the dreams of my seven-year-old self were likely a little bucolic and unrealistic in nature. That's what happens when you introduce Beatrix Potter to an impressionable city child.
I almost forgot about my Potter-esque dreams of country living as I got older. Or, rather, they got relegated to the back of my mind as "Maybe someday, when I'm retired." It never occurred to me that I might be able to actually live in the country on a small hobby farm while I was still a working adult.
This changed around 2004-2005, when fearsclave met his current wife and moved out to live with her in rural Ontario. I went to visit them and realised that they had something perilously close to what I'd always wanted. fearsclave was, at the time, beginning to become aware of the perils of peak oil (I'll let you Google that if you want), and this tied in with my own increasing concerns about the environment and the global effects of climate change. I was also reading a fair bit about fair trade and many of the other ethical concerns surrounding the agroindustrial complex that keeps us all fed these days.
Thus began a multi-year plan designed to get me into a more sustainable way of living. The plan has been substantially altered over the years, fine-tuned and re-defined on more than one occasion due to financial and other considerations. Some of the pipe dreams I had (and still have) are not realistic in the short or even the medium term, but I am hopeful that I might still see some of them become a reality in the long term.
So here's a rather disjointed accounting of what I'd like to do, once I'm settled in a more rural area.
Reduce my ecological footprint by as much as I possibly can, hopefully by about 50% in the next 10 years. This is going to take a lot of work and planning, especially as because I have no way of getting to work other than by car, my ecological footprint is pretty large these days.
I apologise in advance for the fact that this entry is likely going to be more disjointed and a lot less comprehensive than previous entries. Mostly I'm writing it because I committed to writing these posts every day this month, and because I'm trying to distract myself from yesterday's really horrific trauma. Needless to say, the distractions aren't working all that well so far. However, I figure trying to write an LJ post is better than siting on my bed and crying, so that's what I'm going to do. Subsequently I'm going to go through with my original plan of cleaning up the basement.
When I was a little girl, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you at exactly what age this started, I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to live on a farm. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I was probably overly influenced by Beatrix Potter, and the notion that living on a farm would resemble living in an idyllic little English cottage covered in roses and with a garden full of peas and carrots and cats and rabbits living in harmony.
*cough*
Yeah, okay. So the dreams of my seven-year-old self were likely a little bucolic and unrealistic in nature. That's what happens when you introduce Beatrix Potter to an impressionable city child.
I almost forgot about my Potter-esque dreams of country living as I got older. Or, rather, they got relegated to the back of my mind as "Maybe someday, when I'm retired." It never occurred to me that I might be able to actually live in the country on a small hobby farm while I was still a working adult.
This changed around 2004-2005, when fearsclave met his current wife and moved out to live with her in rural Ontario. I went to visit them and realised that they had something perilously close to what I'd always wanted. fearsclave was, at the time, beginning to become aware of the perils of peak oil (I'll let you Google that if you want), and this tied in with my own increasing concerns about the environment and the global effects of climate change. I was also reading a fair bit about fair trade and many of the other ethical concerns surrounding the agroindustrial complex that keeps us all fed these days.
Thus began a multi-year plan designed to get me into a more sustainable way of living. The plan has been substantially altered over the years, fine-tuned and re-defined on more than one occasion due to financial and other considerations. Some of the pipe dreams I had (and still have) are not realistic in the short or even the medium term, but I am hopeful that I might still see some of them become a reality in the long term.
So here's a rather disjointed accounting of what I'd like to do, once I'm settled in a more rural area.
Reduce my ecological footprint by as much as I possibly can, hopefully by about 50% in the next 10 years. This is going to take a lot of work and planning, especially as because I have no way of getting to work other than by car, my ecological footprint is pretty large these days.
- Reduce my electrical/fossil fuel consumption.
- Heating: On my own I generally like to keep the house quite cold, and don't use air conditioning in the summer. I'm planning to look into getting a wood-burning stove, or find a place with a good fireplace in which I can place a wood-burning insert.
- Electricty: I am going to try to keep the consumption to a minimum. Air-dry my clothes as much as possible, keep lights on only in the room(s) I'm using (although I do that already; I'm beginning to remind myself of my father, following Bean from room to room and turning off lights and grumbling about wasted electricity. Aie. ;) ) I'm also going to look into one of those new hot water heaters that don't have a tank, but rather heat the water "as needed."
- Transportation: If I can carpool with someone from work from my new residence, I will try to do that. I will also be looking into perhaps finding a bus that will take me to and from work at least on weekdays. My schedule is designed to be bad for public transportation, but I'm going to give it a go as much as I can. The up side of public transit is that I get to read a lot more than I do when I have to drive everywhere.
- Solar Power: In the long term, I would like to gradually switch to solar power. I'm going to first try a solar oven, which I believe ai731 has used with some success in the past. I believe that Ontario Hydro has an incentive program for people installing solar panels, so once I'm settled and have a better idea of what my finances will look like for the next few years, I'll start budgeting for that.
- Wind power: This is more of a nebulous plan, since I have done absolutely no research on it whatsoever. I did see one farm in Ontario while I was window-shopping for houses a few years ago that had a wind turbine on the property, so it's marked down as "look into this" on the list I keep in the back of my mind.
- Heating: On my own I generally like to keep the house quite cold, and don't use air conditioning in the summer. I'm planning to look into getting a wood-burning stove, or find a place with a good fireplace in which I can place a wood-burning insert.
- Become more responsible about where my food comes from.
- Growing my own food: I already have a bit of experience growing my own vegetables, albeit in a very limited fashion. I'd like to step up my game in this area, and grow and preserve enough vegetables to be able to say that I can feed myself for a year. This will obviously not happen overnight, but I am pretty sure that I can manage it over the long term.
- Raising my own livestock: In a limited capacity, I'd like to have my own farm animals. This is a long-term project. I'd start with chickens, then in the following years I'd want to add bees, rabbits, and eventually a couple goats to the mix. It would take several years to do all this, but I'm willing to put in the time to research it all thoroughly and talk to as many people as I can who'd themselves be willing to give me advice and tips and what have you.
- Sourcing whatever I can't grow or raise myself locally: No matter which way I slice it, I can't realistically expect to sustain myself alone. For one thing, I work a job that demands about 60 hours a week from me, and I'll need to keep that job if I want to maintain a roof over my head. That means that, especially in the early years, I'll be dependent on other sources of food than my own garden. Also, I really like meat, and I don't plan on ever having my own cattle or pigs, because that's expensive and time-consuming in a way I can't afford. However, I don't like the idea that my food has to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres just to get to me. So the idea is to find local growers and producers of whatever I'd like to have on my dinner table and inject my money back into the local economy as much as possible.
- Become more responsible about my consumption/waste.
- Recycling: I'm already pretty good about my recycling habits. I recycle everything that can be recycled in the house, and bring my recycling home from work when I can't find a reliable way to recycle it there.
- Composting: Composting has been a little more hit and miss. When I was living alone I composted all my kitchen waste except for meat and fish. This past year, though, the winters have made composting a little more awkward, and so when everything was buried in snow we sort of stopped composting. I'd like to start that again, and maybe get myself another vermicomposting bin for the winter months. Heck, one of the vermicomposting options I've seen was called the "worm condo" by its creators, and I thought it was the neatest thing ever. I'd also like to be able to compost bones and the little bit of fat that doesn't end up used in my cooking.
- Waste water: I'd love to set up a "grey water" system in the new place. I'm already working on reducing how much water I consume. I'm very lucky to live in a country in which fresh water is plentiful, but that doesn't mean I should waste what we have. So that means showers that are more water-efficient, making sure I don't waste water when doing laundry or washing up or anything else. I'm also going to look into getting a composting toilet, but that's more of a long-term project than a short-term project. I know it can be done, since I briefly researched composting toilets back when I saw that fearsclave had one up at his old cabin. They can be installed in pretty much any house, as far as I can tell, so it's something to consider. Again, there needs to be moar research.
- Reducing the consumer goods that come into my home: Pretty much what it says on the tin. This will help to save money and the environment, and will be me doing my part to make society that much less materialistic.
- Recycling: I'm already pretty good about my recycling habits. I recycle everything that can be recycled in the house, and bring my recycling home from work when I can't find a reliable way to recycle it there.
So that's what I'm planning to work on for the next few years, and probably for the rest of my life. It's not an instant fix, by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, I have plenty of other plans, but they don't fall under the "sustainable living" banner quite as directly as what I've listed above.
Stay tuned tomorrow for my thoughts on D-Day and Moar History! - Growing my own food: I already have a bit of experience growing my own vegetables, albeit in a very limited fashion. I'd like to step up my game in this area, and grow and preserve enough vegetables to be able to say that I can feed myself for a year. This will obviously not happen overnight, but I am pretty sure that I can manage it over the long term.