“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.”
That quote is from Joel Achenbach’s pretty scary cover story in this weekend’s Washington Post Magazine, which basically suggests that it’s about time we start listening to Al Gore. It chronicles life at Earthaven, a semi-commune near Asheville in western North Carolina. If you happened to catch last week’s My Name is Earl you pretty much know what you need to know about this place. But not really; they generate their own electricity and use phones and computers, and they’re not all knee-jerk idealist hippies. They just think it’s time to start walking the walk where environmental responsibility is concerned. All that being said, though, they sort of remind me of the Others on Lost. And it seems like despite their good intentions they aren’t the self-contained, self-reliant, self-sustaining village they would like to be. At least not yet.
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.
And it goes on like that.
At any rate, the piece touches on a bunch of different issues related to energy use and conservation and I thought it was interesting. Maybe you will too.
He did an online chat about it today.
And as a sidenote, Catherine already posted on this but I want to add my own two cents: Japan’s annual dolphin hunt is an appalling and brutal anachronism. How can we tolerate such utter cruelty and sadism toward creatures of such intelligence? I’m not against eating meat or the industries that requires, but there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it. It seems pretty clear that slowly and painfully slaughtering a self-aware mammal and then (maybe) using the meat as fertilizer and pet food is fundamentally inhumane. I really hope this practice is stopped soon.
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