Mother Earth News Books for Wiser Living

Your Complete Guide to Living beyond the Grid with Renewable Energy Technologies and Sustainable Living

John Schaeffer

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781550925791
• Edition: 14
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Renewable Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

What book would you want if you were stranded on a desert island? Widely regarded as the 'bible' of off-grid living, The Solar Living Sourcebook might be your best choice. With over 600, 000 copies in print worldwide, it is the most comprehensive resource available for anyone interested in lessening their environmental footprint and increasing their energy independence.

The Solar Living Sourcebook-14th Edition is the ultimate guide to renewable energy, sustainable living, natural and green building, off-grid living and alternative transportation, written by experts with decades of experience and a passion for sharing their knowledge. This fully revised and updated edition includes brand new sections on permaculture and urban homesteading, and completely rewritten chapters on solar technology, sustainable transportation and relocalization. It also boasts greatly expanded material on:

• Natural Building
• Permaculture and biodynamics
• Electric and biofuel-powered vehicles
• Passive solar
• Solar water heating
• Grid-tie photovoltaic systems

-- plus maps, wiring diagrams, formulae, charts, electrical code, solar sizing worksheets and much more.

Whether you're a layperson or a professional, novice or longtime aficionado, the Sourcebook puts the latest research and information at your fingertips-everything you need to know to make sustainable living a reality.

CHAPTER 1

Relocalization

A Strategic Response to Peak Oil and Climate Change

AS WE APPROACH THE MIDDLE OF THE SECOND DECADE of the 21st century, peak oil and global climate change continue to loom as the two most critical issues of our time. The end of the age of cheap and abundant fossil fuels on one hand and the unprecedented disruption of long-stable climatological and biological systems on the other are unquestionably altering life on Earth as we know it. This is not an ideological statement. It is grounded in the overwhelming weight of scientific fact and the laws of physics and ecology as we understand them. Even the last few remaining scientist skeptics—even the last holdouts among the oil and gas companies themselves!—now grudgingly acknowledge the reality of these earthshaking, interlocking trends. We begin the book by exploring some promising strategies for grappling with these profound issues. Many thanks to Daniel Lerch of the Post-Carbon Institute, who tackled the revision of this chapter.

The greatest hope rests in the ability to honestly accept the reality of a situation and then make the best of it.

People may be scared or shocked by predictions of ensuing environmental and social chaos driven by the end of cheap fossil fuels and the decline of the planet’s ecological systems. But while awareness and concern about these issues are growing, many people still remain indifferent. How individuals respond emotionally to facts and deductions is important, but if they are unable and unwilling to accept what is true because it makes them feel bad, positive change is not possible. The greatest hope rests in the ability to honestly accept the reality of a situation and then make the best of it.

The world officially woke up to the looming challenge of climate change at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Then in late 1999 at the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, the world woke up to another looming (and controversial) challenge—economic globalization. Both trends were driven in large part by fossil fuels: climate change, by overconsumption of coal and oil; globalization, by the dropping cost of transportation and manufacturing enabled by abundant and affordable oil, coal, and natural gas. Suddenly, people who had been separately concerned about the environment, society’s oil addiction, and the concentration of economic power faced an interconnected triple threat of global energy, economic, and environmental crises.

Photo © Ann Card

One aspect of relocalization is buying locally grown produce, such as the fruits, vegetables, and other products available at Rosaly’s Garden, an organic farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

The period around the turn of the 21st century proved to be a crucible for new approaches to these vexing challenges. Influential publications exploring the potential of local economies and local action had begun to appear.¹ The November 1999 WTO protests that brought together “Teamsters and Turtles” (labor activists and environmental activists) were quickly followed by Y2K, which prompted not only scattered doomsday panic but also real community concerns around local infrastructure and provisioning—ideas that, publicly, hadn’t been much discussed since the oil crises of the 1970s. A few months later, the 30th anniversary of Earth Day in April 2000 turned into a rallying point for environmentalists eager to breathe new life into the second half of the “think globally, act locally” mantra. In the summer and fall, Ralph Nader’s passionately supported but ultimately doomed candidacy for President on the Green Party ticket gave an unexpected voice to voters disenchanted with the pro-corporate and pro-globalization policies of both the Democratic and Republican parties. And finally, the Supreme Court’s awarding of the presidency to George W. Bush in December 2000 firmly closed the door on many people’s hopes for progress on the world’s sustainability crisis from the US federal government.

Out of those years emerged a scattered but quickly growing grassroots movement of people and organizations focused on local sustainability, some of whom started using the terms “localization” or “relocalization” to describe what they were doing. Where a decade earlier the call was for individuals to make small changes that collectively could impact global issues (see, for example, the famous 1989 book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth), this new activism was decidedly community focused. Groups organized community gardens, clamored for bicycle lanes, set up car-sharing clubs, launched local currencies, and pushed for their local governments to adopt climate action plans. By 2004, with the release of the movie The End of Suburbia and James Howard Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency, concern about peak oil was added to the mix. The movement started developing a national and even international identity with the launch of the Relocalization Network, the predominant pre-Facebook online meeting place supporting relocalization initiatives and ideas.²

Of course, the movement drew from a rich history of activism related to environmental and social concerns. “Relocalization” may have been a new term, but the concept and the activities it encompassed had deep roots. Its precursors include: thinkers like E. F. Schumacher, Ted Trainer, Garrett Hardin, and Wendell Berry;³ social trends like the conservation movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the voluntary simplicity movement, and the slow food movement; practices like organic gardening, biodynamics, placemaking, natural building, and permaculture; concepts like ecological footprint, import substitution, new urbanism, and ecocities; and centuries-old American traditions of individual and community self-sufficiency. In general, the common themes included the decentralization of political and economic structures; lower material consumption and pollution; a focus on the quality of relationships, culture, and the environment as sources of fulfillment; and downscaling of infrastructure development.

The movement has since grown and evolved in myriad ways. The Transition Towns concept, developed in the British Isles in the mid-2000s, gave rise to the global Transition Network; in 2009, the Relocalization Network was folded into the Transition movement, and in the United States is now coordinated by Transition US. Similarly minded groups also formed and spread (and persisted, or faded away), including peak oil awareness meet ups, Resilience Circles, and Local Living Economy groups.⁴ Crafts and skills related to relocalization, like urban farming and DIY (do-it-yourself), have been embraced by popular culture. The number of people—and books, conferences, websites, videos, etc.—involved in relocalization activities has truly grown exponentially.

Before describing some of the details of relocalization, let’s examine its basic premises. We believe that these premises are sound, being grounded in good science and common sense. By contrast, the assumptions underlying most of the economic and social models that have led to our current environmental and resource predicaments are essentially unsound rationalizations to justify short-term, often individual, interests. Our society’s obsession with growth and gain have blinded us to the real common good, the needs of future generations, and the welfare of nonhuman life on the planet. Changing these paradigms and reorienting the trajectory of our society is a major undertaking, but all of us—as individuals and working together collectively—do have the power to make a positive contribution.

Ecological Economics

During the era of cheap energy, the study of economics became divorced from an understanding of how human systems are connected to ecological systems. Not surprisingly, the nearly free energy available from fossil fuels, and the rapid technological advances they fostered, made people in modern industrialized societies believe they were no longer constrained by tangibles like food, energy, water, and the weather. But the hubris of our recent past is being revealed, and many are searching for a more honest and realistic reckoning of humanity’s place on Earth.

A helpful place to look is the discipline called ecological economics.⁵ A conceptual model based on ecological economics is useful both to understand the current economic system and its vulnerabilities and to guide the development of a sustainable alternative.

Mainstream economic thinking usually distorts or fails to fully understand the fundamental interconnectedness of “the economy” and “the environment.” Only in recent decades have economists begun to consider the environmental or ecological dimensions of human productive activity. But even when economists do take account of these relationships, their formulations are typically partial or misguided. For example, wealthy and environmentally responsible countries are sometimes touted as examples of how economic growth and stewardship of the planet go hand in hand. But while local measures of air quality, forest cover, and water cleanliness may be high, the raw materials and goods that the wealthy countries consume still have an environmental impact—in the poorer countries where those materials are extracted and those goods are manufactured. The damage—in addition to the jobs—has simply been outsourced.⁶

In the ecological economics model, the Human Economy is a subset of the Earth System, and therefore the scale of the human economy is ultimately limited. The human economy depends upon the throughput of materials from and back into the Earth system. Just pick up any trinket in your possession and ask, What is it made of? Where did these materials come from? How much energy was used and what happens to the waste products?⁷ Limits to the size of the human economy are determined by three related factors: 1) the capacity for the Earth system to supply inputs to the human economy (sources), 2) the capacity of the Earth system to tolerate and process wastes from the human economy (sinks), and 3) the negative impacts on the human economy and the resources it relies on (feedbacks) caused by too much pollution.

For example, mining coal makes available a “source” of energy for industry that produces pollution, including sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain. Too much acid rain degrades built infrastructure and overwhelms the capacity of natural “sinks,” such as fores...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• A MESSAGE FROM THE RGS ENERGY CEO
• FOREWORD: by Bill McKibben
• INTRODUCTION: by John Schaeffer, Real Goods Founder
• Chapter 1 RELOCALIZATION: A Strategic Response to Peak Oil and Climate Change
• Chapter 2 LAND AND SHELTER: Designing and Building Your Green Dream Home
• Chapter 3 SUNSHINE TO ELECTRICITY: Creating Renewable Energy with Solar, Wind, and Hydroelectric Power
• Chapter 4 FROM PANEL TO PLUG: How to Get Your Renewable Energy Source Powering Your Appliances
• Chapter 5 EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS AND SOLAR MOBILITY: Be Empowered When the Grid Goes Down
• Chapter 6 ENERGY CONSERVATION: Superefficient Lighting, Heating, and Cooling Are the First Steps
• Chapter 7 WATER DEVELOPMENT: Reckoning with Our Most Precious and Endangered Resource
• Chapter 8 WATER HEATING: The Most Cost-effective Solar Alternative
• Chapter 9 WATER AND AIR PURIFICATION: Clean Water and Air Are Human Rights!
• Chapter 10 COMPOSTING TOILETS AND GREYWATER SYSTEMS: Novel, Safe, and Clean Solutions to an Age-old Human Issue
• Chapter 11 REGENERATIVE HOMESTEADING AND FARMING: Growing Your Own Organically Using the Permaculture Principles While Living the Good Life
• Chapter 12 URBAN HOMESTEADING: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living
• Chapter 13 SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION: Toward a Future of Carbon-free Mobility
• Chapter 14 NATURAL BURIAL: The Ultimate Back-to-the-land Movement
• Chapter 15 THE REAL GOODS’ SUSTAINABLE LIVING LIBRARY: Reading for a Renewable Future
• APPENDIX
• Glossary
• ENDNOTES