Green Options

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Modern Day Homesteading

I consider my family modern day homesteaders. We started with 160 acres of raw land, which actually was an old homestead and still had some of the original fruit trees. We built our own home from the trees on the land, started a garden, and installed an off-the-grid power system. We live as self-sufficiently as possible, and the only major difference between my family and the original homesteaders is we had to buy our land and the modern conveniences of our home.

Apparently, there is a small trend in the United States for families to give away their possessions, get back to the land, and choose a simpler life. Take for example the Harris family of Austin Texas, who aspire to be organic homesteaders in Vermont.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

I’ve recently witnessed a few scenes of life after peak oil, and it isn’t necessarily the Apocalypse.

In Juneau, Alaska, for example, people are proving it’s possible to change our energy-hogging ways literally overnight and still keep a community up and running. The inspiration in their case: an avalanche that severed the hydroelectric power lines serving the remote Alaska capital, cutting off about 80 percent of the city’s available electricity.