Thursday, September 25, 2008

Day 157 of our Green Year: Sharing Resources

As we mentioned yesterday, we moved to be closer to family. However, in our move we kept Our Green Year in mind, and that shows in where we are moving.
We are going to be living on a ranch, with others that we will be sharing the property with. The reason we decided to do this is because we feel that it will be better to share resources with others, than try and go green alone. Communes were common in the 1960s because everyone was able to live a natural lifestyle, with help from those around them (albeit not all worked out). This is not quite a commune, but we will be following the philosophy of going green together and helping each other.

The ranch is 20 km from the nearest town so that will cause us to change our daily walk to the store. Now, we will be driving to the store once a week, where we will park and do all the errands we need to in town. At the end of each month, we will be buying carbon offsets from CarbonFund.org to offset our travels. However, because of the mileage of our car we should be able to still go on only one tank of gas a month. Some other great points of this ranch include:
  • Large organic garden, much bigger than what we had in our former home.
  • Surrounded by farmers that we can get eggs from to support the local economy.
  • Water comes from a well, so water conservation is incredibly important
In our former home, Layla and I rented so we were very limited in what we could do with the house to go green. However, here we can not only go green on the ranch, we can go green on the house. Plans are already in place to begin putting in solar panels on the house, and Layla and I are going to begin work on a personal wind turbine to provide power.

In a world of uncertain economic times and growing distances between each other, sharing resources and working together is very important and very needed.