When a rural Saskatchewan town needed a population boost, they decided to offer prospective 
residents half-acre building lots for $1. But there was a catch: the newcomers would need to build a sustainable community from scratch and live off the grid.
CBC’s The Passionate Eye followed the residents’ first year in the eco-village in Craik, about 80 kilometres north of Moose Jaw, resulting in the Eco-Home Adventures documentary, available to watch online at www.cbc.ca/video.
“I was lured by affordability and the idea of small town going eco,” says Kelly Green (identified as Reinhardt in the documentary), who moved to Craik from Toronto.
Unlike the other families – including an ex-military man, his wife and four kids; a couple with plans for a healthy home for their two boys along with a music studio, photo studio and pottery studio; and a woman planning for a tiny “hobbit house” while facing custody battles – Green and Bridget Haworth decided to buy and retrofit a home in the middle of town, with plans to build an off-grid complex, including living space, a coffee shop and the headquarters for their eco website www.boilingfrog.ca.
“It was decided that renovating an old house would be more eco-friendly and perhaps a little bit easier than building from scratch,” he explains. “And because the property is right on Main Street, we thought it good to have an eco-village type project in town, rather than all the focus being in a new suburb across the highway.”
Their decision to retrofit the home using strawbales, which was a bit of an experiment, turned into an enormous task, says Green.
“Not having any experience in building or renovating, working on the house was very challenging. This was all the more so given the unusual nature of the renovations. It would have never gotten as far as it did without help from the locals.”
Of course, as the documentary shows, many locals weren’t that receptive to the newcomers. At one town meeting, neighbours described the home as an “eyesore” and fire hazard. The weather wasn’t on their side either, with wind and rain posing a risk to the bales.
Green says his experiences in the town “run the gamut from really good to extremely awful.”
There “are some very nice, thoughtful and supportive people in this community and throughout the region. Many people have come by to help, lend tools and advice, and make great strides to make me feel welcome,” but he says he’s also “been threatened, jeered at, heckled, ignored, complained about and blacklisted.”
He says, coming into the experience, he was perhaps a little naïve about how onboard the town’s residents were with the idea of a green community.
“Perhaps it was a little much for folks, having some new guy who thinks he knows it all, going around asking drivers not to idle their cars, speaking out on pesticide use and lobbying for a ban of pesticides in town,” he says. “In a small town, people are not naturally accepting of new folks, and if one starts stirring the pot immediately it has a fast effect.”
If given the chance to start over, he says he may have decided to try building from scratch or would have started the retrofit by replacing the roof prior to wrapping the house in straw, because the old roof didn’t offer enough protection for the bales, leading to months of living in a house wrapped in tarps. And, he says, he would “change the way I interacted with the town and maybe not have been so outspoken.”
To help reduce his eco-footprint, Green says he’s practicing the “Three Rs” reducing his consumption, reusing by purchasing used and shopping at the Habitat ReStore for construction and reno materials, and recycling. He’s also cut out chemical cleaners – including shampoo – and strives to eat local, sourcing food from his own garden as well as local gardeners and farmers.
While living in the retrofitted house featured on the doc, he generated his own electricity, except for a fridge that was plugged in a few months of the year in a neighbouring building, heated water with the sun and on a wood stove and used solar cookers for meals in the summer months.
For people not quite ready to go off the grid, Green suggests making small changes such as cancelling subscriptions to save paper, planting a garden, cutting down on electricity consumption by turning off power bars, lowering the thermostat by a few degrees at night and washing clothes in cold water and hanging to dry. Homeowners can also look into installing an ‘on demand’ hot water tank, or wrap their existing units in an insulating blanket. He also suggests looking into a heat recovery unit that siphons heat from wastewater and puts it back in the tank, as well as checking the home for leaks and repairing or renovating where needed, for example with caulking, insulation or new windows.
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On the surface it’s a portrait of a wannabe eco-hero: Colin Beavan, a Manhattan husband and father who recently vowed to lead his family in a yearlong experiment to live with as little environmental impact as possible. That means no motorized travel, no electricity, local in-season foods only. Forget about air conditioning. Toilet paper? Don’t ask.
