Viewing your home as part of the ecosystem
We need to see our homes as systems that require X inputs and have Y outputs.
Your home is a complex system of systems.
A home needs the primary shell, or shelter rather. Beyond that a home needs water connection, sources of energy, and a way to deal with sanitation.
Our modern homes outsource ALL of these inputs.
Many of the materials used to build the shelter are sourced from distant locations.
Water is typically piped in from a municipal source.
Energy often is delivered in the form of natural gas or electricity from a coal / natural gas plant.
Waste water and sewage is piped back out to a municipal treatment plant.
Most homes are directly tied to these big centralized systems that are tied into a global economy.
These are all centralized systems that are highly sensitive to global shocks, inflation, regulation, and control from central sources. Your home has outsourced these key needs to energy companies, your county, and other faceless providers.
As inflation rises, as regulations tighten, as local government taxes rise to cover sprawling infrastructure, and as the asset bubble expands this form of housing becomes less tenable. Not to mention most homes today are inefficient, polluting, and very expensive.
What would another form of housing look like?
Here’s our flow chart illustrating our concept for a local-first, ecological, affordable, and sustainable way of operating a home’s core systems:
This flowchart illustrates how shelter, water, energy, sanitation, some transportation and even food can all be incorporated into a holistic system for living.
These ideas fuse tiny homes, minimalism, permaculture, composting, decentralization, and localism into a new way of resilient living.
This is a simpler way to live locally.
Does this blueprint look like a direction we might head into the future?
What do you think?
We built a prototype off-grid micro cabin using these concepts here in this mini documentary:
This is awesome! I hadn't organized it so beautifully as in your chart, but it has many of the same systems I'm building into our Domestead!
https://bioharmony.substack.com/p/domesteading-spa-dome
https://youtu.be/dtVZHJzhbUY
I love this flow chart and it's a great start. If it's going to be accurate though, it needs to include all the many inputs of materials such as construction materials, batteries, mechanical parts like pumps and pipes, etc - as well as the outputs of where all those things go when their use is done.
Otherwise we run the risk of living in a fantasy about the real impacts of our lifestyle on the ecology of the earth, which extends far beyond property lines and the immediate ecosystem that surrounds the home.
Only once we examine the full big picture can we start to address and shift the larger societal systems and structures that continue to harm all of us. The solutions are bigger than ourselves alone, but if we don't start with an honest assessment of the situation then we will inevitably be part of the problem rather than the solution.