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.

Super Efficient Prius On the Way

A Toyota Prius that gets 95 mpg may be in easy view according to Treehugger, who tends to get a bead on such things. From Treehugger:

The plug-in hybrid (PHEV) version of Toyota's best-selling Prius hybrid, which is debuting in the U.S. next month and will be commercially available in 14 states this Spring (national rollout in 2013), was first supposed to be rated at around 87 MPG-equivalent. This alone would have been enough to put the plug-in Prius pretty high on the fuel-efficiency list, but after more testing, Toyota has revised its estimate and now says it is confident that the Prius PHEV will get 95 MPGe, which is 2 MPGe more than the Chevrolet Volt, which is rated at 93 MPGe.

You can read more here.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Lightning Car Company is getting ready to debut their completely electric supercar. We certainly live in a time of great and exciting change! You can read more about that car here.

A Month -- a Lifetime -- in View

I love National Geographic’s Daily News for a quick snapshot of the health and heart of our planet. At a time when we can be given so much news that is both conflicting and disheartening, National Geographic’s concerned but mostly non-political take can be refreshing. And one thing I really enjoy: it often gives me a smile along with a dose of new information. Not many news agencies can say that!

Their “Best of” photo collections are a great way to get a fast view of the planet and a few of those smiles. Here the “Best of January” begins with a trio of penguins admiring a plush toy in their image. It’s a gorgeous shot and a great thought: “The composition of this image reinforces what to me is its main point,” says Monica Corcoran, senior National Geographic photo editor, “communication. The ‘talking heads’ are not sure what to make of this oddly familiar intruder.”

Thanks, National Geographic, for once again reminding us that there is so much still to smile at in the world -- so much to lift our hearts and souls and refresh for all the work we still need to do to ensure these many wonders continue.

The Cure For Living in Darkness: Let There Be Light!

It is sometimes too easy to feel that all the news is bad news and that our path to a greener more sustainable future is unbelievably convoluted and too filled with obstacles to properly progress.

And then you hit a story like this one: a simple answer to a complicated question, one that has deeper meaning than that easy solution would imply.

In San Pedro, a small town near Manilla in the Phillippines, the residents struggle with poverty and all that goes with it. Because the homes they’ve been able to build lack proper windows, they also struggle against darkness, even during the day. Adapting an MIT development, the Isang Litrong Liwanag (which means liter of light) Project helps residents create bright indoor light out of easily accessible products. Here’s an incredibly lucid explanation from FM World:

They are made from an ordinary plastic bottle, filled with water and a capful or two of bleach.

A malleable metal sheet, about a foot square, has a whole cut in the centre where the plastic water bottle is tightly fitted. A little grouting goes around the contact area of the bottle and sheeting to keep out rain.

The unit is then inserted into a hole cut into the metal roofs of the breeze-block houses and the metal sheet is moulded to the roof shape for a good fit, aided by a little more grouting.

The bottle hangs about two-thirds into the room below. Sunlight filters through the externally exposed part of the bottle and is diffused through the water, making for a bright light in the room.

According to the Isang Litrong Liwanag website, as of 2009, “3 million households still remain powerless outside Metro Manila. And even in the metro, families still continue to live in darkness,” so this deceptively simple initiative is having an incredible impact on the quality of life for an increasing number of people. From the website:

Isang Litrong Liwanag, is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly solar bottle bulb to low-income communities nationwide. Designed and developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Solar Bottle Bulb is a device based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.

The video embedded below shows this simple but powerful technology in action. It’s difficult not to be moved when you think about the difference this will make in people’s lives. It also gets me thinking, as these things sometimes do, about the simple answers we can find in our own lives to make things better and about how we tend to complicate things for ourselves: making things hard when -- sometimes -- they can be easy.

For me it’s also about moving forward in a conscious way: watching where we place our feet and thinking about how we can live more lightly on the land and with the people we love.

In any case, it’s all good news, and I’m always in favor of that!

If you’re looking for more information on Isang Litrong Liwanag, it’s here.

Eating Local, Eating Raw: Easy Steps to a Conscious Diet

I’ve been interested in raw and organic foods for a very long time. Though I’m not currently a vegetarian, it wouldn’t be much of a leap to call me a flexitarian: I’m mindful about what I eat for both moral and health reasons.

Long story short: my interest in real food is part of my personal history. In some ways, it’s been one of the touchstones of my adult life. So when we were planning our retreat program here at Dancing Deer and someone suggested we do a raw foods component, I threw my support in right away. I understand the personal power that new knowledge can bring and, in many ways, that’s what our retreat program is all about.

Even if you’re not interested in making the complete lifestyle change to total raw food diet, we’re teaching some skills that many people will find life-changing. It’s about not only coming to terms with the fact that you can eat in a more healthful and earth-friendly way, but that sourcing and preparing the foods you require needn’t be as daunting as it might at first appear.

And even if health were not an issue, the level of consciousness required to making and eating even a partially raw diet can change your outlook entirely. Take, for instance, this New York Times piece from a few days ago.

For the second time in three years, food prices began to soar in late 2010. Some food experts thought the increases could have been a factor in the unrest that swept the Arab world in early 2011.

In 2008, food riots broke out in developing countries around the world, as the prices of staples, particularly rice, jumped sharply. Good harvests and a drop in demand due to the worldwide recession eased those shortages in 2009.

Prices began rising steadily again in the summer of 2010.

These are frightening facts. Articles like that can make you feel despair. Perhaps they even should. But they can also make you reconsider the way you’re eating right now. It seems to me that there has never been a louder call to a local diet that consists of whole foods: and all of that is entirely in keeping with a raw food lifestyle.

We are so lucky in this region: everything we really need for a healthy diet is grown pretty much within a 100 mile radius. That is to say that, if it isn’t grown locally, you probably don’t really need it. Think about that the next time you reach imported strawberries in your local market. Think about all the fuel it took to get them to you and, in some cases, the political repercussions on local economies that send all of their food away.

Eating locally is not a radical thought. It’s a sensible one and, in some ways, it’s the very easiest.

You can get more information on the Dancing Deer raw food retreat here.