Sustainability

Sustainability has become a buzzword that has lost any rigorous meaning. Sustainability is supposed to mean the ability to maintain an ecological system at a certain rate or level indefinitely. If so, what does it take to transition from our current unsustainable, natural resource depleting state, to being able to maintain ecological systems at a level suitable for sustaining human life for many generations to come?

Is switching out incandescent light bulbs to LEDs enough? What about taking shorter showers? What about going vegetarian or vegan? How about selling the gas guzzler and getting an electric car?

All of these decisions do move us in the right direction by reducing our ecological impact, or ecological footprint. What is most important is that the combined ecological footprint of human civilization must reach a size capable for the Earth’s ecological system to maintain for many generations to come.

The website, https://www.footprintcalculator.org/, has a series of questions that assess the ecological impact of one’s living and lifestyle choices and assesses how many Earths it would take to sustain such living and lifestyle choices if everyone on earth lived the same way. Each of the lifestyle changes above by themself is unlikely to be enough to reduce one’s ecological footprint to one Earth or less. For most people, it takes the combined effect of many lifestyle changes to reach a point where it can be sustained by our only one Earth.

Changes to food, transportation, and housing choices all make a big difference in how many Earths it takes to sustain them. A tiny house is an excellent way to live more sustainably. With less space to store and accumulate stuff, one is forced to substitute materialism for experiences and relationships. With less refrigeration and garbage space, one is forced to buy less packaged foods, accumulate less food, and eat more fresh foods instead. With less square footage of space to heat and cool, a tiny house by default uses less energy. Beyond net-zero energy homes takes it one step further by focusing on not just total energy use but also minimizing the amount of energy used per square foot by maximizing energy efficiency.

Tiny homes on trailers also allow its owners to move the tiny house to be located closer to one’s workplace and thereby reducing one’s transportation footprint. Our homes also feature solar powered electric car charging equiptment and bicycle hangers.

Food is often the last great frontier. Dietary preferences are deeply entranced in family and cultural traditions. We think the extra land available from building smaller structures would be put to good use growing food. Advances in farming technology coupled with smart, low-tech, practical ideas, together make fulfilling a large amount of one’s diet out of one’s own garden more possible than ever. Technologies and good designs including smart automatic watering devices, robots, vertical farming, hydroponics, chicken tractor, and smartphone apps together help make this possible.

We hope a beyond net-zero energy tiny house on a trailer will become a cornerstone building block to helping you achieve a better more sustainable lifestyle without compromises. A healthier, more enriching, more fulfilling life with more freedom.