Back in the last millenium, we had a hankering to get our fingernails dirty and tell the Man to shove it, so we purchased some acreage out in the woods with the idea of living a modicum of an independent life.

Much of our initial impetus towards renewable energy came from out desire for autonomy, and as the US economy shows daily with its importation of nearly half billion gallons of oil to keep the consumerist dream humming, there's nothing independent about using fossil fuels for anything.

I think ten acres is a common threshold for what many of us think of as "a decent chunk of land." When we set out looking for our patch of earth to build and sustain our lives in early 1996, we were convinced that we'd need at least this amount just for gardening. At our new city digs, we can barely keep up with our 4,000 ft2 (or 1/10th of an acre) garden, so that mythical ten acres we did eventually buy stayed mostly wooded. We also thought that we should be "in the woods" so that we would be close to nature, not realizing that most of that "nature" scrambled for the exits as soon as we brought in the front loader to clear the driveway and put in the septic system, and that a passive solar home and vegetable garden don't work so well in the shade.

Lesson learned, but we now are the owners of a very unique round cob home, built pain-stakingly by hand, that is 45 minutes from town. Now that our idealistic notions of independence have becoming increasing intertwined with both our understanding of the need for community and the miserableness of trying to provide every last thing for yourself, what to do with a sustainable home in a not-so-sustainable location? We'll keep you posted as we tidy up our little darling cob home and look for some new owners this spring, but for the moment, let me conclude with two lessons learned. The first is that to be an equal participant in any community means coming into it as an autonomous individual, so that our youthful striving for independence was not all for nought. And the second is that every piece of infrastructure (especially housing) requires massive amounts of additional energy both for its long-term maintenance and for the needed daily connections of its inhabitants, usually far exceeding the initial outlay for building, meaning proper location is the most important component of a sustainable building, not what it's made of or how many solar whatevers it has.

Here's a Homepower article I wrote about building our cob home back in 2006. Please ignore all of the photo captions as they are not in the slightest bit relevant to the article.