Friday, February 25, 2011

Self Sufficiency, Five Years In

I gave a presentation last Monday on our progress, successes, failures, and lessons from five years of working towards self sufficiency at our current house. I advertised the event with this blurb:

In March of 2006, Tulsi and Norris purchased a small house on a .2 acre lot, and used permaculture principles to design their food forest, sun garden, and house renovation. They aimed to create a low-maintenance, truly sustainable habitat for 2-4 people plus wildlife, providing from the property all necessary food, heating & cooking fuel, water, and waste treatment. Join us for a reality check on what's worked and what hasn't, what seems theoretically possible for the future, and what all this means to the oxymoronic goal of a sustainable city.

You can view a PDF (6 MB) of our presentation slideshow. I went into a lot more detail during the presentation than what I was able to write out on the presentation slides, but you can still get a good idea of our journey from looking through the slides.

UPDATE April 2014: I have now created a slideshow with audio synced to the images. View Self Sufficiency, Five Years In online (may require reasonably fast internet connection) or download 36MB zip for offline viewing. (Extract to anywhere on your hard drive, then open the included index.html file in your web browser.)

3 comments:

Dale Asberry said...

This was a fantastic presentation and I greatly appreciate the effort you made in capturing so much detail.

You're blog is one of the most valuable "permaculture" blogs that I read. It saddens me that so many with permaculture skills hold them close to the vest. Many, many more people could be helped if it were an open-source movement, even if only sharing a fraction of the lessons that you've learned.

Thank you.

Norris said...

Hi Dale,

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you found the presentation and my writings here useful. I've also noticed a dearth of detailed information on the many experiments people are carrying out to adapt to our quickly changing world. On the other hand, there are definitely some folks out there spreading such knowledge, much of which has helped me out. The least I can do is share the bits I've learned here!

Norris

Michelle said...

oh wow, video would be great! Thanks for some wonderful information. My son and I are working towars becoming totally self sufficient(or as close as possible). We are still a work in progress but are moving towards our goal one step at a time