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.

For those of you who have toiled with the idea of “off the grid” living or are in search for a simpler life or there is a special tree house community functioning in the rainforest of Costa Rica which might be right up your alley. Finca Bellavista: A Sustainable Rainforest Community is what it’s called and according to inhabitat.com, “was created with the sole purpose of preserving 300 acres of local rainforest by offering a unique opportunity for ecologically minded property owners to live sustainably in and steward a managed rainforest environment.”

The guidelines include that all tree houses must be low-impact, stilt-built or arboreal dwellings that run on hydroelectric and solar power. All of the water is provided by a rainwater catch system and residents have virtually no electricity bills. However, residents do have access to the community center which has “a high-speed WIFI zone, parking area, a community center with a bath house, kitchen and dining area, and game room, a stone-lined, river-fed swimming pool (under construction), the start of the SkyTrail network, and numerous gardens.”

How much will this cost you, you ask? Everything is all for the low low price of $50,000US. If that’s not simple living, I don’t know what is.
Sustainability Ninja – Laura Gosselin

When people talk about renewable energy, they usually mean that the main source from which the energy is derived—wind, the sun, ocean waves and tides, the never-ending heat below the Earth’s surface—is available in endless supply and either remains relatively constant or continually regenerates as part of the planet’s natural cycles.

For renewable energy to be sustainable, however, the mechanisms we use to convert the raw energy to usable power have to be just as renewable as the source from which it is drawn. Currently, most of those mechanisms—from solar cells to hydrogen fuel cells—contain enough non-renewable material to make them the weak link in the renewable energy chain.

That idea was highlighted at the Financial Times Energy Conference in London a couple of weeks ago and reported in New Scientist magazine. Solar cells convert sunlight to electricity, but the most efficient solar cells rely on indium, a rare and expensive mineral that is in short supply worldwide. Hydrogen fuel cells, among the most promising alternative vehicle-fuel technologies, require platinum, which is even rarer than indium.

Scientists are hard at work on alternative ways to make renewable energy truly renewable, by finding new ways to convert the energy to electricity or other types of power without the need for components that may not be available when needed. Unfortunately, many of those breakthroughs may be years away—and at a time when the world is looking to renewable energy to slow global warming and replace fossil fuels before supplies are exhausted. Clearly, we have a lot more work to do.

Larry’s Environmental Issues Blog

By Larry West, About.com Guide to Environmental Issues

Barack Obama stepped into the chaotic final hours of the Copenhagen summit today saying he was convinced the world could act “boldly and decisively” on climate change.

But his speech offered no indication America was ready to embrace bold measures, after world leaders had been working desperately against the clock to try to paper over an agreement to prevent two years of wasted effort — and a 10-day meeting — from ending in total collapse.

Obama, who had been skittish about coming to Copenhagen at all unless it could be cast as a foreign policy success, looked visibly frustrated as he appeared before world leaders.

He offered no further commitments on reducing emissions or on finance to poor countries beyond Hillary Clinton’s announcement yesterday that America would support a $100bn global fund to help developing nations adapt to climate change.

He did not even press the Senate to move ahead on climate change legislation, which environmental organisations have been urging for months.

The president did say America would follow through on his administration’s clean energy agenda, and that it would live up to its pledges to the international community.

“We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say,” Obama said.

But in the absence of any evidence of that commitment the words rang hollow and there was a palpable sense of disappointment in the audience.

Instead, he warned African states and low island nations who have been resisting what they see as a weak agreement that the later alternative — no agreement — was far worse.

“We know the fault lines because we’ve been imprisoned by them for years. But here is the bottom line: we can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward, and continue to refine it and build upon its foundation,” he said.

“Or we can again choose delay, falling back into the same divisions that have stood in the way of action for years. And we will be back having the same stale arguments month after month, year after year – all while the danger of climate change grows until it is irreversible.”

He also took a dig at China, drawing attention to its status as the world’s biggest emitter and reinforcing America’s hardline on the issue of accountability for greenhouse gas emissions.

The lacklustre speech proved a huge frustration to a summit that had been looking to Obama to use his stature on the world stage – and his special following among African leaders – to try to come to an ambitious deal.

The president was drawn into the chaos within minutes of his arrival at Copenhagen, ditching his schedule to take part in a meeting of major industrialised and rapidly emerging economies.

Responding to Obama’s speech, a British official said: “Gordon Brown is committed to doing all he can and will stay until the very last minute to secure a deal… but others also need to show the same level of commitment. The prospects of a deal are not great.”

Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said: “The president said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so. He showed no awareness of the inequality and injustice of climate change. If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate change disaster.”

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”

The World Wildlife Fund said Obama had let down the international community by failing to commit to pushing for action in Congress: “The only way the world can be sure the US is standing behind its commitments is for the president to clearly state that climate change will be his next top legislative priority.”

The extent of crisis in the talks has taken leaders by surprise. The Brazilian leader, Lula da Silva, told the conference that the all-night negotiating sessions took him back to his days as a trade union leader negotiating with his bosses.

Suzanne Goldenberg and Allegra Stratton in Copenhagen

guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 December 2009 12.53 GMT