From the Heart to the Home: Living Sustainably and with Thought

My mind really gets going when I start ingesting some of the ideas over at Eco Friend. This humble little web site isn’t big and flashy, but they tend to collect ideas and images on a wide variety of green topics. Though they aren’t generous with the links, Google makes it easy to look things up for further study.

Today the piece that caught my eye was called “Eco Friendly Houses for Green Living.” This is always a topic of interest for me because, in many ways, it embodies so much of our focus at the Center for Reuniting Families. After all, the home often symbolizes the very heart of the family. And it seems to me that, if we make an effort to make that familial heart as efficient and earth-friendly as can be, we’ve already taken steps to make the family itself more healthy. That is, ideally, caring manifests into every portion of our lives: If we begin by caring deeply about the planet, we come to care about where and how we live. We care about what we eat and where it came from. With all this caring and thought in our lives, how can we not also care more about each other? It is, in a way, about a culture of thought and caring and a way of living consciously that we try to share here at every opportunity.

So the piece on eco friendly houses really gave me a lot to think about. Though not all of these houses are ones I would think of as perfectly eco friendly, I love that an increasing number of people are giving thought and more than lip service to making the structures that protect us more Earth friendly in many ways. And I love that even people like Dow are now talking about the need to make big changes in the way we live and build. More than talk: they’re making it happen.

Of the houses discussed in the article, I was especially impressed with the Torus Design concept house (shown above left). In some ways this house completely reconsiders the way we as a culture currently think about buildings and homes. And when you read about it, you realize that was the point. From the web site of the designer, Colorado’s Dream Green Homes:

The Torus Design concept was inspired by the movie Thrive, which outlines ways of creating prosperity and equality in the world. The design brings together three emerging trends: increasing self sufficiency — including renewable energy and food production, families moving back together to save money, and sustainability. These trends are evident in the growth of home gardens, organic food, green building, eco-conciousness, off-grid homes, do-it-yourself attitudes, and cost cutting strategies such as bartering and trading for goods and services.

With people and companies like this putting such great effort into rethinking this most basic of human needs, it’s difficult not to be optimistic about the future. I love what it says about thinking about sustainable living and the families that will get to create the core of their lives around these bright, new hearths.