[FLPERMACULTURE] Fw: Another Way

[bosak at ibiblio.org]

CATEGORIES: Intentional communities; permaculture; energy descent

Not much new in this long and fairly insightful article on
Earthhaven; the news is that it was published in the Sunday
Washington Post Magazine.

Jon

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Another Way

A band of idealists in the mountains of North Carolina is trying
to build a low-energy lifestyle. But must we all live like hippies
in the woods to make a difference?

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, November 19, 2006; W10

THE SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY CRISIS turns out to be, in part, mood
lighting. You go with one gentle bulb, a 10-watt number that shoos
away enough of the darkness to keep everyone at the table
identifiable. We're having a delicious, if arguably dim, meal on a
pleasant summer evening at a place called Earthaven. It's an
"ecovillage." It's in western North Carolina, east of Asheville,
in a notch in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We're off the grid, and
deep inside one version of the human future.

Susan Lathrop and Kim Rylander, known in the village as Suchi and
Kimchi, are hosting me and my guide, Earthaven resident Greg Geis,
as I try to figure out how a bunch of suburbanites who've fled
mainstream America are able to live in the boondocks half an hour
by car from the nearest small town, without electrical lines or
water mains or flush toilets or streetlights or microwave ovens or
washing machines or home entertainment systems or electric garage
door openers or fake-log fireplaces operated by remote control or
any of the other things that most people consider essential to
survival.

Earthaven is not a "commune," a term now in disfavor (too stale,
too '70s); the members prefer to call it an "intentional
community." It's the kind of counterculture social experiment more
typically found in places such as Oregon and Northern
California. I visited because, while the rest of us worry about
gas prices and global warming and terrorists taking over oil
fields, the residents of Earthaven have a special approach to
energy. They make their own.

Suchi and Kimchi have solar panels that give them enough juice to
run a laptop and a coffee grinder and a few low-wattage light
bulbs. They follow the weather reports, dialing a local phone
number for the latest forecast.

"If I know it's going to be sunny tomorrow, I know I can be a
little more extravagant -- put on the Christmas lights for dinner,
check my e-mail at night," Suchi says.

They're not absolutists, to be sure. They use propane. Even an
ecovillage finds it hard to wean itself completely from fossil
fuel. With help from a little stove, Suchi and Kimchi have made a
fine meal of stir-fried beef with vegetables, basmati rice, garden
salad with greens from the community garden, and a blueberry
cobbler with berries from the bushes not far from their front
door.

There won't be any leftovers, because it's all good, and they
don't have a refrigerator. They use coolers. They had a freezer
for a while, but it sucked too much energy. When the leaves came
out in spring, their solar panels didn't get enough
sunlight. Maybe Suchi and Kimchi needed to add more panels or cut
some trees. In the meantime, they simply unplugged the
freezer. That's another solution to the energy crisis. Unplug what
you don't need. They decided they could make do temporarily by
hauling ice in milk jugs from an old freezer that's a few hundred
yards away, powered by a small hydroelectric contraption parked on
a tumbling stream.

Suchi doesn't mince words as we talk over dinner about life in the
village: "It's torment living here sometimes -- just torment." But
she loves it still, and says, "I have the sanity of living my
principles."

After dinner, I help with the dishes and do what I can to stretch
a little pot of hot water heated on the stove. Most of us
mainstream people keep a huge tank of the stuff in our homes, say,
30 gallons, maintained at scalding temperatures, at least 160
degrees, even when we're out of town on a long vacation -- in case
we need to fly home suddenly and take a bath.

Washing dishes the Earthaven way works acceptably well (though in
the gloaming, it's kind of hard to see what's happening down there
on the plates as you scrub). It's energy-efficient. It does not
require gratuitous amounts of fossil fuel or result in the
prodigious emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

When you live like this, you think differently. You think about
energy. You think about where it comes from and where it goes. The
people of Earthaven have developed a way of life that's
sophisticated, that's technologically aware, even as it resembles,
at first glance, camping. It's all rather enlightened. Or so you
may conclude, after your eyes adjust.

THE KEY TO MODERN LIFE IS STRATEGIC IGNORANCE. There are so many
things we don't know about our lives and that, frankly, we don't
want to know. We don't know much about the basic things that
sustain us. We are clueless "end users" in elaborate industrial
supply lines. Energy comes from distant power plants and oil
refineries and pipelines and electrical grids, but we don't think
about them when we flick on a light or turn the key in the
ignition. We live in a world we didn't make, by rules and customs
and laws we didn't invent, using tools and technologies we don't
understand.

Even as science teaches us, constantly, that we are part of the
fabric of life, that we have a common genetic heritage with all
other living things, we continue to hold nature at arm's
length. Predation and cultivation and gathering and even
preparation of food have all been outsourced.

Meat in the store has been carefully butchered and wrapped to
obscure any association with an actual animal (hence the
counterculture movement toward "food with a face"). Novelist
Arthur C. Clarke said that when a technology becomes sufficiently
advanced it becomes indistinguishable from magic, but he didn't go
far enough: The final advancement comes when the technology ceases
to register at all. Electricity, accessed through an outlet,
becomes an intrinsic property of residential walls, as are the
drywall and the studs. Power comes from a switch. We have the
consciousness of small children. We can conjure power at
will. It's a dream world, but one that might not be sustainable.

I'm guessing that for most of us, the only time we really
concentrate on energy is at the gas station, because we can feel
the fuel surging through the hose and can see the numbers spinning
on the pump. The United States uses about 141 billion gallons of
gasoline a year. A barrel of oil yields about 19.6 gallons of
gasoline, not far off from the capacity of a typical automobile
gas tank. If you were really conscious of your gasoline use, you'd
say to yourself: There goes another barrel of oil.

Americans make up 5 percent of the global population, and use
about 25 percent of the energy. You wake to an electric alarm
clock. You grab your cellphone, which has been charging
overnight. Your computer monitor is dark, but it's not really
"off," because it's one of those vampire appliances that operate
in standby mode all the time (the average house has 20 of them, a
Cornell study says). Your hot water heater and air
conditioning/heating system have been going strong all night, as
has your refrigerator, which is a vintage appliance using 7,000
watts a day (and has been keeping the same half-empty jar of
exotic mustard chilled since 2002).

You put coffee beans in an electric grinder that sits next to your
electric coffee maker that is adjacent to your electric toaster
that is struggling to make a frozen waffle edible. National
electricity use has doubled in the past three decades. In 1978, 23
percent of American homes had central air; by 2001, 55 percent had
it (the booming Sun Belt is also the AC Belt -- gone are the days
when people cooled themselves by sitting six inches from the fan
or by lounging on the porch with a glass of iced tea held to the
forehead). Appliances are far more energy-efficient these days,
but we make up for that by having more appliances. Only 14 percent
of homes had a microwave oven in 1980, but two decades later, 86
percent had one. Your energy statistics are right there on your
monthly bill, not that you pay attention. In 2004, the typical
household in Washington used 757 kilowatt-hours of electricity a
month; Maryland and Virginia, with a greater percentage of
stand-alone houses, averaged 1,117 and 1,188 kWh,
respectively. Where is your meter? Hidden.

So, too, is the meter that monitors the fuel you use for the hot
water heater. It's easier to sing in the shower when you're not
thinking about the Btus that went into it. The energy the United
States used in 2005 came out to about 337 million Btus per
person. One British thermal unit is roughly the amount of energy
in the head of a match. Collectively, we all struck a lot of
matches.

Most of the electricity we use comes from the burning of coal or
natural gas, which heats water to create steam and turn
turbines. Thus, when you flick on a light, you're responsible for
a certain amount of carbon that goes into the air. You can go
online and calculate your "carbon footprint." Compared with that
of most people in the world, mine is Sasquatch-size. I like to
drive in the countryside ("motoring," we call it), fly on business
a lot, and although my home seems pretty modest, it's crammed with
human beings, including teenagers who leave so many lights on the
house can probably be seen from the moon. One Web site calculates
that the combustion of a gallon of gas emits 19.55 pounds of
atmospheric carbon, and using that standard, driving my
six-cylinder Honda Accord for 450 miles from Washington to
Earthaven puts about 338 pounds of carbon into the air. Every time
my house burns through a kilowatt of electricity, add another 1.32
pounds of CO2. I ran the numbers (guesstimating my household
energy use), and the calculator declared that we emitted 47,350
pounds of carbon annually. On a per-capita basis, that's less than
the American average but a long way from being "carbon neutral."

"If everyone lived at the lifestyle of Americans," says Jim
McMillan, who works on alternative energy for the Department of
Energy, "we'd need five planets."

So how do we change? What's practical? Sure, we can lower the
thermostat in winter, but do we have to wear a parka and a ski
mask around the house? Is the right duration for a hot shower two
songs, one song or a couple of stanzas? How much energy is
"embedded" in each of our consumer decisions? How much fossil fuel
did it take to truck that organic salad from California across the
country? Does it make environmental sense to wash a glass instead
of tossing a cheap Dixie cup in the trash? Desktop computer or
laptop? Paper or plastic?

How should we live?

There are those who argue that using energy is, in fact,
good. That the solution to the energy crisis will emerge naturally
from a full-throttle economy filled with ingenious people, just
one of whom has to invent the new thingamajig that yanks energy
from the vacuum of space, or whatever. Believers in the genius of
the free market will say we should not fret. It'll work
out. Markets solve problems almost magically.

But the business world also tells us to use as much energy as
possible. Oil companies are among the planet's largest and most
politically influential corporations. The advertising industry
pumps billions of dollars a year into what amounts to an organized
campaign to make us into frenetic consumers. The implicit message
is: Live it up. Keep buying. More is better.

Earthaven is a low-budget, backwoods advertisement for the
alternative view. Its members are attempting to craft a new
society, built not around economic growth but around the idea of
sustainability and what they call "permaculture," the goal of
creating modes of living that will never damage the planet. And
even if they don't succeed in saving the world, they hope to
survive whatever calamity might be coming down the pike.

FROM INTERSTATE 40, YOU DRIVE UP BAT CAVE ROAD FOR ABOUT EIGHT
MILES, and if you know where you're going, you'll eventually come
to a low sign saying "Earthaven Ecovillage." A gravel road leads
down through the trees. A street sign gives the road a name:
"Another Way."

The property has 320 acres fingering the mountain hollows along
several converging creeks. You might catch a glimpse of a
ridgeline overhead, but there are no grand vistas. Somewhere out
there the Blue Ridge Mountains fall away toward the flatland, and
in the other direction are the Smokies, but it's all a bit
disorienting. You're in the woods.

The main street passes by a few structures and over a creek before
reaching the humble center of the village. There's a visitor's
kiosk where you sign in. The White Owl Cafe and the trading post
are directly ahead. Off to the left, down a trail and over a
footbridge that crosses a stream, is the Hut Hamlet, the first
neighborhood on the site. To your right is the Village Green, a
pasture where you might see a small cow, named Bridget.

Landscaping is minimal. Woody debris is piled along the
creeks. There's even a junkyard. The place is an aesthetic
mishmash, a bit shabbier than an ecovillage ideally would be. As
co-founder Chuck Marsh, 55, puts it, "If we're going to make a
place that's going to inspire others, we've got to make it
beautiful."

At the moment, you'd call it interesting. Permaculture emphasizes
such "natural" building techniques as using plastered-over straw
bales as wall insulation. Windows are tall, for natural lighting,
and floors are often concrete, built thick to hold heat in winter
and remain cool in summer. One house, in a style known as an
"Earthship," is set into a hillside, with walls made of
dirt-filled, salvaged automobile tires.

Rain is precious here. Rooftops channel it into cisterns. Some
people draw water from small springs on higher ground. There's a
communal shower with a water-saver button on the shower head (to
shut off the flow while you lather up). It is acceptable to pee on
the ground, because it nourishes soil that can later be
cultivated. "Pee Here Now" a sign will say in a spot that someday
will be a garden. There are several communal composting toilets,
which are basically outhouses. Sawdust cuts down on
odor. Everything eventually is repatriated to the
soil. Permaculture is pretty uncompromising.

There are a couple of satellite dishes on the property, but it's
not really a television-watching culture. There's no cell coverage
whatsoever. Residents rely on voice mail, e-mail and -- radically
in this modern age -- face-to-face communication. At one point, my
guide Greg Geis said he had to call someone, stepped outside and
whistled. It didn't seem to work, but I got the point. Birds do
it; people can do it.

Founded in 1994, Earthaven is less radical than some intentional
communities. Members don't share income. Some older members are
affluent and comfortably retired; others find work inside
Earthaven, like construction, or hold jobs in nearby towns. The
property is communally owned (and fully paid for), but everyone
must lease his or her plot of land. Joining costs $4,000, not
counting the lease and the additional cost of housing and
energy. So you can't just walk up and pitch a tent. Applicants go
through a six-month-minimum trial period and must win approval
from everyone else -- Earthaven isn't a democracy but, rather, is
governed by consensus.

There are a lot of philosophies swirling through the air
here. Feminism runs strong. A men's movement searches for "the
sacred masculine." There's a lot of yoga and meditation and
holistic healing. You hear references to "radical honesty" and
"neo-tribalism." "The white cultures no longer remember the tribal
knowledge their ancestors had," says a member named Ivy Bolick.

They talk about Peak Oil. That's the hypothesis that global oil
production will soon decrease, triggering a global economic
collapse. (Peak Oil is, in a sense, the cure for global warming.)

One day, one of the founders of Earthaven, Arjuna daSilva, invited
Greg and me for lunch, which turned out to be a veritable feast of
pasta with red sauce, fish with squash and onions, and a leafy
salad. We were all feeling fat and happy, even as the conversation
turned toward the end of civilization as we know it.

"It's a little too late to do major salvation of the planet,"
Arjuna, who is 60, said. "We're screwed."

Will we face a worldwide economic depression?

"That may be the best-case scenario," Greg said.

"Worldwide depression is what many of us have been hoping for for
the last 30 or 40 years," Arjuna said.

Wipe the slate clean. Start over. It's an appealing concept when
you're already in the community-invention business.

One night in the Hut Hamlet, a 37-year-old Earthaven member named
Robert Carran talked about the coming collapse.

"Something will come to a head in the next five years. Definitely
in 10 years. It could happen tomorrow. There's a term bandied
about called Roving Cannibal Hordes."

He didn't explain it fully, but the gist seemed to be that,
someday, when the mainstream collapses, people will roam the
countryside in search of food and energy supplies and, who knows,
any source of meat. If the food supply collapses, Robert said,
"I'm ready to eat some bugs. Run up in the hills and eat some
bugs."

I questioned that. He backed off.

"I'm not ready to eat bugs," he admitted.

It's all a work in progress. There's no script. They're making up
a lot of it as they go, and there are basic questions they're
still trying to answer. How many people can be supported by 320
acres of land? What is the right number of people for a village?
What does it actually mean, to be "sustaining"?

And finally, how do you create -- out here in the sticks, with
only a tiny labor pool and very little energy -- a functioning
economy?

THE SUN WAS OUT, AND GREG GEIS WAS MAKING ENERGY. A little meter
on the wall told him how much: 12.4 amps of net gain as our
friendly star blasted his solar panels. Greg tapped a button on
his meter and learned that his batteries were at 85 percent
capacity.

The meter is right there in the living room, next to his bulletin
board. That's typical for Earthaven: The meters are centrally
located, crucial to life management. If the sun hasn't been out
for days and your batteries are low, you probably shouldn't watch
that movie on the VCR.

Greg has more creature comforts than many of his neighbors. When
you enter his residence, you might well hear Pat Matheny coming
from the sound system and see Greg typing away on a desktop
computer in the corner. He's not roughing it.

As we talked, the number on his meter began to go down, below 10
amps, below 5 . . . below zero.

A cloud.

"We're negative. We're using more power than we're getting."

The sun came out again, and the numbers improved. Greg said his
batteries would probably soon be back up to 90 percent.

But when I went back the next day, they were still at 85
percent. Had Greg been profligate with electricity? He had fixed
dinner for me and his friend Arjuna the night before, and by his
calculation we'd used only about 30 watts of illumination over the
course of 90 minutes. Something didn't quite add up.

Greg was my Earthaven guide, graciously taking me all over the
place and setting up interviews. He's 56, soft-spoken, rail
thin. He'd like to put on some weight, but he's a busy man who
lives alone and sometimes forgets to eat. Greg came to Earthaven
from the corporate world. He had saved a couple of hundred grand
as an energy consultant. He wanted to live in the mountains, in
the woods, among tumbling waters. "The question for me was whether
I wanted to be a monk, a hermit, or wanted to do something with a
broader meaning." When he first showed up at Earthaven, he had an
overly ambitious plan to build a spa. That didn't fly -- too
corporate. He put his money into his home, and now he's a village
techie, setting up solar power systems and running the micro-hydro
electrical generating station (it can put out about 1,000 watts
continuously by funneling stream water into smaller and smaller
pipes, creating a jet of water that turns a turbine). He can take
a hot bath pretty much whenever he wants, thanks to a solar panel
that heats water for a bathtub parked (rather conspicuously, the
visitor might think) in his front yard, just off the main road.

He has an electric hot water heater under his sink that only holds
2.5 gallons and is usually turned off. I never saw him turn on
more than a single, small halogen light bulb. His propane-powered
refrigerator is not much bigger than what a college dorm room
would use for beer.

"We all tend to be minimalists. We find that people tend to be
happier when it's simple," he says.

He is not a big believer in ice, because of the energy penalty
when the water goes through the phase change.

"That takes 144 Btu, just to cause the water to become a solid,"
he says.

Greg's batteries continued to hover at 85 percent -- oddly low,
given the sunny days.

At about 1 the next morning, Greg looked at his meter. It should
have been completely quiescent. Off. Blank. No numbers. But it was
still on, showing a negative number.

He surveyed his electrical possessions and tried to figure out
what could possibly be sucking energy. Finally, it occurred to
him: His tenant, away several days, must have left something on.

The next morning at the crack of dawn he walked to the little
rental unit a few strides from his own home, and went inside and
saw the culprit: The tenant had left her computer on. He yanked
the cord out of the wall. He later did a calculation: 1,800 watts
down the drain.

"For no reason! There's nobody there!"

MAYBE SOMEDAY OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS WILL GO AWAY, vanquished by
human ingenuity. Right now, we have an energy crisis, even though
politicians and the media don't upper-case the term the way they
did in the 1970s. Back then, we worried about Arab oil embargoes
and long gas lines. We worried about smog. We worried that we were
running out of oil. President Carter famously described his
efforts to solve the Energy Crisis as "the moral equivalent of
war." Turn down your thermostat in winter, he said, and put on a
sweater. He even wore sweaters himself to show how it could be
done.

Americans did, in fact, conserve. They made do with less
electricity. They bought energy-efficient appliances. Auto
companies, forced to abide by new fuel-efficiency laws, stopped
making so many eight-cylinder gas guzzlers. But somewhere along
the way we took a detour. The political and cultural climate
changed. The word "conservation" gave way to the less loaded term
"energy efficiency."

Marilyn Brown, a Georgia Tech professor of energy policy, says the
government decided after the 1970s that it shouldn't tell people
how to live.

"We were wanting not to characterize saving energy as having to
live in the cold and the dark," she says. The emphasis was on
using energy wisely, "as opposed to suffering. The whole
Jimmy-Carter-wearing-a-sweater."

The Carter approach seemed to some people to be weak, timid,
lacking in confidence. Americans are supposedly a muscular,
energetic, independent bunch of folks, living large, always
fighting with the urge to light out for the territory like Huck
Finn, only not on a raft but in a sport utility
vehicle. Meanwhile, in suburbia and exurbia, the newly affluent
have had no compunction about expanding their homes to 4,000
square feet or 6,000 or even 8,000, with seldom-used formal living
and dining rooms, overwrought guest bedrooms, auxiliary kitchens
and even, perhaps, a conservatory on the off chance that someone
will drop by to play the violin.

And so we wound up back where we started: worried about
energy. Worried about the supply, worried about the
demand. Worried about the political consequences of needing it and
the environmental hazards of using it. Worried that it's killing
us coming and going.

The big problem of energy supply isn't that we're in danger of
suddenly running out. We've got a couple of hundred years' worth
of coal in the ground, just for starters. And the Peak Oil theory
collides with a long history of human ingenuity. The Pennsylvania
geologist J.P. Lesley warned that the amazing production of oil in
recent decades was a "temporary and vanishing phenomenon." That
was in 1886. (I noticed that some older folks at Earthaven didn't
buy into Peak Oil. "I think it's fear-based," Chuck Marsh says.)

The real energy dilemma is geopolitical and atmospheric. The
United States imports 60 percent of its oil, much of it from
places where even our friends seem to hate us.

Energy security has become a hot-button political issue. And then
there's the whole issue of global warming. By burning coal, oil
and gas, we are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and
throwing the global climate out of whack. There aren't a lot of
people, outside of the coal industry and Exxon Mobil, who think
business as usual will be healthy for the planet. We need to keep
that carbon in the ground and out of the air. Our long-term
challenge may not be a lack of fossil fuel, but an abundance.

What if we could do with less?

Part of the problem is that we never run out of new ways to use
energy. Free-market advocates point to a confounding fact about
energy efficiency: It often leads to more energy use, not
less. The reason is that a technology that makes something more
energy-efficient can also be used more broadly, in novel
ways. Think about the amazing advances in computer chips, which
didn't simply make those bulky old mainframe computers smaller;
the new microchips made possible the desktop computer, then the
laptop, then the BlackBerry and all the other gadgetry that marks
our lives. Someday your eyeglasses will always be online.

Energy use is calculated every year by the federal government, and
from certain angles the numbers look encouraging. As we've shifted
from an industrial to a service economy, we've gotten a lot more
economic bang per Btu -- about 9,000 Btus per dollar of gross
domestic product, compared with nearly 17,000 Btus per dollar
three decades ago. But the economy has also tripled in that time,
overwhelming the sizable gains in energy efficiency. Our total
energy use (and carbon output) keeps going up and up and up. In
2004, we hit a national milestone: 100 quadrillion Btus.

The Department of Energy estimates that global energy use will
triple by the end of this century. China wants to build 500
coal-fired electrical plants. The global population of 6.5 billion
is expected to rise to at least 9 billion. At the moment, 1.6
billion people don't have electricity. They're all going to want
it. In half a century, the planet is probably going to have 2
billion cars.

Finding a way to give people the energy, food, water, shelter,
clothes, toys and entertainment they demand is going to be hard
enough; doing it without roasting the planet is yet more daunting.

We hear all the time about alternative energy sources -- biomass,
butanol, cellulosic ethanol, fuel cells, photovoltaics, wind
farms, geothermal, hydroelectric, "the hydrogen economy." But even
in aggregate, new energy technologies have to overcome the fact
that fossil fuels, for all their faults, are rather
marvelous. They're buried in the ground beneath our feet as though
waiting for us to find them and use them. They pack a lot of
energy into a small amount of matter. They can be easily stored
and transported at normal temperatures (unlike, for example,
hydrogen). New technologies have to outcompete the old ones.

There are technological optimists who say we have the know-how to
solve the climate problem. They say it's a matter of political
will. Many argue that the government has to find a way to factor
in the long-term cost of climate change. Right now, carbon
emissions are what economists call an "externality," a cost not
included in the price of energy (just as health-care costs aren't
factored into the price of cigarettes). One possibility would be
some kind of carbon tax, or a "cap and trade" system that gives
companies a financial incentive to cut emissions. The convoluted
details of such schemes tend to be a bureaucrat's dream.

Al Gore has endorsed the "wedge" approach of two scientists,
Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala. They argue that we need to
remove 7 billion tons of carbon -- seven wedges -- from what we're
currently projected to emit into the air in mid-century. They
believe there are at least 15 potential wedges in their pie-shaped
model. We could increase solar power 700-fold. We could stop
deforestation. We could double nuclear power. We could increase
wind power 80-fold to make hydrogen fuel cells for cars. Some of
these ideas may be more difficult to achieve than others, but none
of them requires a breakthrough in physics. These technologies
exist and are already being used. And three "wedges" can come from
energy efficiency and conservation: cutting electricity in homes
and businesses; doubling fuel economy from 30 to 60 miles per
gallon; driving 5,000 miles a year on average instead of 10,000.

One idea (and potential wedge), already in use by Norway, is
burying CO2 underground. The crust of Earth is porous. "Carbon
sequestration" captures CO2 at its origin in a power plant and
pipes it deep into the ground, into depleted oil and natural gas
reservoirs. But the scale of such an enterprise is daunting: "Just
to give you an idea on a volume basis, you could be looking at
Great Lakes' worth of carbon dioxide," says Scott Klara, who works
on coal research for the Department of Energy.

Ethanol, already in mass production, offers a modest improvement
over the carbon emissions of gasoline. But there may be better
results from the next generation of ethanol, which will come not
from corn kernels, but from cornstalks and other inedible forms of
biomass. Still, transportation costs skyrocket as ethanol
factories get larger and require biomass to be hauled from
ever-greater distances. Jim McMillan, who works on biomass for
DOE, asks: "Do we truck it? Do we barge it? Do we rail it? Do we
do some preprocessing of it at the farm? Do we slurry pipeline
it?" Cornstalks won't walk to the factory.

Wind power is booming. James A. Johnson, senior mechanical
engineer with the National Wind Technology Center, says the design
of wind turbines has greatly improved, and more turbines will come
online in the next year than in the past 25 years combined. The
problem with wind is not technological, but political, as wind
farms run into the NIMBY problem: Not In My Back Yard. People
living on Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard, for example, have made it
clear they want to gaze upon sailboats, not big metallic
contraptions.

The photovoltaic industry is thriving, nearly doubling in size
every couple of years with a boost from tax rebates. But going
solar is still, at the moment, much more expensive than buying
electricity from your local utility. You might pay 46 cents for a
kilowatt-hour of solar energy, but only 8 or 9 cents a
kilowatt-hour from the power company. "The technology needs to
improve. Efficiencies need to improve. And then the production
scale has to increase in order to bring costs down," says Tom
Surek, manager of the photovoltaic program at DOE's Natural
Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The nuclear power industry boasts that it produces no greenhouse
gases. But nuclear has its own set of issues, including disposal
of nuclear waste, terrorism fears and the sheer cost of building
nuclear plants.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently came up with a
comprehensive blueprint for future action. Five years in the
making, the "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan" is
what you'd expect from the title: a technophile's handbook. The
word "conservation" pops up in passing on Page 2 of the
introduction, but this is not the place you'll find advice to turn
down the thermostat in winter. We can finesse the global warming
problem with "the power of markets and technological innovation,"
the report states. Human beings are essentially nowhere to be
found in the document. In the calculations of energy use,
Americans are not a variable but a constant. There's an
assumption, stated explicitly at the outset of the report, that
there will be "a continuation of existing patterns and trends in
energy use."

We won't change. That's the official word.

FOR A PLACE DEDICATED TO BEING SUSTAINABLE, Earthaven has a
fundamental problem: It's not. Not even close. No one pretends
otherwise. There's not enough money, not enough labor.

"There's just not enough people here," longtime member Sue Stone
says.

You can't buy a sandwich at Earthaven. You can't even buy a loaf
of bread. You can buy a dozen organic eggs from a little farm in
the center of the village, but no orange juice. There's a trading
post that doubles as an Internet cafe, but it doesn't have enough
of a customer base to carry much merchandise. For a quarter you
can buy a cigarette, but you have to roll it yourself.

A dentist would be nice. Greg Geis has a cracked tooth. "I haven't
had my eyes checked for nine years," he told me.

Washing clothes is a dilemma. There's no working laundromat yet,
and most people take their laundry down the mountain into
town. They'd rather not jump in a car, but being a purist isn't an
option at the moment. Tracy Kunkler, for example, briefly
carpooled into Asheville on Monday mornings with another of the
single moms. They would dash from one errand to another --
laundromat, grocery store, bank, hardware store, etc. -- with
three boys, ages 3 to 7, crammed into the back seat of Kunkler's
Honda Civic. It was chaotic and exhausting. The carpooling plan
was what turned out to be non-sustainable. They now drive
separately.

"I'm not going to make myself crazy on a Monday with three kids in
the back seat. That's the line I draw," says Kunkler, 37. "We're
not martyring ourselves."

For Earthaven to make the next leap forward, it has to solve the
basic problem of feeding itself. A community garden helps, but
it's not enough. That's where Gateway Farm comes in. Anywhere
else, the plowed field near the entrance to Earthaven would hardly
be worth a second glance. Here, it represents a tremendous
change. A gamble, really.

Chris Farmer -- everyone just calls him "Farmer" -- is the
appropriately named driving force behind Gateway Farm. He's 35,
sunburned, muscles taut from hard labor. He grew up mostly in
Bethesda and spent a couple of years at Whitman High before his
family moved away. While in college, he "had a realization one day
that I hadn't eaten a single thing in my life that I knew where it
came from." Nine years ago, he came to Earthaven, living in an
old-fashioned canvas tent for two years, sleeping on a futon,
reading by candle-light. On the coldest winter nights he'd boil
water, seal it in a Mason jar, wrap the jar in a towel and put it
under his blanket. He'd wake up and try to take a sip from his
canteen and get nothing. Solid ice.

Almost every week he thought of leaving, but stuck it out. He
built himself a microhut, 10.5 feet by 10.5 feet on the inside. He
looks around today and wonders: "How do you take a bunch of
overeducated suburban refugees and help them train themselves to
build a village in the woods?"

The key, he believes, is entrepreneurship. Building an
economy. He's among those who talk of markets, economies of scale,
of expanding the definition of "sustainability" to include a
larger bioregion defined by the watershed of Cedar Creek.

Last year Farmer, in partnership with a young Earthaven member
named Brian Love, persuaded the village council to let them clear
four acres of land. It was an agonizing decision. These were
people committed to protecting the environment, not ravaging it.

Farmer and Brian and a team of co-workers first built a sweat
lodge, a little structure in which they sat naked among stones
heated in a fire, and contemplated what they were about to do. An
old Indian ritual.

Then they brought in a huge, diesel-guzzling, smoke-belching
industrial tractor and ripped out trees and dug out the stumps and
piled the brush along the creek. It was, as Farmer put it,
"ecological brutality." He felt a scar on his soul. But he also
felt honest.

Humans require food. Earthaven would never be sustainable, never
be a real ecovillage, until it could feed itself. Farmer had a
guiding principle: It is essential, he says, to "bring the effects
of our actions within the horizon of lived experience."
Translation: Someone who can't stand the idea of cleared land
should give up eating vegetables. "They're not growing under tulip
poplar trees."

If they can get the farm going, they might be able to create
biofuel from their crops rather than buy gas and propane from
mainstream sources. They could grow vegetables. Raise
livestock. They've dug a pond for aquaculture (fishing, etc.).

It all takes money, labor, imagination and energy. It's
ambitious. There are times when Farmer sounds as though he's been
reading the Wall Street Journal.

"We're undercapitalized, and we're under-entrepreneurized," he
says. "Unless we're just a bunch of hippies living in the woods."

JUST A BUNCH OF HIPPIES . . .

Yeah, you could probably make a case for that if you
wanted. There's a lot going on at Earthaven that's not exactly
. . . linear. Being off the grid is just one element of being an
"alternative community." "It's a social experiment that's packaged
up as environmental awareness-slash-conservation," Kimchi
says. Traditional families are rare. Earthaven has little kids
scampering around, and they go to a school on the property, but
there's only a single teenager. Because teenagers find the place
boring. "Teenagers just don't do well here," Marjorie Vestal
says. "They want their peers, they want technology, they want
sports, they want to be invisible."

Privacy is rare, romantic life transparent. One person's problems
become everyone's problems. "We almost read each other's minds,"
Greg said at one point. If you don't work hard enough or create a
bad vibe, you might be called to face the community in what is
known as a Heartshare. Operating by consensus is not exactly fast
and efficient. One person can block an initiative. "We can spend
years discussing whether one particular word should be included in
the bylaws," Greg said.

Could the rest of us live this way?

Um, no. Not unless held at gunpoint. Most of us aren't moving to
Earthaven or anything like it. On the official Earthaven tour, a
banker with a small farm who was taking the tour just to get tips
on animal husbandry, shook his head at the thought of living by
consensus with lots of other people. "That'd kill me," he said.

What the visitor realizes at Earthaven is how much energy is
expended in mainstream culture just keeping other people out of
our hair. There's a reason everyone on the block drives separately
to the grocery store. It's a waste of energy but, arguably, a
rational purchase of independence. For the most part, we don't use
energy to be powerful; we use it to be alone.

And yet for all its imperfections and eccentricities, there's a
lot that's right about Earthaven. There's an honesty and
directness, not only in the approach to energy but in every aspect
of daily life. The people here are self-aware, awake,
perceptive. They work hard. They don't do things the easy way. And
I never heard anyone try to hype the place. No one pretends that
Another Way is an easy road to travel. They don't even argue that
they represent the future of the planet.

"I don't think the future is going to be in isolated rural
communities like this," Sue Stone says.

Mall culture, Chuck Marsh says, isn't going to be changed by "this
little experiment that we're doing in the woods."

But in the same way that Earthaven is gradually adopting ideas
from the mainstream -- pushing entrepreneurship, building an
economy -- the mainstream may have no choice one day but to adopt
some ideas from Earthaven. Starting with being conscious about
energy.

Cities, where most of us live, are where the battle for energy
efficiency has to be won. Fleeing to the woods isn't an option to
begin with. There are not enough resources in the world to allow
all 6.5 billion (or 8 or 9 or 10 billion) people to live in their
own little Earthaven, says John Anderson, an engineer with Rocky
Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colo. And because of their density
and higher use of public transportation, cities can actually have
a low carbon footprint per capita. "One of the least
carbon-intensive places on Earth is Manhattan," Anderson says.

Individuals -- the "end users" in this whole energy drama -- can
create one of those billion-ton carbon wedges. And being green
doesn't necessarily mean suffering. Many of the things that save
energy also improve lives. City planners are trying to design
communities with less distance between where people live and work;
less time stuck in traffic jams saves energy and sanity
simultaneously. Green architecture places an emphasis on natural
light -- a nice thing in and of itself. Greg's house at Earthaven
is pleasant without any artificial lighting during the
day. There's a big light out there in space, 93 million miles
away, doing all the hard work.

Switching to an energy-efficient refrigerator saves money in the
long run, and lots of energy. Eating local foods rather than
something shipped from California or Brazil or New Zealand may be
pleasant on the palate -- local often means fresher.

The federal government estimates that if you switch five
high-energy light bulbs with Energy Star bulbs, you'll save $60 a
year. If everyone in America did that, we'd delete from our
greenhouse emissions the equivalent of what's emitted annually by
21 power plants.

Mainstream culture can be cynical about those who are
self-consciously green. To be ecologically centered is to be
eccentric. To tread softly on the planet is to be "crunchy." What
Earthaven seeks to be, an "ecovillage," at first blush may sound a
bit silly, a bit theme-parkish. But the mainstream is its own vast
theme park, built around the themes of consumption, convenience
and more of everything. We talk a good game about nature, even as
we become more and more removed from it. We're all
environmentalists these days but cannot imagine life without paper
towels and a microwave.

Change is hard. We have to start somewhere.

"You pick your battles," Farmer says. "Often the perfect is the
enemy of the good."

When I got home from Earthaven, the first thing I did was turn off
some lights.

Joel Achenbach is a staff writer for the Magazine and can be
reached at achenbachj at washpost.com