thoughtsignals

The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine has a story about a small “intentional community” in the mountains of North Carolina where the residents are trying to build a low-energy lifestyle.

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.

Aside from how much I’m spending on gas, I tend to be an optimist about these things, believing that in the long term innovation, free markets and most people’s desire to have a clean environment will produce solutions to the “energy crisis.” I do not believe, as some folks in this article do, that a decades-long world-wide depression would help. Yes, that would lower overall consumption, but it would also likely lead people to practices that are environmentally harmful. Nonetheless, the Earthaven experiment is interesting.

Link.

For word buffs, a cool, long New York Times piece about what the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary do and how they do it. Among the tasty tidbits in this story is the word that means “a misheard lyric:” Mondegreen.

Link.