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The New Independent Home
by Michael Potts
from chapter 15 :
Bunkers will not save us:
Leander Poisson's story |
Lee Poisson lives in a futuristic cement-and-glass house he and his family built on a clement southern slope in southern New Hampshire. An inveterate designer, Lee is constantly seeking better ways to dry fruit, move heat within a building, and keep a community strong. In Solar Gardening, Lee explains his ideas for extending the growing season and increasing food production even in the harshest climate using simple gardening appliances of his design. I asked him to talk about the theories which took him out into the garden from architecture.
In the mid-1960s I was teaching a class at the University of New Hampshire called Environmentics, based on the study of everything that had to do with how we, as a species, had gotten to this point in history, and how these factors might project us into the future. While researching for the course I read the Petroleum Institute's report on how much oil there was left on the planet. The other force to reckon with was the population bomb. With so many people on the planet, the present solutions could not keep up with the problem. My conclusion: The most valuable gift we can give our children is an intact ecosystem. Since then, the world's population has doubled, and the biosphere is on the ropes. Seems our civilization has a cancer: It's built on growth, and borrows from the planet's future to survive.
It doesn't take much looking to see that we're not doing very well. How many monarch butterflies did you see last summer? I heard the Mexicans cut down the forest where they winter. There used to be so many orange newts around here that children would collect them and hold races, but last summer I don't think I saw more than two. I've been nurturing the bluebirds, and so there are a few in the woods; visitors wonder what those birds are? because they have never seen a bluebird. The problem is right here.
By 1970 I had enough information to realize that Western civilization was on a collision course with destiny. When population explosion, resource depletion, pollution, and species extinction became apparent to us, my family decided to move to the country and try to live in a totally different way, more gently on the planet, to become more self-reliant for our own basic needs. The first thing we did was to grow as much of our own food as possible. There are immediate economic benefits to living a self-reliant lifestyle. Income tax is figured assuming you have to buy everything you need to live. Provide for your own basic needs, and you increase your non-taxable earning potential.
When we bought the land, it was so overgrown that we didn't know there was a view. We cleared land for the garden, and discovered lots of fallen stone walls from the time a century ago when this was a farm. Fortunately, I love to rebuild stone walls, creating order out of chaos. Illustrates my Garbage Principle: You don't really have to clean anything, you just arrange it in straight lines and it looks orderly.
People ask if I'm living some kind of alternative lifestyle and I tell them, No, just trying to save our collective asses. I remind them that Jeffersonian democracy is based on the self-sufficient landowner who cannot be tyrannized. The Founding Fathers wanted everybody to have a piece of land and democratic access to the sun. Too bad the Jeffersonian dream has evaporated.
After a few years of working toward self-reliance I went back to my own college, Rhode Island School of Design, and talked a lot about the need for doing for ourselves, unplugging, canning and storing food in the root cellar. One of my students said, "Well, if I ever get hungry in the city, I'll come out with a gun and take your food away." Hot-headedly I responded with "You do and I'll blow your expletive deleted head off!" Afterwards I realized that he was right, that if we don't all make it, nothing really matters. We have to share our skills and knowledge and work with our community. The bunker mentality won't work: It's just a matter of time before someone needy rips off our root cellar.
While looking for creative solutions to the problems of growing, processing, and storing food I came up with the idea for my solar dehydrator. Since I didn't want to manufacture it, I developed some plans showing everything you'd need to know to make your own, and started selling the plans. I guess there was a ready market of like minds, because I've sold 35,000 sets of plans, which helped put my children through college.
You see, people have to work toward their own integrity, doing as much as possible for themselves. For example, it doesn't take special skills to build the Siberian stove I designed, just hard work and cement. The one heating this house has been working for nine years. It burns slabs of waste I buy from the local lumber mill, four hours a day when it's very cold. I had to design special doors for the firebox because there was nothing on the market that could withstand the 1,800 degree combustion temperature. The heat is stored in 10,000 pounds of thermal mass, and gradually radiates into the house. We bake bread and pizza in the firebox when it cools to the right temperature; we call it "catching the wave."
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