July 28, 2010 at 5:49 am Hi Michael, Great summary and of cosrue going off grid can be done in degrees but even then, it is not a precondition of living in a tiny house. Any of these methods can be used to any degree by anyone to reduce our impact.There is nothing to stimulate the thought process of how complex these systems have become and how much we take it for granted as buying a piece of land which has no access to centralized utilities and trying to design all of the things which you would need to build and live there. You very quickly come to grips with putting in simpler systems and come to the same conclusions and solutions which our predecessors used for centuries. Pit toilets, collect your water, burn what you have for fuel, reduce your consumption by a lot compared to what we do today.And to Andreas, I live in an area where there is also lots of freshwater and hydro power and yet water is a topic of huge discussion because we are rapidly running out. It is over-allocated. Everyone wants a piece farmers to irrigate more and more land, industry for manufacture, homeowners to keep their lawns green. The amount of consumption per person is unsustainable and more and more pressure is placed on every single running body of water to tap it, dam it, ship it, redirect it, channel it. OTOH, we have water so clean it can be drunk from the stream and yet, chemicals (like chlorine) are still added to it before it becomes drinking water because of potential from farm runoff. We’re not the only ones pissing in our drinking water. We should never again think of any resource as being limitless because it is just a matter of time Reply
Jung says
July 28, 2010 at 5:49 am Hi Michael, Great summary and of cosrue going off grid can be done in degrees but even then, it is not a precondition of living in a tiny house. Any of these methods can be used to any degree by anyone to reduce our impact.There is nothing to stimulate the thought process of how complex these systems have become and how much we take it for granted as buying a piece of land which has no access to centralized utilities and trying to design all of the things which you would need to build and live there. You very quickly come to grips with putting in simpler systems and come to the same conclusions and solutions which our predecessors used for centuries. Pit toilets, collect your water, burn what you have for fuel, reduce your consumption by a lot compared to what we do today.And to Andreas, I live in an area where there is also lots of freshwater and hydro power and yet water is a topic of huge discussion because we are rapidly running out. It is over-allocated. Everyone wants a piece farmers to irrigate more and more land, industry for manufacture, homeowners to keep their lawns green. The amount of consumption per person is unsustainable and more and more pressure is placed on every single running body of water to tap it, dam it, ship it, redirect it, channel it. OTOH, we have water so clean it can be drunk from the stream and yet, chemicals (like chlorine) are still added to it before it becomes drinking water because of potential from farm runoff. We’re not the only ones pissing in our drinking water. We should never again think of any resource as being limitless because it is just a matter of time Reply