Читать книгу The Self-Sufficiency Handbook - Alan Bridgewater - Страница 16

The self-sufficient house is just that: a house that is self-contained and independent, a house that generates its own power and recycles its own waste. But there is more to it than that.

In the perfect self-sufficient scheme of things, the people living in the house would not be going out to work to earn money and then spending the money on food; rather, they would stay at home and spend all their time growing their own food. Of course, most people now agree that this self-sufficient dream of completely dropping out—like some sort of New Age Robinson Crusoe—is very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.

The reality is that we all need money to pay rent, taxes, and all the rest. The perfect self-sufficient house can only be a part of a much larger picture. Ironically, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s, most governments tended to regard go-greeners as slightly eccentric, they are now pushing us all to do our part in conserving energy, producing less waste, driving smaller cars, using less water, and so on.

The truly wonderful thing is that many of the much-debated visionary possibilities of the 1960s and 1970s are now realities. You don’t have to dream about such items as small wind generators, low-energy cars, and solar heating; these things are readily available to us. The truth is that if we all do our part toward self-sufficiency—whether a simple step, such as insulating our homes, or trying to go whole-hog and work toward going off-grid—then these efforts will go a long way in solving our country’s, and even our world’s, ever-pressing energy needs.

Better still, where most people once had no choice other than to travel to work, modern computer networks mean that more and more people can now opt for doing a good part of their work at home.

Most self-sufficiency gurus today are of the opinion that the best option is to take the middle road. Their thinking is that most of us do need to earn some money, but we could spend the bulk of our time growing our own food and maintaining our self-sufficient houses. The reality is that most people will not go down the path to self-sufficiency by choice; rather, they may be interested in certain parts of the go-green package, but they will be forced to use “eco” technology out of the necessity to cut living costs.