Self-sufficiency, to a fault

I’m enthusiastic about self-sufficiency, to a fault. I know that’s a flaw. I’m leaning into it anyway, because I’m building my own home around it.

The brief is easy to say and hard to do: a place that’s as self-reliant as practical and as low-impact as possible, with energy, water, food and shelter each brought a little closer to home.

Why bother

Part of it is temperament. I grew up around people who fixed their own things, and the satisfaction of doing it yourself never really goes away. But there’s more to it than that.

Every system you depend on is one you can’t see into. Power, water and food all just arrive, and the cost, the fragility and the impact all happen somewhere else. Bringing those systems home makes them visible. You start to understand what a kilowatt-hour really is once you’ve watched your own batteries fill and drain.

I also think it’s a hopeful act. The technology to live well on far less has quietly become cheap and good: solar, storage, efficient building, and better ways to catch and keep water.

Much of the future we want is already on the shelf. It just needs someone to put it together.

The “to a fault” part

Self-sufficiency has a failure mode, and I know it well. It can turn into stubbornness, a refusal to rely on anyone that has more to do with pride than resilience. Taken too far it’s lonely and inefficient. There’s a reason people invented towns.

That’s why the Donne passage matters so much to me. No man is an island. The goal isn’t to cut myself off. It’s to stand on my own feet so I have more to offer the people around me, not less. A resilient household makes a community more resilient. It doesn’t replace one.

What I’m working to

I’ll write more as the build goes on, including the mistakes, because they’re the useful part. For now, these are the principles I’m working to:

• Design with the land, not against it.
• Prefer passive over active, and simple over clever.
• Build things that can be repaired, ideally by me.
• Measure first, then decide.
• Don’t let perfect get in the way of done.

More from the site soon.