(This is post 1 of 7 in a series, to see the post about the series, click here.)
Before we even get into all of the wonderful ways that you can apply permaculture thinking to the place you live, I want to share some ideas about how to apply it to choosing where you live:
Carefully selecting where you live has an enormous effect your ability to reduce your ecological footprint while building self-reliance and community resilience. Whether you’re actively looking for a new abode, or are thinking about moving in the near future, you might consider utilizing the permaculture princples of Relative Location and Stacking Functions in your search:
- Relative Location
The time and energy it takes to get from your home to every place you need to go should be factored into a holistic calculation of both the financial and environmental cost of a house, room, or apartment. The place with the cheapest rent might not actually be the cheapest when you factor in the extra mile to and from work every weekday.
If serious attention is given to the relative location between your home and all of the places you need to, enormous amounts of time, money, and energy can be saved. Walk-ability and bike-ability (the number of necessary trips that you can make by foot/bike) are key.
(To get a sense of a neighborhood’s walkability, check out walkscore.com)