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.