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Community

Greenpeace “loses $5m” of donations

Greenpeace, the environmental charity that lost its way over a decade ago, has announced it has also lost money – over $5 MILLION dollars of donations have been frittered away in currency speculation.

Greenpeace headquarters, a marble-lined former bank in Amsterdam is a place where self-important Greenpeace executives plan their next vital air journey to visit a politician or industrialist. Greenpeace executives work is too urgent, you see, to follow the rules they prescribe for others. Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo loves to be photographed at meetings around the world.

Now, one of their management cadre has embarrassed the organisation by running up the huge losses on money markets. The cost helped push Greenpeace into a loss for the year of €6.8m on a global budget of €300m Euros.

It raises the question,why they have $5 million sitting around? Surely the environmental emergency they are always fighting requires spending the money we gave them, not sitting on it?…

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Community

Happy Father’s Day

Dad

My Dad is much of the reason why I am getting to live my dream, he gave me a sense of adventure from a young age, as a family we would watch nature and science shows on PBS, we also watch Grizzly Adams, now THAT was how I wanted to live, in a small hand built cabin, on a mountain side, with few neighbors, a few good friends and independent.…

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Community

Short cycling? Problem solved :)

1x1placeholderShort cycling, it makes me think of riding a bike a very small distance, or someone riding a really short bike…. actually it’s when a motor or compressor runs for a short period of time and is off for a short period of time. This will shorten the life of said motor or compressor.

We have had our current/new freezer to fridge conversion for a couple of months now, as the weather began warming up, I noticed the box ran more often than I thought it should, so I really started paying attention to the cycle. I didn’t officially time anything, but I estimated it was coming on for only a few minutes at a time every 5-10 minutes, that was definitely wrong. Of course this was during 100 degree days, it was also happening that way whether I opened the lid or not.…

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Community

Spring in the Sky Castle

Sky CastleI do my best to see the bright side of life and everything in it, take winter for instance, the cold temps means there are no bugs or other creepy crawlies out and about, it’s nice to snuggle up next to the wood stove. Now spring hits, the warm weather is great, don’t have to worry about bundling up over night, but with the warmer temps comes the critters, snakes, squirrels, mice and bugs.…

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Nova Scotia bans new off-grid homes

Dear Off-Grid,

I live on the south shore of Nova Scotia and I want to build a tiny, off-grid homestead. So far, it is proving to be a near impossibility.

The building inspector says I have to have 3 radiators and an air exchanger and these must be powered by electricity (as per the National Building Code). He says I must be able to maintain a temperature of 22.5 degrees Celsius in my home at anytime during the year! Who keeps their heat that high anyways?…

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Community

Lost Faith in the System

hagopianJoachim Hagopian voices the feelings of millions of Americans

The forsaken American population finds itself more in poverty (46.2 million people) as well as more in debt ($57 trillion) now than ever before in history.

Young generations of the college educated are having to pay off mounting college loan debts ($1.2 trillion and rising) that without jobs they can never even hope to repay. Rather than marry, have kids and buy homes like generations before them, we worry how to pay the light bill and avoid eviction. Sometime in the last century, when we weren’t looking, the American dream died. Foreclosures and unpaid debts are now sucking the lifeblood out.…

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Community

Tiny home in Hawaii

Tiny home in Hawaii

I think we can all appreciate Johnny Sanphillippo’s situation, he worked hard at a job he loved that unfortunately didn’t net him a large salary, of course if you were to ask him, I’m sure he would tell you that money isn’t the most important thing in the world, not something to run after at all costs.

Johnny cleaned houses, he painted homes and gardened for a living, he lived in California, there was no way he was going to be able to qualify for a mortgage on a home of his own, something he really wanted. He decided that going small would be the best thing for him, he purchased a lot in Hawaii and began working toward building a small home, one that he could afford, and one that allow him to retire later on without having to worry about having a pension or major money coming in.…

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Community

Keeping it clean…

shower

Hygiene while living off-grid, especially if you are living rough and/or just starting out, keeping clean can be one of the challenges. When PB and I first moved to our off-grid home, it was little more than a box on stilts, one room. We had a double sink on the “kitchen wall”, but it wasn’t hooked up to running water or even to a drain.…

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Barton St David, Plotgate farm aims to persuade locals
Community

New rural community to launch

As the nation’s housing crisis (also known as the nation’s house price bubble) intensifies, part of the solution is hiding in plain sight – cheap rural housing, on agricultural land, for people who are working that land. I wrote a story in The Guardian to bring them to public attention.

Tucked away down a farm track in Somerset is a project that could act as a catalyst for an era of low-cost, off-grid rural living across Britain.

A small group is aiming to join the population of Barton St David, a village of approximately 500 residents, 5 miles south-east of Glastonbury, with a pub, and a 12th Century church. Local residents are keen to make sure their new neighbours stick to the letter of the planning laws.…

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Community

Illegal to be off-grid?

og

Apparently it is illegal in some places, Florida makes off-grid living illegal – mandates all homes must be connected to an electricity grid.

It’s no secret that an opposition to sustainable living exists. Earlier this year, Texas state brought several SWAT teams to a sustainable community and threatened to shut it down. Each one of the community members were initially handcuffed at gunpoint. It was called “The Garden of Eden Community,” and was totally self sustainable.…

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Community

Choices, we all have them….

goal

For those of you who have followed my writing for a while, you will notice I am frequently trying to get people to go beyond just dreaming about their dreams and actually DOING something about it. Dreams are nice to have, but take the steps to turn that dream into a goal and start working toward that goal.

I saw this article today, at first I thought, oh brother, another post about “10 things”, but once I began reading these 10 things, it really made sense, for everyone’s life, including those who want to go off-grid or live more independently.

Personally I think numbers 2, 5, 9 and 10 are very important, all of them are good… read them over and begin applying them to your life, whether you wish to live off-grid or not, these are great ‘ism’s.…

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Mom knew best – cooking from scratch

Mother’s Day passed last weekend, for me it’s a bittersweet day, I’m happy because I’m a mother, but it’s sad because my mother is gone. Be that as it may, my mother taught me many things, one of the more important things was how to cook from scratch, I can follow a recipe but I’m quite capable to straying from the recipe to improve it, or to substitute for something I don’t have. I can even cook by the seat of my pants, meaning I can take a few kitchen staples and make a dish, it’s not difficult if you learn some basics.

Knowing how to cook (and bake) from scratch has so many benefits, first off it’s going to taste better, it’s going to be cheaper, and it’s going to be healthier for you. Buying food basics rather than food products, you KNOW what is going into your dish and consequently what is going into your body.…

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