Lance Mannion: Stylish and sustainable

Lebanon, NY -- Amy Yahna and Brian Musician are writing their own definition of living off the land.
They built a farmhouse in the town of Lebanon using local bales of straw as insulation and timber they dragged from their forest with horses. Their bathtub is an old watering trough for cows...
They make their living growing organic crops and selling them through a community-supported agriculture operation -- customers pay up front to buy a share of the farm's harvest.

Their greenhouses are home to gourmet salad greens. Soon, the greens will make way for heirloom tomatoes.
Does it work? At a winter farmers' market last month, they sold 35 pounds of salad greens in less than an hour.
The home is stylish as well as sustainable.

Read the rest.

Lance Mannion on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 in Ideas in search of a post, Your morning paper | Permalink

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The home is stylish as well as sustainable.

That does seem to be the important push these days - convincing people that sustainable food, clothing, practices etc. are more mainstream than the traditional image of unwashed hippies eating lentils while wearing hemp in their off-the-grid log cabin - or the more modern but still unappealing yuppie couple who ride bicycles everywhere, use cloth diapers and recycle their dishwater, and eat tofurky.

It's one of those things I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, if we can't convince Joe Six-Pack to drink local organic beer, sustainable will not... be sustainable. On the other, I wish that we could mainstream the hippy/eco-yuppy lifestyles a bit more. I don't just want to have plentiful local and organic food; I want the small shops and walkable cities and upcycled clothing as well. I won't go so far as saying I want Ecotopia (not least because that book's got really weird gender and racial elements to it) but it'd be nice to not be the granola-crunchy weirdo without having to give up the granola-crunchiness, if that makes sense.

Posted by: Rana | Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 11:09 AM

What impresses me is the "timber dragged from their forest with horses". Not a lot of people know how to skid logs with a team these days....

Posted by: Janelle Dvorak | Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 03:21 PM

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