Why Build?

The party's over (nearly)

Until a few years ago, I never thought about buying land in the country or building a house. Then I read "The Party's Over" by Richard Heinberg and I started to look at everything around me differently because Heinberg shows how our modern way of life is completely dependent on finite, non-renewable resources, especially oil and natural gas, and we're starting to run out.

There's still a lot of oil in the ground, of course, but discoveries of new oil have been decreasing worldwide for some years while demand is accelerating. Although it took Mother Nature millions of years to create all the oil in the Earth, experts calculate that we have extracted about half of it during the 150 years since the first oil well was built in Pennsylvania. In another 150 or 100 or perhaps 50 years (depending on how the supply and demand play out), it'll all be gone except for the stuff that's so expensive to extract that it's not worth it.

So, while we've built a global economy that depends on oil to move cars, ships, trucks, airplanes, tractors, and bulldozers around and depends on natural gas to heat our houses and buildings, the Earth's gas gauge has slowly moved past the half-way point (known as "Peak Oil") and is headed toward empty. What are future generations going to do when there's virtually no extractable oil left on the planet? What will they think of us if we've done nothing to prepare for that?

Time for action

Reading books and articles about Peak Oil can be kind of depressing because the problem seems so huge. And then combine that with global warming and you start to see that we're in a real pickle! I felt that I had to find some positive, practical steps to take, and these should be steps taken not so much out of fear but because they are steps that are good for the Earth and good for us no matter what happens.

Some research on the Internet led me to permaculture, an extremely sustainable approach to shelter, food, energy, and living. The permaculture concepts were developed in Australia in the 1970s and have been slowly spreading around the world; see the links in the left column for more information.

The goal

Our goal is to find a more sustainable, less energy-intensive way of living on the Earth. To do that, we needed some land where we can grow some of our own food, build an energy-efficient house, and experiment with permaculture and renewable energy systems. We wanted to be within five miles of an active small town because our plan is to be self-reliant, with the support of a community, not to be entirely self-sufficient. I want to try many things at our new homestead, find out what works and what doesn't, and then help other people based on our experiences.

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