Next door to the grid
I’m inaugurating a new category with a couple of items found today …
For your peak-oil preparedness file, this couple is attempting to live for a full year off of food originating within 100 miles of their home. They say that for a typical meal, “ingredients typically travel between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres”. But that’s only because they’re Canadian. Our meals travel 1500 to 2500 miles.
Shipping food from all over the country and world does give us much more variety and the economies of scale of corporate farming makes food much cheaper, but there are still plenty of good reasons to be more locally-reliant. Not the least of which is the fresher and better-tasting produce you can find at your local farmer’s market.
They have already hit a couple of big roadblocks though — sugar and flour.
Bob has put together a whole solar shingle system and has a blog all about it.
This would be another too-expensive endeavor, but how cool would it be to be able to run your whole house off the sun?
I’d love to try this one day, but I’d like to see the whole process and real costs in action first. Perhaps I could find a spendthrift friend in a sunny part of the country and help him install one in his house first.
One Response to “Next door to the grid”
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Comment from jank
Time July 13, 2005 at 11:13 pm
Rock on.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this lately (but precious little acting aside from the Stonington Farmer’s Market). Nothing particularly insightful, but we have been running the air conditioners a lot less this summer than last…