Sustainable House and Home

With all of the hype and press about all things green these days, you’ve probably heard about many approaches to living a more sustainable lifestyle than you ever have before.  One place where we could all agree is that our foods should be as clean and nutritious as possible.  It doesn’t matter where you come out on the organic or non-organic foods front.  It doesn’t even matter if you think that growing genetically modified organisms (GMO) is an appropriate way to farm.  Whether you are truly interested in organic gardening or not comes down to what would you want your own children to eat in an ideal world.  If this point is brought to you, you would have to agree that foods grown and harvested with as little pesticides, herbicides and other chemical agents used in typical commercial farming as possible is the best way to go.  It is not only the safest but may also help the foods produce more naturally occurring healthy substances that they would normally produce in a backyard garden.  Now, this point of nutrition and safety are too hot of a topic for anyone with any political career to address openly, but common sense dictates here at Sustainable House and Home.  And, common sense in this case means if you grow your food like your ancestors did before the invention of modern agricultural chemical agents, you are probably better off on many levels. And so are your kids.  And mine, too, for that matter.

Gardening is one of those areas where it is possible to capture children’s interests and help them learn where their food and other plants come from.  Not everyone can live on a farm.  Not everyone wants to either.  But, there are ways of having soil that every farmer and avid gardener lives for.  This soil has just the right amount of nitrogen, potassium, oxygen and all the other good minerals and microorganisms that make vegetables thrive.  This dark, rich brown dirt is a combination of natural forces that breaks down what comes from the surrounding rain, other plant waste products and small organisms that naturally occur in the soil.  You can get this same ‘black gold’ dirt by composting at your home as well.

Compost is really simple to do, saves items from filling in a landfill or having to be filtered from the water supply and can save you money on having to buy potting soil as well.  It is an all around great use of kitchen and yard waste.  You could think of it as an outdoor recycling program for things other than plastic, steel, aluminum, and glass.  You can’t include paper in this group because you CAN actually use paper in your compost bin.  Old newspaper can be shredded up and used as a great addition to your compost mix.

If you have a small patio garden or even raised planting beds, your compost can provide you with more than enough soil additive to keep your plants thriving.  In order to make your compost mix ‘work’ you’ll need to pay attention to having the right mix of moisture, brown waste and green waste.  Newspaper and other brown waste can be used to keep the moisture level just right.  Brown waste is things like dead leaves, grass clippings, and other similar yard waste products.  The green waste is from things like vegetable ‘table scraps’.  You can use the parts from your vegetables that you don’t eat (like the ends of onions and the peels of various fruits) and ‘feed’ them to your compost pile or bin.

Many cities actually have either free or inexpensive compost bins that they will provide to you.  If you want to get some more elaborate ones that are able to turn or rotate on wheels and such, you’ll need to invest in one of those yourself.  Once you get the hang of it, it is fairly simple to maintain.  As discussed, the real trick is in keeping the right mix of green, brown and moisture.  If your compost begins to get too dry, the natural decomposition and breakdown will not occur.  This will invite other critters and bugs to the pile.  If it is too moist, then you’ll get a sloppy mess with no breakdown either.  Think of it just like Goldilocks’ porridge and keep the mix just right.  This will cause your compost to produce heat as a natural by-product of the mix decomposing and will kill off any unwanted microorganisms.  Also, with the right mix and temperature, your coveted rich, brown soil will be ready for use in a matter of months.  As you keep adding stuff to the top of your pile, you can keep it going so that you almost never run out of compost.

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This is a simple answer in terms of coming from a knowledge of these things.  However, when trying to come up with a concrete and succinct answer, it is sometimes a bit more difficult.  The simplest answer is to say that what makes a house a sustainable home is that it is not only built from materials that are harvested or manufactured in a way that is supportive of the larger global environment, but that is in constant balance and harmony with the environment that it is a part of as well.  In other words, it is constructed of materials that support a more ‘green friendly’ – we’ll get to that as well – approach and is also surrounded, supported and maintained in this fashion as well.

As the term implies, the idea is that this sustainable home is one which can sustain itself within its larger environment.  We are all living inside larger and larger rings of environmental and universal rings.  Think of it in terms of one big compost pile.  In other words, the tiny microorganism that helps break down the waste products in the soil is also contributing to the food that is grown. This food is what you eat and what drives your life force and energy.  You, in turn, do some sort of work and contribute to another way to the global community.  Our efforts and by products are affecting the Earth and beyond.  It doesn’t matter to what extend you agree or disagree with political wrangling of facts and figures, the point is that we are all interconnected.  The homes in which we live are part of a larger living community and environment.

Rather than trying to isolate ourselves from this larger environment, what if we embraced where we were and lived in harmony with it?  This is not really as radical a concept as it may sound.  In fact, these concepts have been espoused for years by Native Americans and other Native peoples of various places in the world.  They have a greater appreciation for these concepts because they interact with their environment in such an intimate way.  The people that truly ‘live off the land’, as all human beings did at one time in our history, have a greater appreciation for the immediacy of their actions.  The further and further we isolate ourselves from the environment, whether that is through distance or technology, the less able we are to see the affects we are having.

This is a big problem, and maybe not in the way you might be thinking.  While there are certainly intelligent people arguing that humans are destroying the planet, it is our contention that it is more contributory than causative.  That is to say, while there are signs that we are currently in a warming trend on our planet, it is not definitively caused by humans.  We have gone through these cycles in the past and we will again in the future.  To assume that we have all of the conclusive evidence NOW is just too egotistical to begin making judgments on.  Don’t read this the wrong way.  After all, you are on SustainableHouseandHome.com.  It would be silly to think we don’t care about these matters.  Quite the contrary.

This site is dedicated to those principles that we believe will have the greatest impact to limit our footprints on this blue and green planet we co-inhabit.  That there is evidence that our past and current actions are contributing to the trend has been proven to our satisfaction.  The purpose and design of this site is geared toward you, the individual, inhabitant of a house you call home.  Whether or not your home could qualify for a “green building council” award is not the only matter we are concerned with.  Of greater importance is bringing awareness to the materials, products and ways of living that we each have that can minimize the destructive impact we are having on the planet.  We may not be able to reverse any trends that have been set in motion through the ages of time, but we can certainly not add more in the way of our past and current transgressions.  Together, one home at a time, we can make our local environment, then our global environment one connected and sustainable place to live.

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