Living Sustainably at DR-In Detail: Sustainable Building

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Dan Durica

You may wonder what it’s like to live at DR, and in what ways we are living differently from the rest of America. This series of posts is intended to let you in on some of the practices and technologies we use here to reduce our impact on the planet. This is my personal story, and although there are people here that live simpler lives than I do, and some that live with more amenities, this should give you some idea of an average person’s lifestyle here. Most of the ways of living I explain you could practice where you live as well if you had the desire. It is a lot easier to do it at DR because we’ve set up our infrastructure around living more sustainably. But then, in many ways living closer to an urban area you may have more opportunities for cooperation and sharing of resources. You also may not have to travel as far as we do to get what you need to implement some of these systems.

Since shelter is a fundamental need for humans, and since my house is where I spend most of my time, I’ll start there with this week’s post. In future posts, I’ll explore how I meet other basic necessities such as food and water, and some not so basic necessities, such as power and transportation, in a more sustainable way.

My house was constructed of a combination of materials, some reclaimed and reused, most local, most natural, and some new and neither natural nor local. Most of the house is constructed of natural materials like clay, sand, lime, and wood, and natural fibers such as straw and cattail fluff. The major components that are not natural and were bought new are the roofing tin, the stovepipe, the cistern (which is plastic), cement in the foundation, and the power system. These make up a relatively small amount of the bulk of the house. My house features a living space, kitchen with running water, bathroom, and closet, but doesn’t have a shower.

Starting with the foundation, I used a gravel bed to take the drainage down below frost level. This took a load of gravel from the local quarry. The limestone gravel is broken up using fossil fuel powered machines but has far less embodied energy than cement, which could have been used instead (and usually is in conventional construction). On top of the gravel I built up a short wall of urbanite (a name for reclaimed concrete) I’d salvaged from the removal of a runway at the local airport. It was already cut into pieces and I just took the ones that fit my project. I used a lime mortar to bind the concrete pieces and finished the wall with a concrete bond beam reinforced with rebar. The south foundation wall was made of reclaimed cement block from a local house demolition, and the spaces in the block were filled with concrete. The whole point of using the reclaimed materials and the gravel was to reduce the amount of cement in the project. Cement has incredibly high embodied energy, and alone is responsible for 5% of the greenhouse gases emitted every year.

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DR Out and About

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Dan Durica

Education is central to Dancing Rabbit’s mission and we are always working to inspire people towards sustainable living and give them the information and tools to really do it.

In the next few weeks some rabbits will be giving public presentations while they are out and about. Please come join us if we are in your area and please help us promote these events.

And if you are interested in hosting such an event in your area contact our outreach team at outreach dancingrabbit org .

Upcoming Dancing Rabbit speaking events:

November 2-4, 2012 – Ann Arbor, Michigan

NASCO Institute – Many DR members, including Tony Sirna, Mandy Creighton, and Ma’ikwe Ludwig-Schaub, will be presenting and giving workshops.

November 5, 2012 – 4-5:30pm – Detroit, Michigan

Tony Sirna will be speaking about Dancing Rabbit at WARM Training Center 4835 Michigan Avenue, Detroit, MI.

November 5, 2012 – 7-8:30 pm – Royal Oak, Michigan

Speaking to a Renewable Energy class at Oakland Community College, Royal Oak Campus 739 S. Washington — Room A 206. This is part of an ongoing class, Introduction to Renewable Energy, which is open to the public for this special event.

November 7, 2012 – 5-7 pm – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Tony Sirna, cofounder of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, will speak on the successes and challenges of one of the world’s foremost experiments in real-world sustainability. More info on the U of M site. Or see this event on Facebook.

November 27, 2012 – Brecht Forum, New York, NY – 7:30pm

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage: Making Sustainability a Reality – Our society is wrestling with questions of sustainability and climate change, with many groups working towards a sustainable future. At Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage that sustainable future is here now. More info.

December 5, 2012 – Home Eco Store, St Louis, MO – 7:00pm

On Wednesday, December 5th, Dancing Rabbit co-founder Tony Sirna will give a talk at Home Eco, about his community, sustainable living options, and what the future holds.If you want to see what sustainability looks like, come join us for a slideshow at 7:00 pm followed by discussion. Reservations are encouraged, so that seating may be arranged. Please RSVP to Terry@home-eco.com. More info.

December 13, 2012 – Nomad Cohousing, Boulder, CO – 7:30pm

Sustainability Now – Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage Makes Sustainable Living – Alyssa Martin and Anthony “Bear” Barrett will present a slideshow and discussion in the Nomad Cohousing great room. All Are welcome to attend. Nomad is at 15th and Quince, in Boulder. More Info.

Thanks for helping us get the word out and we hope to see you there.

Top 5 Reasons My Family Moved to an Ecovillage

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Kassandra Brown

The kids (and a couple adults) at DR Preschool

Picture this: Packing up the U-Haul. Saying good-bye to friends in Boulder, CO. Starting down 800 miles of highway and a few dirt roads. My two daughters sitting beside me on the bench seat. We’re heading to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

Many people have asked me why I would change our lives so radically. Here I’ll give you a few good reasons why we changed nearly everything.

Top 5 Reasons My Family Moved to an Ecovillage

Smaller environmental footprint. At Dancing Rabbit we share many things that most households in the rest of America own separately. I am part of shower and kitchen cooperatives. That means that we share the infrastructure and operating costs of bathroom and food needs. We also have a car sharing co-op where people often share rides with one another and share the costs of fuel and vehicle maintenance. This sharing lowers the environmental footprint of each individual. The other good news? It costs less than owning your own stuff too!
Living cooperatively. There is something special about relationships in community. Not everyone is your best friend or favorite person, yet we all need to learn to work together and respect our gifts and differences. Without this understanding, community falls apart. I believe this understanding will serve my children well throughout their entire lives.
Proximity makes it easier. Almost no one commutes to work. Most work is either within the community in the helping, gardening, or building trades or can be done over the internet and phone. Commuting to work is very unusual here. This helps lower environmental impact, while giving more time to play and connect with friends and family.
Adult role models: My husband and I were impressed with the level of integrity and understanding in the parents we met during our visits to Dancing Rabbit. Growing up with other adults to love and role model for them seems like such a gift to give our girls. We also want our daughters to have close relationships with other children who don’t go ‘home’ at the end of the day and are around for more than just school or playdates.
Raise more of our own food: My husband and I dream of meeting our own food needs with incredibly nutritious food raised within 20 miles of our home. We hope to cooperatively garden for our fruits and vegetables. We want to raise cows, chickens, and pigs in the grass-farming model popularized by Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm. On that farm raising the animals actually improves soil fertility. There is room here to raise our own food, to learn how to do it with other people, and to share the work and joy of preparing it. All with people who call Dancing Rabbit home.

Kassandra Brown is the mother of two girls age 7 and 4 and also a parenting coach. She offers support, guidance, and encouragement to change through her phone-based coaching services.

Keeping livestock for a more sustainable food system

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Dan Durica

Eco-friendly lawn mowers in the DR orchard

Dancing Rabbit recently took 19 acres of our land out of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a government program that pays us to maintain potential agricultural land as wildlife habitat. Though this program has helped us pay the mortgage on our land, most of the land we could potentially use for ag projects has been under CRP contract and has not been available for use by members without the payment of a significant penalty. The recent opening up of land has spurred interest in new agricultural projects and has begun a community process of forming new agricultural policies around how we use the land. We’d like to use our agricultural land to produce more of our own food and income for our members, but we also want to be sure we are practicing a kind of agriculture that will be sustainable over the long term. Most agriculture done in this country is based on the use of fossil fuel, and because of its destructive nature will not be sustainable for thousands of years like the agriculture of our ancestors. To help with forming our policies, members were asked to write up their visions for the future of agriculture at DR. I plan to compile some excerpts from what people wrote soon and post them here on the blog.

In the meantime, I offer an essay I recently wrote for my blog about the use of animals in sustainable agriculture. Although modern methods of animal agriculture are neither sustainable nor humane, including livestock in a sustainable agriculture system has great potential for reducing our dependence on fossil fuel, restoring fertility to farmland, and making food production more sustainable. This article is posted on my blog and linked here because it is my opinion and not necessarily one shared by everyone at DR. I do think many of the issues discussed in the essay are relevant to creating a model for sustainable agriculture here.

http://crossthought.blogspot.com/

Taking Dancing Rabbit to the Cities

Posted on May 4, 2012 by tony

Part 1 in a series of articles exploring cities adopting DR’s covenants.

People often say that Dancing Rabbit is in the middle of nowhere, and it’s hard to dispute. Rutledge, our nearest town, has a population of 100 (which we hope to surpass in the next few years) and our whole county has fewer residents than some big city high schools (4,843 by the last census).

But what we do at Dancing Rabbit is as relevant to cities as it is to small town USA, and I’ve begun to wonder: what if cities adopted Dancing Rabbit’s ecological covenants?

At Dancing Rabbit only pedestrians, cyclists, and delivery vehicles can use the roads

These six Dancing Rabbit covenants are the foundation of our ecological expectations of residents and members. Our covenants are based in the belief that radical change is possible and that it will come both through personal choices and through major shifts in physical and social infrastructure. They are based in the understanding that conservation is key, and that only with reduced consumption can technological innovation meet our needs sustainably. We’ve found that cooperation is a powerful tool for conservation and we believe a shift towards more sharing is a big part of the social change we’ll need. Our covenants don’t describe every aspect of a sustainable society, but we’ve found that these few simple rules put us far along the path towards sustainability.

In this series of articles I’ll explore what it would look like for cities, neighborhoods, or regions to adopt DR’s covenants.

Our first (and perhaps most impactful) covenant states:

“Dancing Rabbit members will not use personal motorized vehicles, or store them on Dancing Rabbit property.”

What would happen if a major US city passed a law that personal motorized vehicles were not allowed or at least seriously curtailed their use? For example, what if New York prohibited personal motorized vehicles to drive or park on the island of Manhattan? Could that really work? Would people stand for it? Would the city suffer or flourish under such a law? What exceptions would have to be made?

People have written whole books about New York City transportation systems and I can’t possibly cover it all in that level of detail but here’s a quick look at the possibility. Continue reading →