Sustainable Home

Tips, tools, advice, and activities for raising eco-friendly kids while nurturing compassion, resilience, and community engagement.

Last night I cooked my family a delicious pasta dinner using biogas energy. This morning we all had eggs cooked on biogas. I’m not sure what’s for dinner tonight, but I know what will provide the energy for cooking: biogas. And not just any biogas - it’s home biogas, produced in our suburban backyard, and our off grid ranch as part of my ongoing “action research” into sustainable energy practices. I no longer use electricity or propane for our ooking needs - it's all done with Homemade Bio-gas.

Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cabin without running water or electricity? To find out, writer and activist William Powers visited Dr. Jackie Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgled through Benton’s permaculture farm, and she stroked honeybees’ wings as she shared her wildcrafter philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers, just back from a decade of international aid work, then accepted Benton’s offer to stay at the cabin for a season while she traveled.

Discover the truth about self-sufficiently living off your backyard! In a world as highly dynamic as ours, independent living can be an invaluable trait. By employing intelligent tactics and technologies, you can feed your family, eliminate high utility bills, and minimize stress. However, starting your own garden and homesteading can be an overwhelming task—and you need to prepare and learn what it takes to start. This guide will wipe away all your doubts and help you build the life you’ve always wanted for yourself and your family.

If imagining a life of energy independence by harnessing the sun's power to light your home excites you, this book is for you! Discover how to achieve energy independence through off-grid solar power with this modern, updated guide. Learn how anyone, regardless of technical experience, can understand and implement off-grid solar power. Whether you’re a hands-on DIY enthusiast or an eager beginner, this book is tailored for you.

Having a big beautiful house is one of those things that almost every person has dreamed about. But almost every single one of those dreamers knows how difficult of a process it can be if you don‘t know the rules of this industry. After more than 10 years of selling, buying, and renting dream properties, Norah Sherrod decided to create a complete guide that is going to teach you the most important things you need to know about real estate for both - purchasing your own dream property and building massive real estate investing business.

Look around your home—could you survive thirty days on the water, medical supplies, and fuel you already have? Do you have the necessary supplies to keep you and your family safe if you are forced to hunker down in your home for a month without leaving? Being a good prepper means being prepared to survive any scenario, from keeping your family going when you've lost your job, keeping them safe when law and order have ceased to exist and looters are breaking in to steal whatever they can find, and also surviving off the grid if you're forced to leave your home behind.

Ecological Intelligence argues that "green" labels and recycling programs may do more harm than good by feeding a vital lie, lulling us into the illusion that we are doing enough already while ignoring the adverse impact of the far vaster proportion of what we buy and do.

Our buildings are making us sick. Our homes, offices, factories, and dormitories are, in some sense, fresh parasites on the sacred Earth, Nahasdzáán. In search of a better way, author Jim Kristofic journeys across the Southwest to apprentice with architects and builders who know how to make buildings that will take care of us. This is where he meets the House Gods who are building to the sun so that we can live on Earth. Forever.

Unleash an eco-friendly clean like never before! Transform your home into a toxin-free haven in just a few simple steps, without sacrificing efficiency or battling overwhelming routines. Have you ever felt overwhelmed with the daily task of cleaning your home, only to be additionally burdened by the guilt of using harsh, chemically-laden cleaning products? Are you concerned about the impact your household cleaning routines may have on the environment?

Having done it all - having been an anxious clutter-bug herself, studied why we have stuff (headline: we're humans, it's normal) and set up a business to help people declutter - Emma Gleeson understands how you feel. Stuff Happens is her guide to sorting out your relationship with your stuff and finding the right way for you to declutter.

Public Gardens and Livable Cities uses a prescriptive approach to synthesize a range of public, private, and nonprofit initiatives from municipalities throughout the country. In doing so, the authors examine the initiatives from a practical perspective to identify how they were implemented, their sustainability, the obstacles they encountered, the impact of the initiatives on their populations, and how they dealt with the communities' underlying social problems.

Do you want to learn how to transform your household waste into black gold-dust? Do you feel the need to be more environmentally responsible? This beginners guide will break down vermiculture in an easy-to-understand and apply manner, so that you can get started right after listening. Geoff makes this environmentally responsible hobby so simple that even a 5 year-old could start worm composting!

Bunker Buddy is a simple, family-friendly guide to getting prepared and protected for times of crisis to come. In just eight short, easy-to-digest chapters, you'll get a solid overview of the main areas you need to master in order to ensure your survival and emergency preparedness in advance of any potential crisis or disaster.

For thousands of years, mending was a deep craft that has for too long been a secret history. But now it's back, bigger and better than ever. In this book, Kate Sekules introduces the art of visible mending as part of an important movement to give fashion back its soul. Part manifesto, part how-to, Mend! calls for bold new ways of keeping clothes and refreshing your style.

Minimalism is for rich people who live in big, empty, white homes, right? Wrong. Minimalism isn't just about displaying your food staples in glass jars or having chic Scandi furniture. It can be a beautiful, enriching, and life-transforming practice that, at its core, is all about re-establishing what holds value in your life and letting go of what does not.

In light of concerns about food and human health, fraying social ties, economic uncertainty, and rampant consumerism, some people are foregoing a hurried, distracted existence and embracing a mindful way of living. Intentional residential communities across the United States are seeking the freedom to craft their own societies and live based on the values of nonviolence, self-sufficiency, equality, and voluntary simplicity.

In a perfect world, we would all be able to fit a year’s worth of waste in a mason jar. But for most of us​,​ doing so can be immensely intimidating or simply not feasible. But even if you can’t be perfectly zero waste, you can still have a profound impact on our environment, climate, and health by making some simple changes to your lifestyle and habits.

Surrender your fear and anxiety, trust your instincts, and choose a life that’s compassionate, accountable, and free. This is what it means to be living off the grid. Have you ever noticed that too much garbage and wastewater find their way into the environment? As you continue on this path you face the possibility of leaving an uninhabitable world for future generations. How can you reduce your carbon footprint to make an impact on the global environment?

RVing with solar power is a great way to untether yourself from the trappings of a stationary world. Getting closer to nature and finding your peace is all tied to how well you can make it comfortable within your RV, and how easy and hassle-free you make power generation. This book will teach you how you can install a solar-powered system to generate power in your RV.