WP: Another Way (re: sustainable communities)

[MountainLaurel]

Reading this, I think Achenbach the columnist was writing and not Achenbach the reporter.

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/14/AR2006111400979.html

[jpak]

1. This is an excellent article - (thanks!) - and not just about "hippies"

K&R