Truly Affordable Housing

Land and housing costs are soaring out of sight everywhere. Our community's recent buildable land inventory showed that more than 70% of the families in our community couldn't afford to purchase a home here today. We hear similar reports from all over.

The good news is that we can radically reduce housing costs — by more than 80% in twenty years. Yes, I said 80%. People's eyes glaze over when I say that, and they assume I'm crazy. True maybe, but not the point. The point is we can do it. I mentioned this in an earlier column, but want to talk a little more about it.

The important thing about seeing how we can reduce costs so much is that in the process we see how corporate profiteering has jacked-up prices of everything in our economy. And we can see how easy it is to change, and how much better off we can be doing so.

We've been subtly brainwashed by advertising to accept what is today's "standard practices," which in reality boil down to huge, unnecessary, and often hidden, profiteering...

Life and Work

If gardening and farming is a path of spiritual progress, then a certain amount of bewilderment and confusion is to be expected, right?

I remember exactly the night at Kimberton Hills Camphill Village, an intentional farming community in Pennsylvania, when I first confused LIFE and WORK.  I was walking from Springfield House, where I lived with Joel, the head gardener and his family, over the hill skirting the Garden Cottage vineyard and down into the greenhouse parking lot, through a hedge and into Morningstar garden.  I'd barely dragged myself from bed after a day's intensive garden work, having set the Rainbird sprinklers at dusk. Now it was one in the moonlit high summer morning, and time to change the irrigation.

"Jeez..." I must have said to myself, "...am I working right now or am I just living?  You couldn't begin to pay me to get up in the middle of the night and get wet, dragging half a mile of hose and those damn awkward sprinkler setups of Joel's...