Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Living Without Fossil Fuels with Alexis Zeigler
264 Plays2 months ago
It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of climate change, but where can we find models for living in harmony with the planet—before it’s too late? Alexis Zeigler and the community at Living Energy Farm are doing just that: building a self-sustaining, non-extractive way of life and sharing their knowledge with others.
Alexis brings a unique blend of practical, technical expertise and a deep philosophical vision for restoring our spiritual connection to nature—and to one another. These themes are at the heart of this show. If you’re seeking grounded hope and a climate-resilient model for living, we think you’ll find this conversation inspiring.
In this episode, we cover:
- Living Energy Farm’s mission to live without reliance on fossil fuels or grid electricity and how that works in practice.
- The limitations of climate change mitigation strategies that rely on just converting consumer products into something more sustainable.
- The sacrifices they make to live self-sufficiently, and how its less than what you might think.
- The core tenets necessary to live this way.
- The benefits of living intentionally and in community vs a life focused on private property.
- And much more...
More about Alexis and Living Energy Farm:
Alexis Zeigler is an author, activist, designer and builder of renewable energy systems. He was raised on small, diversified farm in Georgia. He is the primary designer of Living Energy Farm, a community of 10 people that grows most of its food and provides all of its own domestic energy. Alexis has a passion for growing food on trees, and is particularly devoted to persimmons. His books include Integrated Activism, which discusses the links between ecological change and politics, as well as Empowering Communities, which describes how to build food and energy independent communities.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Keith J. Nelson, Alexandre Miller, and Drew O’Doherty.
Recommended
Transcript
Envisioning a Self-Sufficient Future
00:00:00
Speaker
If we just imagine a future 300 years into the future, what could that look like? Then all we have to do is start doing it on purpose instead of doing it by accident, instead of waiting for everything to fall apart before we build self-sufficient communities. Let's just go ahead and do it now. I really call on people to ask themselves, what is important to you? Is it really important that you build up your own house, your own yard, your own thing, and let the planet burn? I mean, come on, what's really important?
Meet the Hosts: Emma and Austin
00:00:38
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin
Introducing Alexis Ziegler and Living Energy Farm
00:00:49
Speaker
Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
00:01:09
Speaker
Alexis, thank you so much for joining us today. I had the privilege of visiting your community living energy farm a few weeks ah ago in Virginia, which was really an incredible experience. I'll obviously let you talk about what you guys have been doing and your project, but I wanted to frame the kind of overall big picture question that we want to be talking about.
Renewable Energy Focus at Living Energy Farm
00:01:34
Speaker
How do we build a resilient and affordable low energy economy without going back to the Stone Age? You have some very interesting ideas about that and have some very interesting insight that I'm hoping you'll be able to share with our listeners. So would you be willing to briefly introduce yourself and talk a little bit about Living Energy Farm and your project and how it came to be?
00:01:57
Speaker
Certainly. So my name's Alexis Ziegler. I was one of the founders of Living Energy Farm and one of the primary designers of our renewable energy systems of kind of the mechanical side of the farm, how we build our buildings, how we supply ourselves with, you know, energy and whatnot. We've been here for 14 years at this point. We are in Louisa County, Virginia. We have some history with Twin Oaks and the other intentional communities in this area.
00:02:23
Speaker
The big defining difference, and it's clearer now than it was at the beginning, was that we really try to keep renewable energy systems simple and cheap and durable. So much of what calls itself environmentalism in our age is about electric cars and grass fed beef and these various ways that people want to take their kind of existing habits and put some green paint on them. So that led us in some quite surprising directions. And, you know, we can talk about some of the technical aspects as we go through here.
00:02:51
Speaker
But the idea was that we would try to find simple,
Success Stories of Self-Sufficiency
00:02:54
Speaker
durable technologies that would allow us to live a simple, but still enjoyable lifestyle using entirely renewable energy. So not any fossil fuel on a daily basis. Now, naturally the shirt on your back, or if you pick up a plastic water bucket, it's made with fossil fuels, but we wanted to live our daily lives at least without fossil fuels.
00:03:14
Speaker
And we've discovered some things and overall it's been more successful in terms of what we've been able to do on the property than I ever would have imagined. It's really worked out well for us. So it's an ongoing community of 10 people or so. We are largely food self-sufficient. We are largely economically self-sufficient growing open pollinated seeds. We are fully off grid. We do not run a generator for our daily energy needs. We do not use propane. So the progress is ongoing and we're pleased at how well it's worked so far.
00:03:43
Speaker
And for people that haven't seen your project, could you in kind of very layman terms describe, like, what does your place look like and how are you producing the energy that you need to heat your home, cook your food? So we have 127 acres in Louisa County, Virginia, 10 people or so. We have one main residential building that's a straw bale house.
00:04:08
Speaker
So it it looks like, you know, Adobe, but it's just stuck out on the outside. So we do just cheap stud frame buildings and then wrap straw bales around them. We've done straw bale retrofits as well. We have a house a mile away in the town of Louisa that we just did a straw bale retrofit on. And then the kitchen's a separate building. And of course we have various sheds and barns and whatnot being an operating farm. There's always a need for more shed space, it seems like. So the advantage of the straw bale is it's not free, but it gives you a, what I would call a super insulated building. And then,
00:04:38
Speaker
The building lines are fairly simple. We can blow ah a lot of insulation R 60 into the ceiling. We set up our building so that there's doors and windows for every bedroom. So they ventilate well. So we don't get mold, which can be an issue anywhere on the East coast or anywhere where it's humid. So that's all worked out really well. The thing that we discovered that's pretty unusual and we seem to be pioneers in is what we call direct drive.
Innovative Energy Systems at the Farm
00:05:01
Speaker
So solar panels, solar electric panels put out DC electricity.
00:05:05
Speaker
and We use that DC electricity by running it straight into a myriad of devices. and It's proved to be an incredibly remarkable system. you know I had a lot of experience before Living Energy Farm working on equipment and machines and food processing and woodworking and building buildings and whatnot. and What you learn as an AC electrician is very different than what we have learned here.
00:05:28
Speaker
With any AC, that's alternating current. That's what the grid is based on or what most Homestead battery-based, inverter-based solar kits are based on. You have to have what's called reserve capacity. So if you've got one horsepower worth of demand, you have to have one and a half horsepower worth of supply. And with a DC microgrid, that's what we call the direct drive DC microgrid. It's the opposite. You can have a fairly weak supply and overload it. And then the motors just simply speed up and slow down and it works great.
00:05:58
Speaker
I never would have imagined we could get away with that. I should say, though, that, you know, a lot of people are fascinated with our electrical system and we're really pleased with it. But when I talk about green building workshops, I talk about like three layers of what's important. And what's really important is to do the a smart thing in a smart place, which mostly just means cooperative use.
00:06:16
Speaker
Because a lot of people go out and build a private house somewhere in a mountain top or out in the forest and then try to make it sustainable or they have their big suburban home and try to make it sustainable. And it really doesn't work. I mean, we're kind of playing games with that. And yet ultimately you can't play games with the laws of physics, but in very concrete terms, I can build a solar hot water system in a cool or cold climate. If it's a couple of thousands of dollars per person, it's going to be six or 8,000 bucks to build a good solar hot water system, except that same solar hot water system can support 10 people.
00:06:46
Speaker
And I had mentioned earlier that we have one building that's shared. So it's a thermal shell around a larger building rather than small houses or rather than one big house for each person. Now in the tropics, if you want to live in small houses, that's fine.
00:07:00
Speaker
But in a temperate climate, you know you can't defy the laws of physics. That's not negotiable. You really need to do smart things in smart places, which mostly means shared use. Renewable energy systems, what I tell people is that they scale in cold climates, in particular 10 to 100 people per system is what you need. And that's not concrete for every system, but that's generally what we tried to do here. So we do good insulation, we do community scale design, and then the DC microgrid I mentioned has worked out fantastically well.
00:07:29
Speaker
far beyond what I would have imagined. So at this point, we run a machine shop, we run farm tools, we run, we even cook our food with what we call direct drive. So we have insulated solar electric cooker. So it's like a, it's a cooker, it's got hot plates in it.
00:07:43
Speaker
but it's really well insulated. So you can put your food in there and it cooks a bit more slowly than on a stovetop, but it cooks with a much more modest power input. So that's tied into our direct drive system as well. And with the direct drive of cookers, it's interesting because a lot of people are familiar with the sun ovens and the various solar cookers and they're they're fine for what they are. But for 10 people cooking three meals a day, 365 days a year, you know, there's more cooking involved.
00:08:09
Speaker
with the thermal based sun oven style solar cookers, we were cooking maybe 5% of our food on an annual basis, you know, more in the summer, obviously. Now it's about 70%, 75% of our food is cooked with those solar cookers because it's so easy to just be in the kitchen and turn on this well insulated cooker, the ISAC it's called, insulated solar electric cooker. So that's worked out well. Another thing that, and this has really changed a lot for us just in the last six months is the biogas.
00:08:36
Speaker
We experimented with biogas quite a bit over the last 14 years, and now we've gotten much better at it. And that covers the other 30% of our cooking. And on a cloudy day, it's 100% are heavy clouds. We can still cook in moderate clouds with the solar cookers. And we have great hopes for the biogas. In the past, you know we run a farm, so we do put a little bit of gasoline. It's only about 30, 40 gallons a year to grow $20,000 to $30,000 worth of seed crops.
00:09:01
Speaker
So you know it's not a lot of fuel but still if you're trying to be self-sufficient we want to make that go away or cover it for another means so we did with gas and that that works i don't like it very much for various reasons we did turpentine which i like more except we had trouble producing much turpentine but we started running engines on biogas and biogas is the same thing as natural gas is the same thing as methane those are all the same thing so we started running engines on biogas and a pretty confident at this point we're going to be able to run our small tractors and run our the mobile machinery on biogas.
00:09:31
Speaker
So the stationary machinery is direct drive electric and then the mobile machinery will be dog ass. We live in an age where the sky is the limit. You know, we think, oh, well, there's going to be hydrogen and there's going to be battery cars for everybody and all this stuff. And it's really not going to work out that way, particularly if you recognize the fact that there's 8 billion people on the planet.
00:09:52
Speaker
and 8 billion people, and only 10% of the people on the planet on a car, we're obviously not going to provide any kind of car gasoline or electric for 8 billion people. It's just not going to happen. And renewable energy sources are not all the same. I mean, hydrogen is kind of interesting, but I think it's too expensive and too complicated. We tried to do high temperature solar thermal storage for cooking and that turned out to be too complicated and too expensive. And, you know, your original question about how do we do this without going back to you know a really degraded lifestyle,
00:10:22
Speaker
The ingredients are fairly straightforward. It's community scale design, good conservation measures, which I talked about the straw bale. Of course, there's other things you can do to conserve energy. And then direct drive solar and biogas. That's kind of the list right there. That's what we have and it's working pretty well.
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah, and to set the scene for our listeners that haven't seen your project, you're about 10 people living on 100 plus acres in Louisiana, Virginia. You guys share one kind of big house made out of straw bales that has these thick walls that insulates well in the winter and keeps relatively cool in the summer. You're able to kind of fuel all your energy or almost all of your energy needs through this DC electric solar that you mentioned, as well as biogas.
00:11:08
Speaker
You grow a majority of your food. And I would say, having visited, compared to like um mainstream, middle-class American lifestyle, it's maybe like a slight downgrade in terms of, like quote unquote, comfort, in terms of amenities, but not so much. It's like a nice space.
00:11:29
Speaker
You guys have all the electricity that you need in the winter. you know You might wear a sweater inside in the summer. It might be a little bit uncomfortable for a few days of the summer, but it's a relatively comfortable lifestyle that you still have, despite the fact that your energy use is drastically lower than a mainstream middle-class American. Yeah, that's a fair assessment. The house is pretty thermally stable. Like you say, we have refrigerated food. I'm cooking on gas at this point, which I love.
00:11:59
Speaker
You know, the things we don't have are big screen televisions and we don't have air conditioning. We're in a forested area. The temperatures here are fairly mild. I feel like, you know, as we take this project into the cities in which we're going to try to do that, we are going to try to figure out some form of affordable, more sustainable ways to cool air. But that's a lot harder than warming things up. So the lack of air conditioning, I think is the one thing that most middle-class Americans would notice right away. For us, I don't want to live in an air conditioned building, even if we had great power.
Adapting the Model to Urban Areas
00:12:28
Speaker
I just don't want that. You know, the word geothermal gets thrown around in various inappropriate ways, but I think we can do basically like a geothermal heat pump without the heat pump. You just use the earth as a heat sink. So I hope we can start building. We've done projects now in Hopi nations. That was a small project. We did a small project in Jamaica. We have much bigger project going in Puerto Rico, trying to push the DC microgrids out there, help people set them up.
00:12:54
Speaker
and Now we're talking to people in Trinidad, and we're also talking to people in Baltimore. and Particularly if we do this in Baltimore, we're going to call it energy independent cooperative housing, where we can get that 10 or 20 or so people in a connected set of units. and you know At Living Energy Farm, we have shared bathroom, shared kitchens, and we're used to that, but most Americans want more privacy than that. so The question is, how do you give people privacy? How do you give people equity in the project?
00:13:20
Speaker
without destroying the environmental model. So that's what the idea is with the energy independent cooperative housing. And hopefully in that process, we're going to come up with some geothermal cooling that will, it won't be like, you know, walk in cooler level of refrigeration, but I think we can cool things a bit to make things more comfortable for particular people in cities because cities, you know, can be quite a bit hotter than those of us who have the privilege of living in forested areas.
00:13:46
Speaker
But yeah, as you mentioned, it's not that different than a middle-class lifestyle. Yeah, and I want to go to the question of how can other people adopt your model or parts of your model. But so you guys are 10 people living on Living Energy Farm in Luisa. Have you guys done any studies to look at what is your energy consumption versus an average American, for example?
00:14:09
Speaker
Yes and no. I mean, those numbers would be easily skewed. So on a day-to-day basis, we are using zero energy, basically, notwithstanding what people do when they walk down the driveway and go somewhere else.
00:14:22
Speaker
You can't call it zero because obviously there's a lot of embedded energy in the systems that we built. So how you depreciate those systems would be the real trick. Do you depreciate them quickly or you know how you look at that? That said, before I built Living Energy Farm, I built solar heated straw bell houses. I built one in particular in Charlottesville, Virginia.
00:14:42
Speaker
And I did do a very careful analysis of that house. So that house was on grid and people more or less did what they wanted. It was not air conditioned, but it had electric fans and people had their computers and refrigerators, whatever gizmos. And that house was less than 10% of the average American energy use. So what we have here is quite a bit less than that house, certainly less than 5%. I would put it somewhere around one to 2% as much energy as the average American.
00:15:11
Speaker
because of the complexity of depreciate. I mean, how do you depreciate roofing metal? I mean, I don't know. I mean, theoretically it's going to last 50 or 100 years, but I don't know if that's a fair depreciation. So I don't have a ah super scientifically accurate answer to that, but I can tell you certainly below 5%, maybe 2% of what the average American uses at this point.
00:15:31
Speaker
So, I mean, quite remarkable if you think about it, less than 5% for sure of the average American energy use. And that's a significant decrease in energy cost for a lifestyle that is still quite comfortable and includes the internet.
00:15:49
Speaker
heating in the winter and all the other things that you know one wants, basically. Moving on to kind of taking this model beyond ah just your guys' community, you've mentioned a few projects that you guys have been working on, and you've also mentioned the need for cooperative use, the idea that in order to be sustainable that we need to have more cooperative arrangements than we're used to in modern American society. So as you think about spreading this model, how do you see this being adopted by people outside of your community, especially given the current situation around cities, suburbs, single family, units? How do we think about how this could spread?
00:16:36
Speaker
Well, the the idea that we have around the energy independent cooperative housing, I have some hope that we can get that to take root. Because, you know, as individuals, we can certainly conserve, you know, you can eat lower on the food chain. A lot of things you can do. And when I've lived in cities, you know, you can not have a car, use a bike. And I mean, I love bicycles, even in rural areas. so But that doesn't really come together all that well. It's the impediments or the things we have to make happen is you really can't do this as an individual financially. It's challenging. The skill isn't there. You know, we've been trying to teach people how to build DC microgrids and I'll throw out a couple of websites. If I may, we have livingenergyfarm dot.org and livingenergylights dot.com.
00:17:16
Speaker
Those are two websites for the project and living energy lights is kind of set up as a commercial thing, but it's we sell equipment at cost for the most part. But we set that up to help facilitate the movement of so a direct drive DC appliances, you know water pumps, refrigerators, whatever we can get our hands on, specifically to Puerto Rico and these other places where we're working.
00:17:37
Speaker
You know, on paper, you can just grab a DC refrigerator, direct drive, has no battery, and set it up. And some people do that. We certainly have sold five times as many in Puerto Rico as we have here, because grid power there costs three times as much, and it's completely unreliable.
00:17:53
Speaker
So there's been a lot of piecemeal approaches or just, you know, it's difficult to get it to come together, but I think what would make it come together, and this is what we're hoping to do with the energy independent cooperative housing. And we might be able to pull this off in Baltimore, we'll see, because there's a lot of abandoned row housing there. And we're connected now with some organizations that have been doing rehabs on those abandoned row housing, because, you know, in any city, the real estate prices can be crazy.
00:18:18
Speaker
And in fact they are doing some sort of cooperative housing now in west coast cities just because of the prices where the shared kitchens i'm not sure about shared bathrooms that rich people are buying it quite handsome prices. but What we're gonna try to do is to try to find basically cheap real estate in baltimore somewhere that needs rehabilitating pull together a group of ten or more people.
00:18:37
Speaker
And again, we wrap the thermal shell around the outside. We set up the direct drive systems. We set up hopefully biogas. We set up hopefully some cooling systems if we need that, depending on which area we're in. And then one real key to make it work is that everybody in that facility is going to pay a fee. So instead of paying an electric bill or a gas bill and all of that,
00:19:00
Speaker
is you pay a monthly fee, and then that fee pays the caretaker. Because another thing that's different about these systems, it's a double-edged sword, and they're highly adaptable. I mean, the DC microgrid, it's super adaptable. You can do a lot with it. But you've got to know how to do it. Your average mainstream electrician doesn't get it. They don't know. So we bring in skilled people up front to help set it up. And then the caretaker takes care of it every day. Let's say you're you're in a city. You're going to get up in your well-insulated apartment.
00:19:29
Speaker
go off to work and you tell the caretaker, hey, I'll be home at six or whatever. So they can put your ah food in the solar cooker for you sometime in the mid afternoon. So to be cooked by the time you get home, they take care of the biogas digester while you're off at work and you come home, dinner is cooked. You can either eat in your private apartment or eat in the living room with other people.
00:19:49
Speaker
So that's the idea is that we kind of set up the social structure around the technologies, let the technology drive the social structure. Another piece of the the energy independent cooperative housing is to allow people to own their own unit.
00:20:03
Speaker
There'd be some community acceptance process where you know obviously if you're a complete jerk and you're going to mess with your neighbors, you're not allowed to move in. But assume everybody gets along, then yeah, you own your own apartment. You can build up equity in that apartment. So when you sell it, you can take your equity with you. So in the current economy, I think that's an important ingredient. And this is looking at, I mentioned Louisa County where we live. There's Twin Oaks. There's a few other communities in this area.
00:20:27
Speaker
and They have been successful as a measure, if you measure by durability, they have been less successful in terms of propagating. and I think one of the big reasons is the equity question. and the The level of privacy is also an issue, I think, at Living Energy Farm at these kind of more community-oriented communities. so That's what we're trying to do because you know we've been here for 14 years. We've had a lot of people come through and stay here for shorter or longer periods of time and do tours, of course.
00:20:53
Speaker
You know, it's growing as a movement, but it's really difficult for an individual to say, yeah, I'm going to go out and find 15 people and we're going to build this cooperative thing. And it's going to be all off grid, but they don't have the skills. They don't have the money. They don't have the group of people. It's a challenge. So we're we're looking at like, okay, well, how do we overcome those challenges? I feel like we've done a lot with the resources we have, but we're going to try to pull together more resources and make bigger things happen. Hopefully.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, and you've mentioned a few times intentional communities. Could you briefly describe what an intentional community is? Well, that does not have a concise definition. I will mention ic dot.org. That's kind of the clearinghouse. It's run by the Fellowship for Intentional Communities.
00:21:33
Speaker
and they have a database there where you can search intentional communities. So the phrase intentional community incorporates or wraps around a lot of different organizations. Some are religious, some are secular, some are smaller, some are larger, some are more communal than others. I mean, commune is a somewhat more loaded word because it brings up images of various things that may or may not be true.
00:21:54
Speaker
The communities in Louisa County are income sharing, Twin Oaks in particular, and Succular. There's only a few of those. There's not many. and It's a great place in some ways. I lived there for a number of years and so did my partner, Debbie. I certainly have a lot of friends there. so If you want to learn about intentional communities in general, I highly recommend ic dot.org. That's really the clearinghouse for it. But there are a lot of communities all over the country of various kinds. you know There's a lot of cooperative houses in every city in the country, really.
00:22:23
Speaker
a lot of informal cooperative houses on the west coast and in most major cities. And some of them, you know, put up a sign say, yeah, we're an intentional community. Some of them are more informal about it. The income sharing is a big line in terms of that makes a very different kind of internal economy than the ones that are not income sharing. you know There are some places that are really just kind of glorified suburbs that call themselves intentional communities. Co-housing is another phrase that started in Europe and that involved something that was kind of an on-grid version of what we're talking about with the energy independent cooperative housing where people had apartments, but like shared living rooms, shared kitchens, maybe
00:23:01
Speaker
When co-housing came to the US, it became suburbs, basically, mostly. But that that's not overgeneralized. There are a lot of different co-housing projects, a lot of different eco-villages, a lot of different and intentional communities.
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, so it sounds like to move towards a more lower energy future, it sounds like it is going to require more cooperative living in some forms. People might have their own home, but ideally more of the resources, kitchens, kind of shared areas need to be cooperatively.
00:23:33
Speaker
managed in terms of energy systems. And it sounds like the model that you're promoting is also more knowledge intensive, a lot more knowledge intensive than what people are used to. So those are two barriers to kind of adoption more broadly.
00:23:50
Speaker
I'd be curious to hear from you also when you think about this bigger picture, considering the current layout of the United States with lots of people living in cities and then lots of people living in suburbs and spread out large houses. like In an ideal world, how do we think about that? Is it a question of refurbishing?
00:24:12
Speaker
these houses or is it do we think about rebuilding from scratch using straw bales and whatever material is appropriate for your context? Well, certainly rebuilding houses or taking a normal quote unquote house normal and you know wrapping straw bales around it, making it super insulated. Some houses are completely in the shade, but mostly you know you can find a spot in the sun. This house we did in Louisa, the house itself is shaded by these big beautiful nut trees that did not want to cut down. so We built a big shed out in the yard, basically, and put the solar thermal and the solar electric stuff out there. Every retrofit is you know you're working with what's there. so On the mechanical side of it, it's not that hard. The problem is that the intermix of psychology and equity and money, you know it really goes back to the Roman Empire that they needed to break down tribal bonds and make people dependent on the state.
00:25:05
Speaker
And over the course of a few centuries, what they realized was private property was the way to do that. And now Americans, everything is wrapped around private property. You know, when we talk about the technology of a more sustainable future, it's less technological in most ways than what we have now, but the technology is more in our hands. I would call it self-determination. You know, instead of buying stuff made by slave labor in China, and unfortunately, even at L.E.F., buying machines from China because we can't get them from any other source,
00:25:34
Speaker
But in the future you know instead of buying things from big factories and being controlled by technocrats you know we have the technology in
Sustainable Futures vs Industrial Decline
00:25:42
Speaker
our hands were self-determined we take care of ourselves so there's a huge political dimension to this apart from the sustainability dimension obviously they're intertwined. You know in the long term what i tell people is the change is gonna happen whether you like it or not i mean industrial output is going to decline.
00:25:59
Speaker
Industrialism is going to change the idea of some magic, renewable, quote unquote, hydrogen, solar based, battery based future is a fairy tale. That's just not going to happen. Or if it does happen, it'll be something that'll support, you know, some number of people while other millions and billions of people see their lives greatly degraded or terminated.
00:26:20
Speaker
So you know on the one hand, these changes are going to come whether we like it or not. On the other hand, it is really challenging in the short term to work around the corporatist state that we have. you know Real estate is really expensive. We deal with a lot of young, bright eyed, bushy tailed people who want to do what we're doing, but they can't afford to move to a city and buy real estate.
00:26:41
Speaker
you know If I could imagine an existing American suburb, it's like, okay, well, there's whatever, 20 houses on a block. We might tear down a few of those and use the scrap material and houses that currently have one or two people in them might have 10 or more people in them. So it's it's not hard to paint those pictures in terms of how it would work. Of course, we have gardens and all these solar features. Hundreds and hundreds of books have been written. Kirkpatrick Sayil and Schumacher and all these folks, you know Small is Beautiful is that one of the more famous books that goes way back.
00:27:08
Speaker
so People have been talking about these ideas for many decades. and you know We're adding in putting some mortar between the bricks in terms of our specific technologies, but the ideas have been there a long time. but It's working around the existing capitalist system, there existing systems of private ownership because that's really challenging. In the long run, it will change. It's as if we're all on an airplane right now and the conservatives want to say, oh, we can fly this airplane forever. and Some people are saying, we really need to land this thing. And other people are saying, ah, we can keep it going with solar power. It's like, well, landing an airplane is very different than crashing one. you know We really need to figure out how to land this thing, how to bring it down softly. And that's not easy. For me personally, I'm hoping I can get out and in the coming months and years and talk to people about the
00:27:51
Speaker
Like, okay, so we we can talk about the end of the world. I mean, that movie Don't Look Up got a lot of attention. And I think environmental activists, were a lot of them were quite amused by that. So we can talk about apocalypse, but somehow we can't talk about any reduction in resale value. It's like, wait a minute, you're talking about the whole planet being impacted in the Anthropocene, as we call it.
00:28:12
Speaker
you know massive species extinction climate change all these big issues and you can't unwrap your fingers from the resale value in your house i mean come on here let's get real about this i mean so what i'm hoping we can do is kind of provide people a ah realistic you know way to do it like okay you know you don't want to turn loose this capitalist system here's how we do this you can live sustainably but please get on board please put your resources and your energy and your health into making this happen Because, you know, I mean, L.A.F., I'm proud of what we're doing, but one one little group of people without a lot of money, you know, for this thing to grow is going to have to be a whole lot of people involved. And I think these ideas are more popular outside of the United States. I mean, I'm not a global traveler and I don't want to be. But, you know, we know what we choose to know. I mean, that's true in every human culture. And in the United States, we think of ourselves as being so smart and so scientific. The average American is far less environmentally informed and politically informed than the average global citizen. And that's no accident.
00:29:12
Speaker
It's very systematic, it's very intentional, and it's very, you know to some degree, self-imposed. I mean, we just don't want to know that our lifestyle is at the expense of everybody else in the world. which That's anathema. In terms of just at the physical level, building the sustainable economy that we need for the future is much easier and much cheaper than building airports, interstate highways, airplanes.
00:29:35
Speaker
rocket ships that take people to the moon, the computers, the medical science we have, all this stuff we're doing. I mean, what we're talking about for a sustainable future is much easier and much simpler than that, but it's politically much more difficult because, you know, these big powerful economies are, they are what they are. And so, you know, I don't have any magic bullets, but we're going to try to to get more people interested in these ideas.
00:30:00
Speaker
And I'd be curious, I mean, yeah, like you said, it it seems like living, creating kind of low energy, self-sufficient systems is possible if a group of people really want to do it. It takes focus, it takes work, but it's doable. And there are examples like you guys out there of how to do it. It seems like it's almost more of like a values and mindset shift that people,
00:30:25
Speaker
need to have in terms of choosing to live by this type of purpose as opposed to kind of just seeking comfort or wealth or whatever else they might be looking for. I'd be curious to hear from you. What led you to choose this path and to kind of go out of your way to pursue low-tech kind of decentralized solutions and dedicate your life to that as opposed to just going down the ordinary path that most people do? and What do you think it will take to get other people to have this kind of mindset shift? Well, I mean, the first question is, of course, very personal. The second question is difficult. But in any case, I mean, I grew up in a dysfunctional family. I mean, or my father, at least, was a crazy, nutcase, racist, abusive, not not a nice person. And I have several siblings. And we all turned out very different, but none of us were completely normal, I don't think.
00:31:18
Speaker
And you I was raised and with a kind of abusive Christianity, you know the kind of heavy duty guilt tripping. you know But I also just picked up on the seriousness of the environmental crisis through books and whatever media I was exposed to. So I kind of developed my own, I refer to it as a messianic mission. just I mean, obviously, I don't think I'm a messiah per se, but I do feel like you know I have this role when I was given it. And that's my role. That's my job.
00:31:47
Speaker
Maybe it's not mean any more important than sweeping the floors and washing the dishes, but it's my job to try to make these changes happen, to get humanity to not destroy ourselves and live more sustainably. So that's where I started out. And you know I came between oaks the age of 18 years old and the media is like, wow. I mean, it's kind of interesting in that it's a microcosm of the bigger world. It's a very progressive, you know, it's an interesting culture and it has a culture in its own right.
00:32:14
Speaker
Communities that share things, as I keep talking about, like you can be an environmental radical without even trying. I mean, just your daily life is embedded in this economy that involves a lot less energy use. so The average person at Twin Oaks just doesn't drive to work. You just, you get up and you work right there. I mean, that alone, I mean, don't talk to me about electric cars. I mean, once you just live close enough to where you work, you don't have to drive. That's the answer. I worked on these things for many years and I published a book called Culture Change that later got edited and became Integrated Activism.
00:32:41
Speaker
And I just didn't feel like I was getting the traction I wanted to get, but I also picked up an unusual skill set. I just have more mechanical skills than most people have. So, you know, the idea of starting living at your farm was, hey, okay, I've got this unusual skill set. I've got some other people who want to do this. What if we start a community that really is completely fossil fuel free, at least on a daily basis? So we did that.
00:33:03
Speaker
And I've been surprised at how well it's worked. And I've been equally surprised at how many of my liberal environmentally minded activist oriented friends aren't willing to do this. So many of them want their own big old house and put some solar panels on the roof and get an electric car and call it done.
00:33:22
Speaker
I'm really disappointed at that, but so it goes. But the work is ongoing. I mean, for me, I'm happy. i have I'm happier now than I've ever been. You know, your body gets older, you feel that, but my life is better than it's ever been. And I feel like we are having some impact, finally. And if you had to speak to some of your liberal-oriented environmental activist friends and kind of give them a case for why they should look at your model, why should someone care from like a personal point of view?
00:33:50
Speaker
Well, because there are 8 billion people on the planet. The world is not just middle-class America. I'm putting some solar panels on a middle-class American home. you know It's a complicated question as the to whether or not that does a lot of good, but even if it is doing some good, we have to consider it the bigger picture. And so that that's really the the most important argument I feel like. And you know, there's a lot of science now. There's a big movement out there. I think the thing that's most poignant for me is, you know, I grew up in, ah I grew up down in Georgia on the swamps, redneck family. I've been to the west coast and seen the the redwoods and the sequoias and the Douglas furs. And you know, that is a magical forest out there just because of the sheer scale of those trees. But
00:34:32
Speaker
The southeastern forest is magical, too, you know just because I've been here all my life. I know it. And we know the Amazon, the rainforest, and all over the world is deforested for various reasons, mostly to support cattle that we then eat. In the United States, it's the biggest exporter of food. We are also the biggest importer of food. So another uncomfortable fact we don't like to talk about, but in any case,
00:34:54
Speaker
What people don't know, because we don't want to know, is that the southeastern forest where I've lived all my life is being deforested five times as fast as the Amazon in a big part of that solar field. At Living Energy Farm, we can support people at less than 300 blocks per person.
00:35:11
Speaker
We don't need a solar field. Why? I mean, to me, that is at a spiritual level. It's pretty profound. It's like you're doing solar strip mining, solar deforestation, so you can hang on to the resale value of your house. Come on, folks. Just at a basic gut level here, you can't tell me that taking down forest and putting up solar fields is a benefit to climate change. You can't tell me there's any justice in that for 8 billion people, and you can't tell me it's necessary. Okay, so maybe you have a window air conditioning unit and I have a solar fan.
00:35:42
Speaker
There is a big spiritual component for me. I mean, my my deity, I have a deity, he's not an old white man, but it's those trees right outside my window. but That's God right there. It's obvious, isn't it? I mean, okay, so four billion years of evolution or a higher power, same thing, whatever, I don't care. But obviously we inherited something incredible. I don't know. I mean, it's a big universe out there. I can't see what else is out there, but even if it's only four billion years of evolution, what is that? We can't wrap our heads around that.
00:36:09
Speaker
We inherited something really incredible, and for the sake of political power, short-term political power, we destroy it, hand over fist. And it's like, come on, this is this is so much easier. And even at the political level, I mean, that is the hardest part of it, is that the big scale politics. It's like, we could do this. We could be living in communities and still have a democracy and make our democracy intelligent, I would hope, and stop acting like obedient sheep that follow these masters What's so scary about the current kind of environmental movement and the Green New Deal and all of this is that it's you know supposedly to solve our environmental crisis, but it's using the exact same logic, mindset, and tools as the existing system to try to solve the problems that the system has created. so I mean, to the the point around centralization.
00:37:01
Speaker
It's like large private equity funds buying up agricultural lands, sometimes forested, burning it down to put solar panels on. And it's just incomprehensible that we somehow think that we can use that same kind of centralized logic to become renewable. I agree completely. Couldn't say it better. It's crazy.
00:37:24
Speaker
Looking a little bit outside of the United States, because i mean we've talked a lot about the challenges here in the U.S. and the mindset and the politics and the culture, but you've also done some work in Jamaica and Puerto Rico and I think a few other places.
Global Adoption Challenges and Opportunities
00:37:38
Speaker
I'd be curious to hear what do you see there? I mean, i it sounds like it's quite different from the U.S. in many ways. What's kind of been the interest around your model there and kind of what what are the challenges for adoption and in those spaces?
00:37:52
Speaker
Yeah, I would say the glass is half full and half empty, particularly in Puerto Rico. You know, there is a much stronger sense of of sovereignty and the issues around sovereignty because they are a colony still of the United States and they have no right to vote in our elections or, you know, the bigger scale, not a state. They have that sense, but they're also Americanized in consumer habits.
00:38:12
Speaker
you know We have done a handful of community centers in Puerto Rico. We've helped some small farmers, and the community centers have felt really rewarding. We don't have time to tell all the stories, but I think the craziest thing you see in Puerto Rico, you know they had Hurricane Maria, which is six, seven years ago now, devastated the island. and Some people took out loans, 20, $30,000 or more to buy big solar kits. And the problem with those big solar kits is the batteries, always. So then the battery's dying, the solar kit's not working, and they're still paying for it. They're still paying them a loan, and they don't even have the use of the solar kit. you know Those people, like yeah they they they listen more to what we say. And the community centers, you know we've done those. Some of them are a little larger, a little smaller, but none of them huge.
00:38:55
Speaker
But again, they're like struggling to, oh, well, how do we, you know, we want to have a community garden. Well, how do we pump water without grid power? You know, and one community center in particular, Fundación Bocarabón in western Puerto Rico, they had a considerable investment in so big and substantial solar hardware.
00:39:10
Speaker
And you plug in a couple of refrigerators and it all falls apart. It's just not well put together because it's because it's battery-based. And what we do is direct drive. But in any case, so yeah, there has been some receptivity to it. We've definitely made more progress in Puerto Rico than we have in Virginia, and in the States. otherlthough we we You know have a few kids here and there that we help people set up and because the demand is higher the thinking my idea is that if we could get some areas some part of the world and doesn't have to be huge. To really adopt dc microgrids then it would spread from there people would just see how well it works.
00:39:45
Speaker
And in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a lot of spread of DC equipment because solar panels put out DC, at least solar electric panels do. We are in a market-based economy, and we're faced with, in terms of making the movement grow, you know it doesn't have the visceral impact of some of the movements that people get out and protest the about. We don't have a lot of funding, and rich people don't want what we have, and poor people can't afford it. Those are kind of the challenges.
00:40:13
Speaker
So working within those challenges, we are trying to get into the areas that, I mean, the Caribbean is more accessible for us. We have friends in several places in the Caribbean to try to build it up so that it gains some recognition, you know, so that people, when they think about solar, they understand what direct drive means and they they want it. Some friends of ours in Puerto Rico, we set up as a distributor. We brought in, you know, some refrigerators and water pumps and and DC fans and whatnot to try to just make it available.
00:40:41
Speaker
So it's growing. It's just, it's painfully slow from my perspective. I really like to see it grow much faster. And you know, the, the appliances themselves are not, I mean, okay. So DC appliance is more efficient than um AC appliance. But you know what you mentioned earlier about, you can't solve the old problems with the old logic. It's like, I'm not, I'm not selling DC appliances. What I'm trying to sell is self-determination.
00:41:04
Speaker
But a water pump, a DC water pump is a piece of self-determination because water is life and death. I mean, for any of us, and especially if you're a farmer anywhere in the world, pumping water is a big deal. um So yeah, the the DC water pump does matter, but it's it's not the thing itself that matters. It's the context. It's what's what the, you know, why are you doing this? We're trying to get as much traction as we can. I wish it would grow faster.
00:41:27
Speaker
It will. I mean, I think in in my life, at least, I'm seeing more and more people that are interested. And I think more and more people, at least, not that this is enough, but that are aware that the existing system is broken, I would say.
00:41:41
Speaker
so yeah At least that's the first step. To finish us off, ah kind of circling back to the kind of original question that we posed, how do we create a resilient and affordable low energy economy? In light of this conversation, what would be your answer to that question? And also, what would be your words of advice for maybe a young person that is you know just finished high school or college or whatever and that is thinking about this and what they should do?
00:42:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, I've said it many times, but if if we just imagine a future 300 years into the future and yeah know and a benign picture, let's be really optimistic of what it could be. We know that fossil fuel is going to decline, that environmental impacts are going to happen, but what what could that look like? um And you know, we don't have to nail it down in terms of every little detail, but then all we have to do is start doing it on purpose instead of doing it by accident.
00:42:37
Speaker
instead of waiting for everything to fall apart before we build self-sufficient communities. Let's just go ahead and do it now. And you know people, I really call on people to ask themselves, what is important to you? Is it really important, more important that you build up your own house, your own yard, your own thing, and let the planet burn? I mean, come on, what's really important?
00:43:00
Speaker
And I know that pulling groups of people together is challenging. There's all these interpersonal dynamics. Different people want different things. And okay, fine. Work with that. But find your spiritual basis. Build the spiritual basis for this. We have to worship those trees out there. Traditional cultures, none of them had a heaven and a hell. Their spirituality was right here on the ground, right around them. We need to reclaim our deities. It's right outside your window. It's right out there. There's God looking at you and those trees.
00:43:29
Speaker
Young people, you need to get involved and you need to know that you're going to make a lot of mistakes. That's fine. you know The difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener is a good gardener plants and it fails, and they say, I'm a bad gardener. A good gardener plants and it fails, and they replant and it fails, and it replant and it fails. and After three or four replantings, they grow a garden and people come by and say, wow, you' you're a good gardener. Well, I failed three times, four times. I failed over and over again. you know The machines we build at LES,
00:43:54
Speaker
I feel like most of what I do every day in the shop now is figure out how many different ways it is to do a particular thing wrong. Okay. Well, six things, six times today, tomorrow we'll do it again and get it wrong again. At some point we'll get it right. So I know it's not easy and you're not going to see it on television. Nobody's going to stand up and call you a hero because you helped start a community garden and pull the group together to start building, you know, an energy independent cooperative house. Yeah. You're not going to be a hero. Not in the short term. And you don't need to be a hero.
00:44:22
Speaker
You know, you need to build a community of people around you who care about this stuff. That's going to be far more rewarding. And we've got to get ourselves broken free of this private everything. I mean, they privatized everything. Good Lord. You've got to get away from that. I mean, yeah. Okay. You need your private space, private bedroom, a little private space to sit and think sometimes, but beyond that, you don't need a bunch of private stuff. Just don't need it. The world's better off without it. So.
00:44:47
Speaker
It ain't easy. It's not going to be glorious in the short term, but if we're willing to make mistakes, we'll get there. Yeah, well, Alexis, thank you so much for joining me today. And to our listeners, I also urge all of you to go to your website, Living Energy Farm, um and we'll also put all of those resources in the show notes. And the project that you've done is pretty incredible. Your guys' place is beautiful. And I think that the kind of like spiritual element that you talk of is like apparent in your project in many ways. So yeah, really urge anyone that's interested to
00:45:21
Speaker
to go dig in deeper and check out all the resources that you guys have on your website. Thank you very much for having me. It's been quite enjoyable. Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.